Hello anyone! I’ve had a really nice week. Played a lot of new board games and met some cool people at Breakout Con last weekend. Left feeling tired- but happy, and inspired by how much creative energy game designers are bringing to the table every day. I really am privileged that I am able to make myself a part of that scene (even if only part-time*), doubly so that I have an excellent creative partner, and triply so because WOFG! seems to be gaining traction online.
Lost of people seem to like our demo- even through I think it’s pretty rough around the edges- and Joel is doing excellent work on the social media side of things. We have people engaging with us about Watch Out for Goblins! every day. They make memes, encouraging comments, share our posts, and point out bugs**.
They (our fans? supporters? encouragers? whatever) also make suggestions- so many excellent suggestions. Things they want to see in the game: features, terrains, actions, items, boss fights, game mechanics, sound effects, plot- all kinds of truly awesome stuff. I love the feeling of getting excited about a creative project or idea. I love to see people engaging with our project and I want people who make these comments to know that we think their awesome idea would be rad as heck. The issue? We just ain’t got time for it all.
I’m not complaining. This isn’t something new. Scope creep is talked about all the time in regards to game dev. We are also in a bit of a different position. As much as we’d like to be, we aren’t a “real” studio that needs to keep the lights on. We are a team of two working part-time on a passion project. Instead of a monolithic design document we have weekly-shifting to do lists based on what the most important next steps are right now. We don’t have a hard deadline for launch, but we have a soft deadline to launch into early access in this year.
I think that’s doable. I also think that any early access launch this year would be a “true early access” launch. It won’t be a mostly complete game that needs time to polish- it will be a clean vertical slice of the game with solid bones to build on, but light on content. Truth is WOFG! is wildly ambitious project for a small team. At our current pace, we could spend another five years just implementing our own ideas into the game- let alone implement the excellent suggestions from the community.
So now I’m thinking about priorities? Right now- it’s simplifying and optimizing the goblin character controller. Next? I don’t really kno.w. We want more content to go to early access with. If EA is well-received maybe we will have the resources needed to spend more time working on our games. If not, we will have to scope down WOFG! substantially- finish it off and move on (save a lot of our best ideas for the sequel, as it were).
Is a lot of content what we need for a good EA launch? We can only make content so fast and good content takes an unpredictable amount of time.
So here’s my brain braining: maybe instead of focusing on making the content ourselves- we focus on going to into EA with a good set of mod tools and Steam Workshop support? I’ve done a bit of looking into it. I think it would be a lot of work- but also it would be work that would help us support the game by giving us a set of tools to build gobland with. At the same time even just a few moders could give people enough to do to keep interest through a long early access period. Besides- all the best PC games have excellent mods.
I don’t know if this is the path forwards. A big part of the fanbase for WOFG! seems to be kids and people playing with their kids (heck yes!)- and I don’t know if there’s much overlap with people who mod PC games. Mods also aren’t really something that ports to consoles (which, if I’m being honest, is where the market for WOFG! really is).
So I’m of two minds on what to focus on next. Tools or content? For now though- it’s cleaning up the code-base and optimizing whatever we can. Goblins only plan things out one step at a time anyway. That’s why they have all the best adventures.
I’ll keep thinking on it- probably talk to Joel about it. If you’ve played WOFG! The Demo! and have thoughts we are always open to feedback (even if it can be tough to attend to it all). Comment on this blog, drop into our Discord, or just send me an email dev@sqyd.studio. What’s most important to you about an EA launch? Lots of content on launch? Or less content and more regular updates? Do you care about mods during EA? Should we save mod support for a full release (in 1 – 50 years XD)? Is this a console game at heart and we shouldn’t even glance at mod support because of that? I have no idea, but if you’ve got an opinion I’d love to hear it.
Anydangway. Thanks for reading, if you did. Until next week, remember: you are never more than three feet from a goblin. That’s a real and true goblin science fact.
* For now, hopefully.
** Sometimes they are mean, but honestly far less often than I expected. I only really understand the internet by infamy, and I expected more Trolls. I think maybe goblin fascinated people are just naturally chill dudes. I mean, just check out r/goblincore
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