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Goblin Gaiden: Melvins War
This version of the game was envisioned & created in 2 weeks for The Goblin Jam: Cute or Creepy.  Play as one of 2 Goblin Warchiefs and take on the Boar Clan in this Roguelike Auto Battler, taking on Goblins, helping Gnome Caravans & seeing what's inside Troll Caves.

Game Notes
- The Troll Units have a taunt for enemy Units
- Boars are great in Numbers and for protecting more valuable Units
- The Tutorial will be very helpful

Known Bugs
- The Reset functionality isn't playing nicely.  If you want to start a new game, open and close the game - sorry!
- If you use your scroll wheel while Dialogue is happening, it'll zip through it super fast.  It's a bug with the Dialogue system I built.

Future of this Project
This game took me 70+ hours on top of my full time job!  I can't believe how much progress I've made and how much I learned creating this game.  I have a lot more changes I'd like to make, and will be continuing development on it.  You can follow my progress by following my BlueSky, YouTube, and Website / Blog posted at the top of this page.  I've worked very hard on this game and am so happy it's at that state where it is!

Attributions
All characters were created by me in Asperite, and most music was from my buddy Mike.

 All Attributions can be found here.  No Generative AI was used to create this game.

Published 1 day ago
StatusIn development
PlatformsHTML5
Rating
Rated 4.0 out of 5 stars
(1 total ratings)
AuthorCapyBloom Interactive
GenreStrategy
Made withGodot
Tags2D, Fantasy, No AI, Pixel Art, Roguelike, Roguelite

Comments

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Pretty impressive for a Jam, I could be interested to play a polished version of this game ! The events at the end of each fights is a really cool feature, I was always looking for the end of fights to get the events.

Placing your units, polished battle scene and more heroes and I’m all in :) Great job !

Thank you so much for your support Tomo!  I'm excited to see what you've whipped up.  Maybe we could collab on a future one as well!


Yay, I finished the game! It's honestly kind of wild that you included a tutorial section for a game jam.

We love to see it!

Tbh, I didn't really know what was expected so I went hard.  I knew I wanted to make an Roguelike / Autobattler so tried to combine the two.  I'm also a project manager / Dev Ops at my job so I tried hard to organize and action.

I told my girlfriend I was entering a competition and wanted 2 weeks to focus on hard on this and she was on board :) 

Now I'm spending my evenings and mornings with her haha.  The tutorial section was mostly for ME to learn tbh

Pretty cool for 70+ hours, no real issues. Managed to win only losing a single gnome, poor bugger.

Feedback:

  • Having a currently assigned units / max available unit count would be nice. To show how many units player can utilise. Basic unit stats; health, speed, damage, short description of the unit's logic and or backstory. Pretty much have all useful information about each unit in the raid group area.


