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[MantraTeam]

Hey all,

a couple of things to post today. The first being this new piece of artwork, drawn by Alex and painted by me, for the purpose of being the introductory screen. (Before the main menu).

check it out:



The second thing being that Alex has been working on the story lately and I thought I'd share a couple of pages from his sketchbook. Just playing with some idas at the moment. Check these out too:







Anyway that's it for now. Hope you're all looking forward to a new year and check back soon for more goblin-related updates.

- James

[MantraTeam]

Fixed a ton of bugs last week and added a ton of juice. The HUD is improving every day, the most notable thing being that the bonus markers are now a thing, which makes it a lot more satisfying to complete a round.

Everyday new artwork is being put into the game, although we still don't have any final goblins in it yet (Should be doing that this week).

I've been playing around with some particle systems on the HUD too which should look nice when they're done.

I'm also starting to adjust the difficulty now, trying to find a good balance. Before I would keep the player way overpowered for the purpose of testing but we're getting to the point now where we need to start thinking about progression and difficulty.

So yeah only a small update. I put up a tons of new screenshots in the first post so check them out.

Have a good week and thanks for checking out what we're doing!

-James

[MantraTeam]

Hey all,

nothing fun to show this week, I've fixed a ton of bugs, implemented delta timing, adjusted the difficulty on the first level of the demo and put the first tutorial in. Things are moving forward steadily, but life's been getting in the way a little bit recently. I plan to add in some new "End Wave" artwork soon among other things.

-James

[MantraTeam]

****UPDATE****

A couple of "final" goblins are in! I say it with quotation marks as they're still likely to change. There are still a few bugs in the animation so I'll be showing them off when they're fixed. A lot more general bug fixes and some small changes for example: it now automatically fades to night time at the end of a wave. This gets rid of the "dead" time after you finish the waves and are told to head to the campfire to continue. A few other little things. We haven't recorded any goblin vocals yet. Something I'm still looking forward to.

I know it's been a while since I posted anything but you can hopefully expect to hear a lot more soon. I'll be making an Instagram account and a FB page to keep you posted.

For now though follow our twitter @MantraTeam and thanks so much for checking out what we're doing!

- James

[MantraTeam]

Hi all!

We've been putting a few more assets into the game recently including a new house. Goblins were getting hidden behind the top of the mushroom so it had to go, nice as it was.

I'm also currently working on the new sheep. I'm still painting him and he'll be in there soon.



Got some short gameplay gifs too. A couple of final goblin designs are in. Still a little buggy but we're working on sorting it.







We're also on instagram now. Check us out and follow and like and all that if you're cool.

https://twitter.com/MantraTeam
https://www.instagram.com/mantrateam_games/

Thanks for checking us out! More coming soon!

- James

[MantraTeam]

The new house is in. It could do with a little bit of polishing up I reckon but the main thing is that the goblins aren't getting hidden by it any more.



Same for the sheep. Looking pretty.


Some other little things have been changed, the spiked wall trap now gets added to the goblin grid so they no longer run on top of it.



The rain is fixed now. It wasn't working for a while as I accidentally deleted the emitter a couple of lines after creating it. Pro stuff here people.

I need to make the night-time version of the house which is in shadow, polish up the existing house and get an outline on it.

We've also got some celebration trumpets now when you complete a level, although they could do with some better placement.



Thanks for reading. We're working on all this stuff so check back next week for some more updates.

all the best,
- James

[CodeLobe]

I love the look/feel of this game.

But, I hope you don't mind a bit of constructive critisism: It seems to me you need to work on your saturation & lightness levels in the art.  You may need to adjust some of the sprites for contrast.  The backgrounds / trees are nice, but could use some differentiation per distance -- and often times I feel they're too saturated in the scene.

See how these goblins are so desaturated they blend into the ground, while the trees feel like they're almost "in front" of the foreground?
 


