this part of the journey is almost over, and it feels like time has flown past. The next post I write will be on the 6th November, and the game will be out in Early Access!? I am actually struggling to wrap my head around this.
And as we keep on working to ensure as brilliant a launch as possible, there's been tons of cool stuff going on and I'd love to share it with you! Naturally we're keeping a lot of it under wraps so you're excited by the launch version, but with that in mind let's go!
SURPRISE! NEW BETA OUT NOW!
We have updated the Beta - available for people who backed the Kickstarter at Backer Goblin tier or above - and wanted to give yo some idea of what's in it.
The main focus is the saving and loading we've implemented! Broadly the game now autosaves frequently, and we need to test the crap out of it.
Please note we do not expect your Beta save game to work in the Early Access version of the game. It might do, but we're not committing to that!
And there's more to look out for too:
- Tons of workshop expansion items
- Seriously. Just loads of expansion items, some of them practical, some of them cosmetic
- More named characters and their quests
- All 50 trinkets that will be in the Early Access launch version of the game
- Workbench is now smaller, ready for upgrading (and few other things have changed along the same lines)!
- Expanded random customer paperdolls
- Brand new sales receipt with animation
- Misc updates and fixes to audio, camera, UI and more
- Removed erroneous 'ultra-widescreen' support options from the settings menu
Here's a look at the city view out of the customer hatch - the customer is a randomly generated character, and there are now crowds in the background which really bring it to life!
What we'd love to hear your feedback on - aside from all the bugs you spot, especially with the saving! - is the following few elements, as they're the ones we need wider data on, from a bigger pool of people than our dev team:
- Cost of expansion items. This is in relation to each other, and also if they feel expensive or cheap)
- Price of trinkets. How much you get for them, compared to each other and of course how this affects your feelings towards saving up for expansion items.
- How long you play for. We've added an amount of handcrafted content, and we want to figure out how long it lasts. So much of the game is semi-random that it's hard for us to know! We don't want to tell you how many named customers are in, nor how many quests they bring because we think it is also important to get an idea of how it all feels.
Here you can see some of the wide range of expansion items you can purchase to customise and personalise your workshop, not to mention storage space for all those trinkets!
All of that will let us figure out our balancing (or in other games: difficulty) and pacing, and plan better for launch and beyond!
Of course there are some known issues, head over to our discord for the full lowdown!
STEAM NEXT FEST WENT GREAT
If you're on Steam much you'll know about Next Fests (they're big store takeovers that show off demos for upcoming games... the catch being any game can only be in one Next Fest ever) and Trash Goblin was in the most recent!
In total, we got 10,848 new wishlists which is just staggering.
In fact 11,438 players went and played the demo, of which 2,556 then wishlisted it - which is amazing! 22% of people who played it liked it enough to wishlist it! And that also means 8,292 people wishlisted it just cos they liked the look of it! Wahey!
And we also had some nice chart positions too. For example, on Sunday in the "Popular Upcoming" charts Trash Goblin was:
- #1 in Relaxing
- #1 in Life Sim
- #8 in Casual
- #10 in Fantasy
To say we're stunned and chuffed is an understatement!
WELL THEN
Not much time to go between now and Early Access (did I mention that?) so what's left to ask of you?
👍discord - get on over there and join in all the fun!
🌠wishlist & follow the game right here on Steam
🗣️tell your friends! Seriously, let's get this game hyped!
These updates will carry on - don't you worry about that - but we'll be moving to 1 every month after EA launch.
And finally, If you've missed them so far we've been running a Road To Early Access series on our twitch - including an audio deep dive that was not to be missed - we're keeping all of them here so you can watch them at any time.