Early Access launch to today
about 6 years ago – Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 12:43:09 AM

Greetings Stonekickers!

I cannot believe its been 3 months since the launch of Goblins on steam early access! You've been seeing the updates and posts from Crytivo who are now handeling a lot of our communications and PR so that we can focus on updating and working on the game but I thought it was about time I check in again and update you all on whats been going on in the world of Elderstone.

Alpha 6.6

Before I update you all on the past I think I'd like to start by announcing that the latest version Alpha 6.6 has just been released this morning. This is certainly the best and most stable version of the game so far, so if you haven't had a chance to play yet or since the initial release now is a good time to come back and enjoy. A few highlights that we have added over the 6!! updates we have done since release:

• Major crash fixes and stability improvements
• walkways connecting better and not leading to goblin death (as frequently :) )
• major balance reworks making the start of the game a lot more manageable and fair
• improved save and load features
• brand new region map look and size (still a very early version however)
• Priests are now more realistic to get to and function correctly healing the sick and removing dead goblins

So with that in mind we hope you will play again soon and it would be a tremendous help if you enjoyed playing and think we deserve it to leave us a positive review. Review status is really important on steam and we currently have a mixed status and you will see why below.

Launch issues

As we posted in our last update our launch went horribly wrong! I'd like to recap what happened here and ask for your help!

We spent several weeks over Christmas and New Years working crazy hours to get the game ready for the early access launch. Finally the hour came and we had everything ready. When we pressed the launch button there was an error on the steam page. No big deal we thought (it happens quite a bit timing out and what not) so we refreshed the page and pressed the button again. Success! Goblins of Elderstone was finally LIVE aand in Early Access! Something we had been thinking about and working towards over the last 3 years had finally come true! It has been a livelong dream to release a game on steam and it finally was true. We had worked all night getting it all ready and felt very proud, tired and relieved. 

Then about an hour later I got an email from a website Gameplanet who were about to run a press release on our game asking us if there had been a mistake? "Your game is in full release, we thought it was supposed to be early access?" My heart sank into my stomach as I refreshed the steam store page and saw that indeed the game was not marked as Early Access but as a full release and already several people had left negative reviews because of this! It was a devastating blow... and completely irreversible on our end! We immediately emailed steam and jumped onto the forums and everywhere we could to explain the situation to people. Steam finally got back to us and confirmed the error and corrected the listing but it was 24hours later and the damage had been done. We had a lot of complaints and negative reviews and we lost that opening window when you release a game and get visibility in the new released section... We have made a very bad first impression and it was a kick to the gut...

Our amazing community on Discord which includes many of you reading this came to our rescue and were amazing and supportive and helped turn the tide in the reviews for a while and answered people on the internet with the facts of the launch and I will be eternally grateful to everyone that helped us so graciously.

Since then we have updated the game 6 times now, which is why I have been quiet with updated and news, its been a massive effort but we have done so much work in the last 3 months and now have a version of the game that I am very proud of. We have a mountain to climb still to get the game back into the spotlight and up the charts but I am more than confident we will achieve this over the next few months with strong updates and the support of everyone that loves our game :)

So, only if you think we deserve a good review, please play the game for a few hours and leave us a nice review to let people know that it is a game worth checking out.

GDC

I was at GDC again this year promoting the game and catching up with our partners and friends in the industry that have helped us get here. Our relationship with Unreal is still strong and I saw some incredible new indie games coming out this year. The market has never been tougher on steam but there are more gamers than ever and I'm excited about the industry this year.

Jenny of Elderstone

Something we've been going on in the background is that the novel by our amazing writer Edwin McRae called Jenny of Elderstone will be launched soon and the epub will be included in the chief backer tier and up! The novel is loosely set in our world of Elderstone and we think you will really enjoy it. Jenny will also be available in the game as a hero to hire once we add the tavern and hero features

If you didn't back at the higher tier for this then don't worry, you will be able to purchase the book soon and we will message about this at the time.

Play by Play Finalists

We have been nominated in this years Play by Play game awards happening this weekend in Wellington! We are incredibly honored to be finalists this year and look forward to this years Play by Play festival.