Typically you'll want things in the foreground to "pop" more.  The character seems OK, but could maybe use a bit more saturation -- just a bit, and desaturate some of those background bushes and such.  If you decrease the saturation and/or lightness according to distance from the player (or into the scene), then it could give a nifty effect [perhaps dynamically if this issomething you can correct / adapt in the rendering pipeline].

As a demonstration of depth I've (crudely) modified your foliage & cute shrooms here:



See how the saturation of that bush in the BG seems too much for the lower sat shrooms in front?  Instead saturate the foreground, increase contrast, and desaturate / lower contrast the Backgrounds.  Below is just a bit overdone to stress the method:



I'm not saying you should modify THIS image, I just quickly modified parts of this image's hue, saturation and lightnes to demonstrate depth.  Apply this principle to the entire game, with the game's actors most saturated / visually popping -- Unless your goal is to blend them into certain backgrounds, of course.  I blue shifted the background and desaturated just a touch, the middle I shifted a bit more yellow, the front a tad more red and saturated / lightened / contrasted a touch.  Those shrooms look like some item you might be able to pick up now.

I'm not saying you should apply a garish amount of such contrast.  Just that you could benefit from sorting the levels of contrast and saturation you already have now so that the scenes convey depth a bit better -- the goblins above should be a bit more saturated / higher contrast than the ground they're walking on, IMO.

The GUI can even convey a sense of "depth" if given a bit more pop.  Here the plants are higher contrast than the UI elements, causing them to blend into the scene.



With a little bit of contrast and saturation:



The UI now feels on top of the scene (at least at a level comparable to yon shrubbery), giving the rest of the game world a feeling that it is "deeper" into the screen.

Appologies if you already planned on correcting this.  It just seemed the depth of your scenes could use some TLC. With a little bit more tweaking the feeling of depth & readability could be greatly improved.

Cheers! 

[MantraTeam]

Hey, thanks so much for taking the time to make this post! I really appreciate that you would put so much effort into helping make our game better and giving such useful feedback. I'm grateful for it all!
This is an aspect of the project that I'm still in the process of learning, so it's really great that you've laid it all out in such a detailed way.

So as I see it based on your explanation, a sense of depth within the screen comes from the varying levels of 3 main things in the colour palette: the warmth of the colours, the saturation of the colours, and the contrast.  The higher the image is in these aspects the more they “pop” and stand out, so there ought to be a subtle but noticeable difference in the objects that the player can actually interact with, and the bits that they can’t, which in this case is the environment. The same goes for the UI, which naturally needs to seem closest to the player, and therefore should have higher levels of these things anyway.

You’ve given me a lot to play around with here, and I’ll incorporate it ASAP.

Thanks again. I always appreciate feedback.

- James

[MantraTeam]

So we've been general bug fixing lately. Everything is feeling a bit more solid and together.Pretty soon we'll be re-making a lot of the assets including the player animations and the goblin animations and artwork, mainly giving each goblin type their own distinct physical traits. We'll also be adding our first boss. Below are a couple of preliminary designs but you can expect those to change. I'm pushing towards a playable demo which is about a month and a half away, hopefully having about 4 enemy types and a boss across around 4 levels. More on that as it happens.



What we want to do is have a small, self-contained story within the demo, primarily told through 2.5d cut-scenes at the start and the end. I'll be painting the images to look like this one:



This should really start to flesh out the world that the player exists in, and give a bit of much needed context to everything so far.

Progress is slow but it is being made. Should should ramp up soon.

all the best, check back soon!

- James

[MantraTeam]

Working on our fist boss fight. Still in PG art but it's on it's way. Been designing the state system for attacks today. A lot of fun. The skeleton of the demo is there, we just need to add meat to it in the form of art assets and animations, the usual. We've also fleshed out a bit more of the story which we'll post about soon enough.



I may have mentioned before that we're going to push ahead with it all soon, and commit a solid month of work on it to get this demo made to a decent standard, which will begin at the start of next week.

