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.