Friday, November 20, 2009

A Brief History of Goblyn Stomp

I've wanted to make video games since I was about four. When I first heard about XNA I was super excited, because it would give regular people a chance to develop games on a console for very little up-front investment. I began fantasizing about what kinds of games I could develop, and started poking around with XNA on some of my friends' computers (my own computer, unfortunately, didn't have the pixel shader required to run the software.) I'm a huge fan of Castle Crashers, and so I wanted to start with a game kind of like it.

Once I got married, my wife got to share all my bank accounts, and I got to share her laptop :) So a couple months after we got married I convinced her to let me install the XNA framework on our laptop, and then I got to work.

It couldn't be exactly like Castle Crashers, so I was thinking about having waves and waves of one-hit-kill enemies instead, kind of like Geometry Wars (...or the alien ship level in Castle Crashers....) I started animating little red dots with legs and figured out how to get them to wander around randomly:


An old cell phone video from several months ago. I can't believe Blogger can play this...

Over time I added a main controllable character and gave him some attacks, still using stick figure animations and a photo of a farm owned by one of my Dad's relatives:

The cane spin attack used to be a poorly drawn chainsaw

So once I had the basics of the gameplay coded, I started trying to think of a theme and a style that I could use for my game (poorly-drawn stick figures seemed like a lousy theme.) One day, as I was searching for graph paper templates online for a household project, I came across Kevin MacLeod's website. Among the many offerings on his website is royalty-free music. I browsed through some of it, listened to a few pieces in his "Silent Film Score" section, and I had found my theme. At the time, I thought that a video game made to look like a silent movie was the greatest, most original idea I could have stumbled across. Of course, halfway though drawing Chap Scaliwag's animations I learned of The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (which looks awesome, by the way), but I decided to stick with the silent movie theme anyway, as I didn't want to start over with my drawings.

All in all it took me about 9 months to make Goblyn Stomp, start to finish. I hope you enjoy it! I plan on adding entries from time to time that go into detail about how I developed specific aspects of the game, so if there's anything in particular you're interested in, feel free to leave a comment and let me know.

Goblyn Stomp Tips

So in the process of making the game, I've put in more than a few hours playing Goblyn Stomp. I'd like to share some tips I've come up with in my playing:
  • At the beginning of the game (the first 25 kills), you can hold down the A button to jump repeatedly. There is, however, a brief pause between jumps that could give a goblyn time to bite you.
  • If you're having trouble lining up your stomps, try lining up your shadow with the goblyns' shadows.
  • The fantastic stomp is great for taking out clustered goblyns, but it also leaves Chap vulnerable for a short time. Try to target isolated groups that fit within the stomping radius.
  • Until you start really getting mobbed with goblyns, try to save your health tonicks until you have 3 bites (or less) left.
  • Use your remote mynes! You can only drop 10 at a time before detonating them, but you can use as many as you like. I've found that laying down a horizontal line across the screen is a particularly good way to clear a path through a stampede.
  • Stampeding goblyns seem to avoid the sidewalk...

Still having trouble? Have any tips of your own? Leave a comment!

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Welcome!

Thanks for checking us out! I've got the websites forwarding here until I have the time to make a real website (or the money to pay someone else to do it.) My current project is a game called Goblyn Stomp, an XBox Live Indie game that I would describe as a cross between Geometry Wars and Castle Crashers watered down to a $1 version and set in the early 1900's. Here's a screen shot:


My goal is to finish the game and submit it for review before Thanksgiving, so it'll hopefully be up on XBox Live by early December.