Back to work and on to Alpha 2
almost 7 years ago – Sat, May 06, 2017 at 11:58:12 PM

Hey Stonekickers!

I'm back from a short break visiting family and recharging my batteries in preparation for this push towards Alpha 2. I covered a lot of what we want to do for the next release, which will be on itch.io, yesterday in the Twitch Stream. If you missed it, you can still view it for the next 2 weeks here: https://www.twitch.tv/lost_goblin also remember to follow in order to get notified whenever we go live.

Chromacon

Last month we showcased the game at  http://www.chromacon.co.nz/ and were the finalists in the video game awards. Mini Metro won that night but we are very honored to have been nominated. We had a really great time at the event and it was amazing seeing so much incredible local art talent. I was also fortunate enough to be on a panel with some incredible people, hosted by John Mueller about Kickstarter, check out the details here: http://www.chromacon.co.nz/connect/john-mueller-2/?wcs_timestamp=1491732000

I also believe we have found our poster artist! The wonderful Li Chen, who was on the panel with me, has agreed to possibly do the poster for us - we're currently concepting these but I have a good feeling we're going to get something amazing out of this. She is the creator of http://www.exocomics.com/ - very cool stuff

Alpha 2

The next big milestone we are working towards is the Alpha 2 or also known as First Access for us. This will be the public release of the game on itch.io - follow us here if you can https://lostgoblin.itch.io/. This means that I'm closing the pre-orders page next week and we will be moving over to the itch.io platform for all new sales of the game. This will be alpha purchases of the game, not funding per se, and those new people will not be Stonekickers but a new clan we welcome into our growing tribe. 

Thats it for now, I'm super excited about the next few months as we release on itch and move forward to our early access release on steam in a few months.

For all the alpha backers - please update your game or download it again and give us feedback on the forums to help us in preparation for the next release.

Till next time!

:D

Alpha update and Chromacon
about 7 years ago – Fri, Apr 07, 2017 at 06:57:29 AM

Hey there Stonekickers!

Job Priorities

We've been hard at work fixing lots of bugs and updating the game in various ways. We have just uploaded a new Alpha build which has the brand new job priority system in it - we're keen to get your feedback on it:

Once you build a Trade Hall you will unlock the goblins Menu from the toolbar or from any building that has a job. This new UI is the job priority UI and allows you more custom control over the priorities of the goblins. You can set items to either high priority, normal or ignore.

At first you can only do this for the peons in the village, but once you assign a Trade Prince from the Trade Hall you will be able to micro-manage the other higher tier jobs as well. We're very keen to get your feedback on this new system!

Chromacon

We will be demoing the game at our booth at Chromacon this weekend, so if you are in Auckland, please come by and say hello and check out this amazing event showcasing local art and games.

Live Stream

There will be no live stream tomorrow as we are at Chromacon and then there won't be one the following 3 weekends as I'll be visiting family for Easter holidays and my moms 60's birthday the second weekend, then traveling back home the 3rd weekend. So that's 1 month of no stream, which kinda sucks, but just think of how much new stuff I'll be able to show you all when we resume the stream on 5/6 May!!

Enjoy the new build and look after yourselves!

See you soon 

x

Back from GDC
about 7 years ago – Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 01:41:23 AM

Back at it!

Hey all you lovely goblins. I got back from the Game Developers Conference this week and am back into full swing here. GDC was really good and re-invigorating seeing what all the amazing people in our industry are up to. It was also really good for Goblins of Elderstone as we built on our relationship with Epic and Unreal Engine. We were on the official Twitch stream live during GDC which was a lot of fun and I got to meet some of the other super talented Unreal project developers out there making cool stuff.

Speaking of Twitch I'll be resuming the live streams this week, so catch me at Sat 11am NZ/ Fri 10pm GMT/ Fri 6pm EST over here: https://www.twitch.tv/lost_goblin

Update

We have been making some small updates and patches to the Alpha build, so if you update your game from itch then you will see some minor improvements. We will be doing another slightly bigger update for the end of the month which I'll talk about more closer to the time.

I will be sorting out the TShirt and figurine order this weekend as promised. We're still looking at artists for a new poster proposal, I'll keep you guys up to date with that as it progresses.

One thing we've let slip with everything going on is the social media stretch goal rewards of designing story moments with the community. We discussed some ideas of how we want to run that and we will be doing that process this month hopefully. After this update I should have the bandwidth to do the hero/ruler/god design processes with the higher tier backers. I want to make sure we can dedicate my full attention and our time to this to do it properly and not just rush it in order to tick it off the list, I hope you can agree that that will be better for you and for the game.

That's it for now, all the best from everyone here and catch you all again soon!

LG 

New build and GDC
about 7 years ago – Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 08:53:41 PM

Greetings Stonekickers!!

We fixed the save/load issues and the materials not loading on the trees making them black along with some other fixes. So go ahead and update from itch and let us know if those fixes are good for everyone on the forums :)

I'm heading to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next week. Looking forward to promoting Goblins of Elderstone to publishers/press/media as much as I can and we'll possibly be on the Unreal Twitch stream on the Thursday - I'll tweet out about that on the day. This does mean no twitch stream for the next 2 weeks however :(

Hope you all are well, we're making great progress with the builds, new features slow down a bit at this stage of development because we're now also dealing with builds and bugs and feedback. That's natural and really healthy for where we are at right now.

We have an indieDB page out now, so please go ahead and check it out, give us nice ratings, post the link wherever you do your social media and as always keep promoting our game positively please, it helps a lot. 

http://www.indiedb.com/games/goblins-of-elderstone

Rewards

The test batch of T-Shirts arrived and I'm super happy with the quality, so I will complete everyones orders, and the figurines as soon as I get back from GDC, so expect to have your T-Shirts and mini goblins in about a month from now!! yeay! 

I am still looking for an artists to do a new poster, no luck so far, but I have some leads on that.

Anyway, that's all for now - enjoy the updated build, hopefully you can all save and load now so have longer play sessions and make more progress!

<3

LG

Hotfixes
about 7 years ago – Sat, Feb 04, 2017 at 03:48:17 PM

Hey Chief Stonekickers

Just a really short update for the Chiefs (Alpha backers) - we made a quick hotfix to the build and the forums. The user access issues some of you experienced should now be fixed - might need to clear your cache first. 

We also hopefully fixed the save/load bug that many people had issues with.

You will need to re-download the build to get the update.

Thank you all for your feedback so far!!