Well that will be all for this update, I hope everyone is well and that you you play the new version and have a good time. Remember to join us in our discord community to stay up to date with day to day information and connect with other GoE fans. This is also the best place to report bugs and help us improve the game.

Take care everyone!

Steam keys have been sent!
over 6 years ago – Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 10:12:27 PM

We did it Stonekickers!!

You should have finally just received an email containing your steam key!

It has been a chaotic and crazy 58 hours without much sleep for us little lost goblins!

Once again I really and truly appreciate your patience and understanding and apologize again about the launch hiccup and delay. There were a lot of little goblins in the machine causing us some pains but we did it with your support!

We hope you enjoy the game, please contact me if you have any issues with your key or the game itself. Remember it is still only in Alpha, full of bugs and issues and we have a long journey ahead to finishing the game this game we all believe in! For this we need your feedback and continued support, you are part of the development!

Also remember you can join our discord server where we are growing a lovely tribe of goblins chatting about Goblins of Elderstone and games and life in general.

Have fun finally playing the game!!

Released on Steam! (and some gobliny problems)
over 6 years ago – Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 12:03:26 AM

Greetings you wonderful Stonekickers!

The wait is finally (almost) over. Several of you have messaged me asking about the steam keys and I apologize for the delay in a response - We have been crazy busy the last 36 hours (I've slept maybe 4-6 hours in that time) and I have been anxiously waiting on some more information before I respond in order to give as accurate an answer as possible. Here is whats been going on:

We finally launched the game on steam yesterday, however there was an error when we released it and then when we refreshed and tried to release it again the game got published as a full release instead of an Early Access release!! This is really bad as it sets the wrong expectation with people and is irreversible on our end! So we scrambled to get a response from the people at steam to help us correct this. On top of this, the version that went live was an outdated unstable version 5.X instead of the latest 6.1 version. The buggy version was live for about 2 hours before we managed to replace it. It took steam about 24 hours to get back to us and correct our classification as an Early Access game but as you can imagine the damage had already been done with many people being quite (rightly) upset with us. We spent the last 36 hours putting out fires and doing as much damage control as possible.

Of course we also did not want to add more fuel to the flame by sending all our Kickstarter backers and Itch.io alpha supporters keys to a broken game that was incorrectly launched.

We have finally corrected everything and are also updating the game in the next 12-24 hours or so with even more fixes from reports we got from the people that bought it on steam.

So now that things have calmed down and the world is no longer burning and my goblins are no longer trying to kill me, we want to get your keys out to you. Crytivo has built a system to deal with the transfers of the keys and everything is in place. We're going to test the new update and publish and make sure it's right and then Crytivo should be sending you an email with instructions to claim your keys. This should happen tomorrow (12 January) (I will keep you updated on this if there are any issues). In the meantime the game has also been updated on itch.io if you are eager to start playing the new release.

Believe me when I tell you that nobody is more upset and heartbroken by how this played out than me. It has been 3 years of my life that kinda felt like it got ruined in the action of one single click. I am truly sorry that you have to wait a bit longer and really appreciate your understanding and patience as we set this right.

PAX South!

 

On a lighter happy note, Goblins will be shown at PAX South this weekend, so if you are going please stop by the Crytivo booth space and say hello to the fine people there and show your support. http://south.paxsite.com/

Thank you again and look out for an email from Crytivo soon! As always please contact me if you have any questions.

Much love!

Gustav

Happy Holidays and Some Big News!
over 6 years ago – Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 07:26:35 PM

Happy Holidays you amazing goblins!

Time has flown by since PAX Australia and a LOT has been happening so I'm going to jump right to it!

A Goblin Aliance

We are very excited to announce that we have partnered with Crytivo Games to help us market, distribute and finish Goblins of Elderstone! Crytivo have been helping us behind the scenes for a little while now and I'm very happy to finally announce this publicly. They are taking over a lot of the work that has been preventing us from focusing on finishing the game. The amount of PR, Marketing, Social Media and general outward communication that is required at this stage of development these days for indies is astounding and this has been a real cost to our development time and focus. 