All the best. thanks for reading. Check back soon!

- James

[MantraTeam]

Hey all. We've started working everyday now so things should be moving a lot quicker. I fixed 3 pages of bugs yesterday while Alex worked on a line drawing for the intro cut-scene, which I'll be painting today.

We have 4 big chunks to tackle:

The new player animation,
the new goblin animation,
the cutscenes,
and the boss.

There's loads of little misc bits of artwork that need to be made, along with a ton of little bugs to be squashed. Of course we'll have to test everything after but once these chunks have been done we'll have a demo.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon!

- James

[MantraTeam]

We've made a lot of progress in the last week as planned. I've been painting cut-scenes ready for 2.5d animation while Alex has been re-making the player animation in Spine. It's been a lot of work and there's still a lot more to do.





The animations still need to be integrated so I'll post some gifs when that's done. Next up we're re-designing the goblins. I made changed to their AI yesterday to stop them always walking in perfectly straight lines and bunching up at their target which is a big improvement.

We'll be making a few variations on each goblin type, along with their unique animations, then after that the boss. We also have a looooonnnggg list of misc. assets that need making. The of course there's all the actual game, level and progression design which will inevitably need tweaking and changing, and of course the list of bugs is getting longer all the time.

We're working more than full time on it right now and we're still cutting it very fine. Lots to do.

I'll try to keep regular updates
- James

[MantraTeam]

I know I've been terrible with updating this but it's because all my time has been spent making stuff. So what's new?

The player animations have been totally remade in spine, including 2 new run directions and a dodge roll. Attacking is a lot clearer now, and there are a couple of combos in there.

The goblins have been completely remade, also in spine. They now have the capacity to be randomly generated. There's only a few variations but the system is built and it works. All we need to do on that front is add more goblin assets. There are also a couple of new enemy types including a "feral" goblin, who is a runt that has been outcast and become feral. They inflict bleeding damage over a small period of time.

Player collision has been tightened up even more, as have the goblins' collision.

There are tons of new particle effects and polish in the game, along with loads more sound effects. On that note we had good fun a few days ago recording about 3 hours of goblin sound effects which are in, and sound great. Considering releasing them as a pack on itch.io or something later.

There's also a ton of new UI stuff.

Squashed about 30 pages worth of general bugs, particularly to do with the UI.


I'm currently working on the progression of the demo, when to introduce new enemy types, bits of the HUD and game mechanics. After that I'll be making the boss level, then tightening everything up, polishing and play testing, then the demo should be done.

It sounds like a lot to do but it shouldn't take too long.

No images or anything today as I'll be re-making the title page when this is all finished. That'ss also probably be the next post in a week or two.

Thanks for checking us out. Check back soon!

- James

[MantraTeam]

I realise it's been over a month since I said the demo would be ready. We took a little break from it for a week or so to de-stress and unwind, but we're back to work on it now and it's coming along. All the content that we wanted to add has been added, we're now in the process of testing, bug fixing and adjusting the difficulty. When this is done, we'll get a website up and make the demo available for download for one month.
Sorry it's taking so long but I have a standard which I want to meet, plus I'm sure we all know what game development is like: everything takes twice as long as you think it will.

Thanks for checking out what we're doing. You'll be able to play Goblin Pest Control soon I promise!

-James

[MantraTeam]

So the demo is here! Finally! We're so excited to show what we have so far. It's taken a lot longer than I thought it would but the demo and all the basic framework is done, and now you can play it! We have a website now which we'll be updating the blog on, as well as on here: https://www.mantrateamgames.com/

We also have our first trailer. I've been hesitant to show off any actual game-play until now, as I'm not a fan of showing too much work in progress, but I'm really happy with how it's turned out. The identity of the game-play has started to shine through in the combat loop, and it's as fun as I hoped it would be.

Check out the trailer, and give it a play for yourself!





https://www.mantrateamgames.com/download

All the best,

- James