Robothorium’s Post Mortem

Posted on June 23 ,2020 - 11 h 47 min by GoblinzStudio

Robothorium is a cyberpunk dungeon crawler with turn-based fights, where all your choices will have a direct impact on your revolution against Humankind. Deep Strategy, Crafting, Party Based management, Talents and so much more in this roguelike! Released on January 31th on Steam + Switch.

First, a note about how I’m doing this post-mortem. I’m a Marketer who arrived in the team a few weeks ago and gathered the feedback of everyone working on it. They sent me by DM to make it a bit more “anonymized” and “less influenced” by other people experience. I also added feedback from my own point of view, as someone arriving in the latests months of a project.

Who worked on it

FYI We’ll be releasing Sigma Theory on April 19th if you’re interested.

How it went

After the success of Dungeon Rushers, Johann, the creator of Goblinz Studio, wanted to work on a game using the same codebase & gameplay. It would be a sci-fi RPG game taking the gameplay basis of Dungeon Rusher but improving it. The same team would be on board and use the experience gained on the first game of Goblinz Studio.

There were some hiccups and the art director of Dungeon Rushers wasn’t available any more. Johann hired Mathieu to do Robothorium! It’s quite important because it was Mathieu’s first project. He learned a lot but still had to gain experience to make something cool.

Mathieu accommodated nicely but the art and creative direction were a bit clunky from the beginning. The team had to do a complete rework of the art direction and change all sprites, for the sake of the game. It did help but we still noticed players were not interested in it that much.

Using the old engine was a bit hard to do at first. We used the basis of Dungeon Keepers. Using an old basis seems flawless and the best use case. That’s you know, in programmers dreams. Not in reality.

The story is a sci-fi tale about a war between robot and humanity. There is a whole plot about how robots trying to integrate in a future society. There are also links between dangerous science and who should own it. Alas, the writing is a bit disconnected from the gameplay! We could feel that the sci-fi part wasn’t interesting for players.

Dungeon Rushers was very fun and put cheesy adventurers in crazy dungeons. Robothorium was “serious business” and the writing was different from Dungeon Rushers. Some players didn’t really recognize themselves in it.

Our marketing was very focused on robots, sci-fi, story until we realized that the very best thing of Robothorium is its gameplay. The gameplay is generous, with skill trees, crafting, looting and such. The progression curve is nice. We decided to shift the marketing more onto the gameplay and less around the story.

We arrived near the end of the Early Access and we knew that the game was good, but the sales couldn’t skyrocket. The team decided to give it’s best though because everyone loved the game. All the team pushed trough the release, and it went pretty well. We organized a stream run with around 30 streamers ready to cover it around release. We had a coupon with Chroma Squad which generated significant sales!

Today we’re preparing the 1.1 patch for Switch + PC, but we’re unsure about how we’ll push after that. We want to work on our new projects like Legend of Keepers. We also have to keep working on Sigma Theory & Seeds of Resilience.

What went right

The gameplay is solid. There are a lot of strategy to try, the rpg parts allow for customization and it’s a good tactical game. Early Access helped to make a strong & balanced gameplay.
The project “only” lasted 2 years and made okay revenue for this kind of length. On the side, we had other projects to make and the team made the project without crunch. It feels like team management is good!

The marketing was solid and allowed for a lot of experiments. Spendings between production & marketing were well balanced.
People like to work at Goblinz, because there is a lot of freedom and trust between people. Everyone told me they liked working here (well… remotely, but still here!).
Bastien hunted community feedback, bugs reports and answers to every reviews possible! It helped with our rating and branding, people saw we care about addressing issues.

What went wrong

The creative direction at the beginning was very weak. It created a lot of problem around writing and art direction. People weren’t too sure on where the project was going.
Not everyone on remote work was fitting. Remote can be great for some people, harsh for others.

The project wasn’t super easy & chill. The reshaping of the art direction was exhausting and took a lot of time. Some people didn’t really live it well!
Matching procedural missions building with history & gameplay. It was hard to do and the result is quite deceiving.
People lacked a bit of experience so the production value is a bit weak, but they definitely learned a lot. We’re currently working on the first iterations of our next game Legend of Keepers. You can see this improvement at every level.

Stats for nerds

I love stats. You love stats. Let’s make a stats party!

As of today 20/02/2019:

63 Steam news
Robothorium Twitter = 800 followers
Robothorium Facebook = 400 followers
Production Budget = around 180k
Translation budget = around 35k
Marketing Budget = around 35k
Rough units on all platforms = around 14k

We’re french but have quite a low amount of French users, we don’t know why. For RU, we hired Pangolin (https://twitter.com/YaPangolin) around launch to help us a bit. China is still quite low cause we had some issues with our publisher there.

125 around EA launch SP ; 5–10 daily ; 220 around launch. Still going :)!

