Today is a special day for Goblinz, as the studio is already celebrating its 5th anniversary! For the past 5 years, we have been developing and publishing games we believe in. It's been quite an adventure, but this is just the beginning!
For the occasion, we have surprises for you including new games announcement and big sales on all our games!
New published games: Diluvian Winds & Defend the Rook
We are so excited to announce the addition of Diluvian Winds and Defend the Rook in the Goblinz catalogue!
Diluvian Winds is a sail punk city builder developed by Alambik Studio. In a context of exile due to the rising waters, survive as you expand your community in your lighthouse!
Defend the Rook is a roguelike tactics board combat combined with tower defense elements developed by One Up Plus. Defeat the invading hoards to stay alive and save the land! Enjoy more tactics than a normal TD game, combined with the added challenge of building towers and fighting off waves of enemies!
Add these games to your wishlist and follow Goblinz Publishing on Twitter so you don't miss any of their respective news!
All our games on sale!
Take part in our publisher sale and save up to 90% on our games until March 25th! From Legend of Keepers to As Far As The Eye or the recently released ski resort tycoon Snowtopia, it's more than ever time to get the Goblinz games!
In case you missed it, our psychological deckbuilding card game is finally out! Build your deck and capacities by answering personality tests, visiting rooms or meditating. Face your phobia and defeat them through the power of life-inspired cards!
Goblinz Studio is releasing a new game with developer TeaForTwo.
Snowtopia is a ski resort tycoon in which you build your ideal ski resort.
Keep skiers smiling with fresh pistes and fine facilities. Ski, build and chill in the wintry world of Snowtopia where everyone is welcome!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvNzqfBlyAY&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=GoblinzStudio
For two years now, the Snowtopia community has been accompanying us on Discord as well as on different social networks. Thank you for all your feedback since the first version of the game in December 2018, and on all the updates. Your enthusiasm helps us a great bunch! The early access will allow us to be even closer to the players, who will have more than ever a decisive role in the development of our game. š
And we are very proud to announce the new game published by our studio: Banners Of Ruin. A roguelike card game with turn-based fights and breathtaking graphics. How not to fall in love? https://store.steampowered.com/app/1075740/Banners_of_Ruin
As Far As The Eye (Unexpected) is now published by Goblinz Studio
Goblinz Studio is publishing As Far As The Eye, a game developed by Unexpected.
We met the Unexpected team during Paris Games Week and immediately saw the potential of the game. The team needed a few months to make it even better and stronger. We felt our expertise in making witty, community-centric games could fit very well with their project.
Goblinz and Unexpected have the same ideals: We believe that this industry needs more games about living in harmony with nature, about non-violence. We want games that help you think and understand new dynamics with an ecological mindset. A FATE is totally that, a game where youāre natureās friend and co-exist with it peacefully.
Check A FATE steam page to get more details about the game and wishlist it!
We now manage 5 upcoming games you can find on our Publisher Page [link]. We try to support every game the same. Weāre dedicated to produce them with a fair consideration to team situations. We give them all the best chance of success!
Noticeably, weāve added a few months of production to A Long Way Down to increase quality. Snowtopia is on a good track to be a great game that gets regular updates. Iris And The Giant gets a Unity port to improve future plans. Legend of Keepers reached a 95% positive review and Top 4 free games on Steam for October.
A new game means some changes in the organization, and a team update! Carla will be joining us a QA Manager. She will help us test thoroughly the game, record screenshots and gifs for social media. Welcome her kindly!
Cheers,
Goblinz.
Seeds of Resilience Postmortem
Postmortem
Hello everyone! Weāre Antonin (part of Subtle Games) & Tavrox (part of Goblinz Studio), who worked on Seeds of Resilience. The full team also includes Alexandre & other people you can find in the credits of the game.
We wanted to take some time to make a postmortem of Seeds of Resilience. After 6 years, our environment friendly village builder went through a lot of hard times. Letās dive into the history of the project.