  • UI displaying current gold at all times, throughout each scene/level.
  • Boar clan map: have a simple strength level for each location, to indicate how strong the forces are there. Player also has one, clearly visible. Strength level is just all units combined based on their effectiveness in battle(Goblin = 0.8, Boar = 1.0, Troll = 4.0, for example). Had no idea if Hog Clan or Boar Clan Leader was stronger, luckily chose correctly. 
  • Having off map raids that could be repeated to gain gold/troops. Once you lose some troops, you don't have much chance to win.
  • Some type of battle of power UI, displaying current strength of you vs enemy during the battle.
  • To save time on the next Game Jame, i'd suggest not adding a separate tutorial and focus on making everything streamlined. E.g. having all relevant information displayed in key locations during game play. Highlight viable targets to attack on the map(glowing, slight breathing animation or twitch, UI saying attack, etc), and darken or add fog to the other locations, clearly showing they are not intractable as of yet. Add big red text buttons to the war table and gnome, currently it's a tad difficult to see what is clickable(Yes it has a highlight, but a button instantly tells your brain I can click here.) Focus more on directing the player's attention, and add interactive tutorials if needed. Blocks of text and dialogue all in one go, causes people to skip it. Breaking it up into short concise information, spread throughout the game is the way to go. For example; player starts with only goblins(fragile, but have long pointy sticks), eventually they get a few boars(high health tanks, knocks back enemy) and notice goblins can stay behind the boars to safely stab enemies yet weak when unsupported. Let the player have an option to fight a troll at the beginning of game, and get decimated by it showing it's relative strength or have it aid you in a starting battle. Show how deadly your opponent is, as they attack in full force raiding your camp after 2-3 turns, afterwards gnome hints we should defend the camp from now on(A small goblin/boar raid that succeeds if player isn't defending is fine also). Stuff like this is how you can teach the player without directly telling them. Aside from that, adding short refined dialogue and input popups ever so often is fine. Also don't be afraid of letting the player die/fail, as long as your game play loop is tight with little to no padding dying over and over slowly learning is a valid option.
  • Save currently assigned unit's each time player enters a battle. Had to manually remove boars and max goblins/gnomes every time.
  • Possibly make your camp followers jump up and down ever so often and flip axis randomly.
  • Battle Juice: each time a unit takes damage, flash their sprite to white and back to normal. On death launch them backwards high into the air, like they were punched into the sky or just do a quick shove 2-4 meters backwards rapidly. 
  • Having each unit be unique would help a lot. Currently they all are just variants of close range melee. And yeah i know, time constants.
    • Goblins throw spears, or have extended attack range, low health.
    • Boar charges at enemy stunning them for 1 second, attacks for 2-4 seconds runs away then charges again, high health and damage, slow attack.
    • Trolls do an area attack hitting max 6 enemies per attack, massive health and damage, very slow movement and attack speed. Possibly throw rocks ever so often.
    • Gnomes are invisible until they attack or spawn from behind enemy, and focus attacking goblins. Super fast attack speed, poor health.
    • Demons knock back enemies with their mace, with a slowing effect

Overall well done. Gamedev is tough, especially with a time crunch. Keep it up.

First off, thank you for such a thoughtful response to my game - this my first "real game" and the fact anyone is playing it at all makes me so happy, much less to the extent that you have to give me such feedback!

Unit AssignmentInformation

For sure. That's one of the things I wanted to fix before releasing it but had such a hard time getting the random generation / army assignment to work properly initially that I chose to come back to it.  100% agreed.  

I have a backstory & also unit secondary unit behaviors planned for all units (for example, boars will have a damage multiplier up to a set maximum when near other boars, Goblins can be assigned as either ranged or melee, gnomes have a chance to evade attacks, etc.) but I realized I need to overhaul the battle system for that to really work.

User Interface

I suck at UI and am learning a lot about it as I make this.  I think all of your feedback regarding it should be implemented and have heard similar feedback from my friends.  Ideally I'd like a book in which you hover over the unit and the other page gives a quick summary about them.  Clicking the Gnome to get unit information isn't great, and I need to have that information at a glance.  That's one of my biggest "overhauls" for the next update.

Tutorial / Time

Tbh the tutorial was me learning how to make the mechanics haha.  I decided to see how to piece together the mechanics there statically before I took it on dynamically - it was more-so for me than it was the player.  

Agreed on the approach, I remember seeing Arin Hanson make a video like 10 years ago where he used Megaman as an example for teaching the player and feel like your insight is in a similar vein. 

Other Stuff

- Unit selection is ass, I'll rework that to save previous assignements (up to whatever max is left).  I need to play around with that too, I dont' know if a spinbox is the best way to go but worked at the time

- The Camp will be more dynamic, I actually want a fenced area that fills up with hogs when you get them, a little area for Trolls, and an area for gnomes / goblins to congregate as you get more.  Have them come / go to reflect the players army (not 1:1 but you get the idea).  I just didn't have time to implement prior to the jam 

- Battle Juice, 10000%.  I wanted this from get-go but wanted to refrain from fudging with the battle system too much because I kept breaking things haha.


Overall, thanks again for your thoughtful feedback and taking the time to both play the game and write this up.  I see this game as more of an alpha build / proof of concept at this time and will actually be making a little dev blog in the coming weeks as I update & implement these and many other changes if you're at all interested.

I saw your portfolio and it's very impressive.  It's clear from your feedback alone that you're a seasoned dev so it means even more to me that you played / responded.  I appreciate it more than I can put into words.