What we learned

Prepare your creative direction seriously. It’ll be useful all along the production and is hardly “lost time”.
Sometimes games have an excellent gameplay but they’re not appealing. You can patch it a bit, but sometimes it’s a lost cause. Deal with it and finish the project.
Narration must fit the gameplay, it has an impact on the whole experience.

Managing Open Development: Tips & Tricks

Posted on June 23 ,2019 - 11 h 40 min by GoblinzStudio

Hello we’re Goblinz Studio (publisher) and Subtle Games (developer of Seeds of Resilience) sharing our experience about open game development.

We, Goblinz Studio, are an indie game publisher specialized in Early Access & Open Development. We’ve shipped Dungeon Rushers, Robothorium, Sigma Theory and now Seeds of Resilience. All of them have been through Early Access.

This article is based on our experience with Subtle Games (Antonin & Alexandre) and what we’ve learned from the production of Seeds of Resilience.

What is Open Development?

It’s hard to give a hard-written definition, but I would say it’s when:

The game is buyable or free
There are regular updates at frequent times (weekly, monthly, etc.)
Players have some kind of power on how the game is developed (low or high power)
The studio is transparent about their processes

Some examples of Open Development are Dwarf Fortress, Endless Games (through Games2Gether), Neurovoider, Slay the Spire and Dead Cells. Pretty neat’o games huh?

There is a lot to say about Open Development, I will give simple tips & tricks that should empower you in this path.

I’ve worked on a dozen different game communities and I can say this is an important rule. If you’re secretive, your community won’t be comfortable sharing hard feedback with you. Same thing for discussing aggressively when you receive harsh feedback. Just remember to be cool with people, even if they’re “small players” and they’ll give it back to you.

Update Timing

We’ve found that the best update timing is MONTHLY.

This way you can have:

Buffer week: you push the update, gather community feedback and share things with people. Production is usually frozen during this week.
Production week: aka leave me alone I want to work. You have the peace of mind on focusing on the next update!
Testing week: this was the trickiest to find. This testing week give your developers and community some time for playtesting and debugging! It’s also convenient for localization community players that want to help before the patch is released. You can use the beta branch on Steam one week before Buffer week.

Content Strategy — Making ass-kickin updates!

The most important thing with open development is “What are you actually putting into the game?”. If you come to Open Development with a super fixed immovable schedule of what you wanted to do: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.

If you do this, it means your players have 0 impact on your development, and loose the “open” tag. They don’t need to lead the whole thing, just being there to support you with all the weight on your shoulders!

Choose a focus : innovation or improvement

Updates can mainly go 2 ways:

INNOVATION — You add new stuff to the game, it can be content, gameplay features, a better core loop or whatever.

IMPROVEMENT — You’re improving what’s already there! You make a better UI / UX, kill the bugs or improve the framerate. It’s also fine tuning the game even more. You may even be adding new languages to the localization!

You can do both, but sometimes it’s interesting to do IMPROVEMENT, because players often complain about bugs!

Content Philosophy : A bit for everyone

In game design, you have to make features for every path of the game : short term, medium term and long term. Your game needs to be good for the beginners, the intermediate and the veterans. This way: everyone gets fun!

That’s something you use in open development as well. On every update, if you can add content for those 3 kinds of players, your current players will be happy! It’s a good constraint as well for making creative decisions.

Now we’ve seen the big lines, let’s move onto smaller Tips!

Hades update, courtesy of SupergiantGames! Note: we didn’t work on Hades but found this update picture to pretty cool!

Tips #1 — Name and theme your update!

If you call your update Patch 0.17.0, players will think : “what the fuck is this shit?”. That look like a very basic advice, yet few people do it! You don’t have to give every patch a name. If it’s a monthly update with a lot of stuff in it, find a theme!

Finding a theme also empowers your creative decisions and processes. For instance we had a “Ingame Seasons Update”. This way, all the team knows that what they’re updating are to improve the sensation of Seasons.

It has beneficial side effects. You patch specific parts of the game, for instance you can make a “Good Tutorial Update”!. We did an update called “Agriculture & Sound Design”, where we revamped the whole sound design.

Another good side effect is that players will understand what’s in this new update, why they need to get back into it.

Tips #2 — Progress must always be visible!

In game development, it’s easy to get lost in backend optimization and tools! You gotta make sure that you always push something players can see moving and play. It doesn’t have to be the whole update with new stuff, but I’d say at least 25%. For the player, tools and optimization can be very abstract. For instance, a player that already had a good computer won’t see the changes…

Tips #3 — Vacation Month

A “Vacation Month Update”, where you ship nothing is actually super interesting. First, you can take some rest (remember “Your community looks like you and your game”). Then, you actually have more time for the next update. It allows you to have several members of the team on different vacations time. You can also take the buffer week from Month N-1 and Month N+1 to make a bigger update.

Sum-up: Discuss, Work, Build Hype!

I hope you enjoyed the read, let me know if there are specific things you’d like to know about open development!