Project History : 6 years of labor
Year 1
At this time we are 4 in the team. The game we have in mind is a mix of all our ideas: A massively multiplayer browser game with RPG-like characters. You can also build villages with other players, explore a huge map. We use a home-made engine using HTML5/javascript, our team put no effort in project management, and has no game design skills. During this year, we work on our first prototype but we are amateurs. You know, the kind with big ideasā¦ way too big!
Year 2
While Alexandre rework the graphics, Antonin starts learning game design by reading and experimenting. He also starts to meet other indie developers that help a lot by giving constructive feedback on different parts of the project. Itās also a great boost of motivation. At the end of the year, two team members leave the project because they canāt or donāt want to spend enough time to make the game progress. This is a hard time and we are close to give up.
Year 3
Alexandre and Antonin spend some holidays together and rethink the whole concept of the game. It helps them drop the RPG aspects and focus on village-building. Alexandre redraws everything while Antonin starts to do some serious project management. They both start searching for realistic data about medieval crafting and building techniques. At the end of the year, we have something interesting to play, though the UI is awfully unintuitive!
Years 4 and 5
Antonin realizes making a home-made engine is not a good idea. We switch to Unity, work in short iterations and remake every part to make it better. We put great effort into UI improvement but our lack of skill limits us. The environment friendly appears and looks really promising.
Year 6
We start working with Tavrox who handles marketing and community management. We launch the game on itch.io then on Steam Early Access. A lot of players give feedback and weāre more confident about the game. A few months later, we start working with Goblinz Studio. They invest in the game. With their help, we remake the whole UI for the sixth and last time. Itās also at that time we get the game localized in 9 languages, add sound design and music. Finally, we released the game!
Fun fact: Until June 2018, our game is called Stormland, but a big studio announced a game with the same name. It was a bit stressful for a few days but it gave us the opportunity to find a more suiting name.
What went right
Game mood & art direction
In the end, the game has a unique chill vibe. We see a lot of games with violence and killing; making a game that has none of those characteristics is very hard. It was at the core of the teamās philosophy and is now a good solid point of the game. The visual arts are also very specials.. Ultimately, the sound designer brought a nice sound layer on top of all that. It doesnāt have the ultimate graphics, but people like it for its simplicity.
Finally released & good sales!
Going through a very long development time, itās hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel! Some of us have been in several game productions, and surviving through 6 years of development is hard. The 1.0 launch has been doing ok. The game is not recouped yet, but a good part of it is. In the end, the game is also ātimelessā, it doesnāt fit to a trend or anything. Itās important because in the long run, it can make good sales.
What went wrong
Very long development time
The project had complete rework several times during the development, at least 3 or 4 times. As you could read in the chronology, it also meant several people worked on the game with several different art directions and game cores. 6 years for an indie project is quite unusual, what we see on average is more around 2-3 years.
Sole developer isolated
Antonin sometimes felt really isolated, living in the countryside far from other developers, sometimes having contact only once a week with Alexandre (who went travelling for a year in his van). Working remotely has many benefits but after years of doing so, the lack of social contact started to be a burden.
Marketing & sales overview
The project was in development for a long time with very few public demo. We only showed the game in local events such as Stunfest or Utopiales. It changed when Tavrox started to work on the game marketing and we decided to launch an open alpha on Itch.io.
Open Alpha
We also tried during the open alpha to make more community building and allow people to have a say about what will be in the next patches. For instance, we had a public trello where people could directly vote.
After a while, we met Aline and her platform Red Bricks, which looked interesting. Itās a community building platform.Weāre glad to be the biggest project there. It is still in early development so in retrospect, it made the community building part a bit slower, but it wasnāt a major issue. Also, it helped having things more streamlined.
