Hi! I am actually really confused about how time works - how is it only 1 week since the end of the Kickstarter?! Anyone else feel the same?
So while I investigate the mysterious construct known as "Time", let's dive into what we've been doing, what's next, and start to take some steps towards sorting out some rewards for you lovely Goblins!
WHAT WE'VE BEEN WORKING ON
To kick things off, we thought it'd be neat to look at some character concepts and talk about our process a little bit.
First up, a couple of images that show the first stages of how we concept a Species for the game! The team agrees the Species (in this case, Frogs), and then discusses and pinpoints references for that, covering literal examples of other frog-characters, or even just key words we think are important to consider. So with these Frog People we called out Chrono Trigger specifically as having a very cool Frog, but then we also include notes about things that might be important to their culture (like lilypads) or physical attributes and differences (toads = bumpy). Once that's done, we smash out what you can see here, a bunch of relatively simple line art concepts that touch on some of the more interesting elements we called out, and sometimes we just riff on whatever seems fun (stilts!), while also playing with stature, body shape, and the like.
Frog people are just the best people.
The importance of this step of the process isn't really about landing on something special, or even wringing every last creative drop out of the opportunity - it's about getting familiar with the demands and specifics of a New Thing, and playing with it. It's cheap, fast, and fun - and sometimes you strike gold.
With the Mushroom Folk, the initial phase covered only 3 sketches, but each one pushed their idea quite far and in separate directions, and we got what we needed out of it. This stuff is like a first draft, which is by its nature always perfect - because the only thing required of it is to exist!
Sometimes you realise that the practicalities of getting dressed in the morning are just as important as anything else.
Related to characters, we have also been working on the "Paperdolls" system a bunch recently. The term "Paperdolls" is something we've used before and we're thinking it might be a good topic for a deep-dive sometime, but essentially all the non-quest-giving characters are generated from a set of visual parts, and we've been trying to make sure we add as much variety as the game needs. Here are just two examples of this system "in action" - for reference we will need the Paperdolls to give us hundreds if not thousands of customers to support the game, spread across all Species.
Left: a completely randomly generated human customer. Right: Same, but one that happens to feature the features of yours truly!
But it's not just the Art department that've been keeping busy - oh no! Design has too - and we keep banging on about planning the Early Access launch, so I thought what better way of showing the sheer gargantuan size of a task like this, than literally showing you?!
Welcome to the Trash Goblin "Game Design Document"! This is literally the whole game laid out on paper - even down to dropped features, and of course some dreams and plans for the future!
We use a piece of software called Miro to plan and work together online - we're a remote-first studio - and it is essentially a digital whiteboard with infinite "Post-It notes" and all kinds of cool features. It allows us to colour code and arrange thigs for clear communication, and to collaborate in all kinds of useful ways.
This is a zoomed-in look at one of the sub-sections, which is where we're planning the Early Access launch!
Once we've had a proper Design-led pass over all the elements we want to make for the Early Access launch of the game, we'll take Code and Art through it to spot holes in the plan and bring up additional elements we'd not considered, and once that's done we'll be ready to guesstimate all the effort required, and break it down until we know what we can fit in the time we have, and what will have to be moved to an update during Early Access itself. We can never plan perfectly, but using this method we can be confident of our reasoning and happy that we're covering everything we need to.
WHAT NEXT
We're still settling down post-Kickstarter and wrapping up some work unrelated to Trash Goblin that needs doing, while beginning to identify all the pieces of the puzzle that we'll need to tackle for a smooth development! Everyone on the team is focused on us creating a sensible plan for Trash Goblin that results in you all having the most fun possible with the Early Access launch of the game, and beyond to 1.0 - for what it's worth we want to make sure everything in that version is super polished and feels as finished as we can (kinda like the demo, but even more so!) and as detailed above if that means we have to shift a feature into an Early Access update we will. But don't worry yet, right now we're doing our darndest to cram as much in as we can.
YOUR QUESTIONS
We love chatting with you in our public discord, and when I asked what you'd like to see in these updates, there were a few elements that I was really happy were brought up! I think it is safe to say most of the requests were around concept art and progress shots of stuff we're working on, and that's going to be a consistent element of these updates (see above).
But one topic was Accessibility, and it's an important one.
The demo raised a few points where people were asking about our plans, especially around the colour-coded words in customer conversations, to the need to hold the mouse button down to clean with the sponge etc.
Specifically to these two elements - the word colour was partially an arbitrary decision, and we're due to overhaul the customer conversations with a ton more polish and features anyway, so we'll have a chance to address this element then. The mouse button holding was a really good spot, and we're looking to one of our key inspirations - Powerwash Sim - for clues here. They let you 'lock' their hose to 'on' and that's something that might work well for us! We don't want to lose the tactile moment for people who want it (it feels 'right' holding buttons to press or hold objects in the game) but of course we can and should allow for both!
On a broader note about accessibility, we definitely didn't fully consider the implications of these elements (and others) when building the demo, but were absolutely aware of the need to rework and establish some rules and options for players of all kinds when we get to release. It's a bit early for us to properly announce what these are (see above re: planning!) but certainly, our intent is to build this stuff into the game sensibly and that means most of the time doing so as early as possible, and to direct our efforts so that anyone out there is able to play as comfortably as we can possibly accommodate. We're not a Sony AAA studio so there will be a limit to what we can do, and it's probably wise to expect a rollout of these sorts of features over time, but we make games for people to enjoy so why would we get in the way of that?!
In the meantime, please do tell us what you want to know more about in these updates, we're still relatively new to this!
See you next update, Goblins!