Crytivo are a bunch of really great developers and also had a major successful Kickstarter for their large world sim game Universim a while back so they genuinely know what they are doing and bring a lot of talent and experience to the table, so lets all give them a warm welcome to the tribe! Check out this page to sign up to find out more!

https://crytivo.com/

PAX Australia

PAX was once again a wonderful experience and thank you so much to all the amazing people that came out to say hi and play Goblins at our booth. We had a great time and learnt a lot from all the feedback we received and observations we made.

We had so many people playing all the time that I barely ever got to take any pictures!

New Website

A part of what Crytivo have been working on is a new website for us which is now live! Please go check it out and let us know your thoughts!

 IndieDB top 100

We have recently been nominated into the IndieDB top 100 indie for 2017 and would absolutely love your vote and support in sharing this to get others to vote for us! Please do so here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/goblins-of-elderstone

Steam Early Access Launch

So the main news and most importantly of course is Steam Early Access! We decided to move the launch to after the Holiday sale period in order to improve our chances on Steam. We discovered some pretty serious issues with the camera and some big crashes when we showcased at PAX and had 100's of people playing it every day. On top of that our steam wishlist was still not growing fast enough to encourage a launch in November so we had a tough decision to make and realized we had to move the launch date a little further to mid January - which is only 5 weeks away!!! I know this frustrated some people and I truly do apologize but this is the best decision for the game and ultimately that is the best for everyone. 

So with that in mind, please share our steam page with your friends and family on Facebook or twitter or wherever you share things and ask them to please wishlist the game so that we can have  a big push come launch day!

Well that will be all for this update, hopefully the next update is the launch announcement for Early Access! 

Wish us luck and have a happy holidays and fantastic New Year!!!! 

Lot so love from the Lost Goblins

PAX and Early Access Launch!
over 6 years ago – Sun, Oct 22, 2017 at 05:59:28 PM

Hey there Stonekickers!

I realize its been a long while since the last update but that's only because so much has been happening and it's kept us very busy! So lets go over some of the news:

PAX Australia

We will be at PAX Australia in Melbourne again next week! We are flying out for Melbourne Games Week tomorrow and then will be at Stand 42 on the indie show floor. The show is quite special to us as it's the anniversary of this Kickstarter and we were at PAX last year promoting it. Can't believe it has been one year already, what a roller-coaster the last 12 months have been!

If you're going to be at PAX, please stop by and say hi!

Early Access

Steam here we finally come! We are finally announcing the steam release date for our Early Access launch at PAX as promised. Its been a long time coming but we are finally there. You will be receiving a steam key in the next few weeks to gain access to the latest Alpha 5.1 build. For now you still have access to it on Itch.io but we have stopped selling it there in order to focus on the steam release.

Community

We've been overhauling and rebuilding our forums and have been building our discord server. Please join us there to continue the conversation and help us further develop the game once we're in Early Access. If you are a Chief tier backer or above, please message me on once you join the discord server and I give you a chief status role which gives you access to a seperate chat room where we will be able to discuss some upcoming design topics.

Other News

We know we have a few reward tiers to fulfill which we will get to I promise, we just need to make sure this final month before launch goes smoothly. The steam release is crucial for the success of the game, once we have that out of the way we will be sure to get the final rewards completed.

A new website will be launched hopefully next week which is a major improvement over our old one with some cool backer style reward tiers you, or your friends, might want to check out - we will post about that once it is live.

There are a few more announcements we will be making in the coming weeks and months but the best place to get them first is through all our other active channels(twitter, facebook, discord), so be sure to check there and please be so kind as to keep talking about, sharing and posting about Goblins of Elderstone and ask your gamer friends to wishlist us on steam right now at this link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/693580/Goblins_of_Elderstone/

As always thank you for all your support you have given over these last 12 months and for being patient and passionate about our cool little game. Let's all work together to make the Early Access launch as successful as possible!!

Lots of love

Gustav and the lost goblins