Steam Early Access
Then, we launched on Steam and had a good first month, considering our very low marketing budget. We saw some opportunity and shared the figures with Johann (Founder & Gamedev of Goblinz Studio). He agreed to invest around 15kā¬ on the game to give it a real marketing chance. After a few months, Tavrox was hired by Goblinz Studio and Seeds of Resilience could get a good amount of marketing time and expertise. Johann did his amazing Steam marketing optimization and we got decent long-term sales during Early Access.
Every month got an update, as you can read here (link). It was very interesting to incorporate the community and be very open about the development.
Our major issue was the ping pong with Mixed reviews on Steam. During some weeks, the game would get into Mixed Reviews (<70% positives) and we had low sales. Then it would get back into Mostly Positive (>70% positive) and the sales would double or triple every day. It happened because the game is a bit special and some players that are looking for a āstandard, tailoredā experience donāt always get it. Seeds is a calm, peaceful game.
Steam Launch : Praise for Chinese Players!
With the problems around mixed reviews, the launch was a bit harsh. The game is launched on June 13th, and as you can see on this graph, the launch day wasnāt the biggest of our days.
It was the few ones after, because we worked with Maple Whispering on the Chinese Marketing. They did a great job and it was definitely worth working with them! As of today 09/07/019, we have around 20% chinese players.
Overall, the reception to the 1.0 version was awesome and weāre glad the game is in a very good state. People like it, itās not the million-dollar sellers that everyone will buy. Weāre in a chill nice and our players like that the game is different enough. The release feels like a moral and sales success to us.
To this day, the game has sold around 8k units on Steam + a bit on Itch.io. In the end, itās hard to see if we recouped because 6 years with very flexible hours is a very long time. But the game is now out and solid, ready to play for years to come!
What about the future?
Antonin is taking some rest from the development of the game. Weāre not sure about what we will be adding or fixing within the next months or years. There might be nothing, there might be something, just donāt expect anything.
We are discussing with people about price of ports for consoles, but its interface is heavy so it might be tricky to do. Of course, if there are critical bugs that prevent players from playing on Steam, we will look into them.
Thank you for reading, we wish you the best. Cheers, Subtle Games & Goblinz Studio.
Seeds of Resilience is 30% off!
Seeds of Resilience is 30% off! Want to start anew? In this game, you'll be able to build a village from scratch. It has 2 game modes : missions & survival. The missions allow you to discover the game mechanics at your own pace. The survival is the real challenge where you dropped in nature!
New languages added to the game!
We are happy to announce we added Korean and Turkish to the game!
If you see any mistakes, feel free to send us an email about it!
A new update will arrive in the next month... with new missions <3 Stay tuned survivors!
Let's check Goblinz Studio lineup 2019/2020!
Goblinz Studio is proud to announce you that weāre getting bigger and specialize in turn-based strategy games. Itās not anymore a pattern but a brand :)
Donāt forget to follow our developer steam page if you wanna be the first to know about our news.
Here is our awesome upcoming games! Only Strategy & simulation games
-Legend of Keepers will have a one-hour-prologue, available on Steam exactly the 26th of September. If you donāt want to miss it, you can wishlist it ;) (isnāt it our best slogan?)
We are super grateful for your hype, feedbacks and advise. If our game becomes a hit itāll be thanks to you!
Goblinz team
Announcement regarding updates
Hello everyone!
It's been a while without news so we wanted to give you updates regarding the future of Seeds of Resilience.
The game is doing good, and we're pretty happy with the current state. It's not perfect, but it's a solid experience for all future players. We will be taking at Gamescom with future partners regarding potential ports.
If we have ports, there will probably be a PC patch as well, even small.
If there's no ports, we will probably not push new updates.
IN ALL CASES, we will solve critical bugs that kill the game. We will maybe add a few missions. But don't expect much more, sorry.
Gan, sole developer of the game, is still resting and looking at how the game is doing. He's been working on it for 6 years along with Alexandre so they definitely need a few months to process the release.
