Merry Christmas Goblin Gang! Or happy whatever winter holiday you celebrate!
We’ve been diligently reworking our character controller and optimizing Watch Out for Goblins! so it runs more smoothly on more hardware. This is a pretty big rework and it’s going to take us some time, but we think it will absolutely be worth it.

In the meantime, we’ve added a bit of winter weather to the Skrimble Isles and warped it up nice with new combat animations. It’s a small update, but it’s a good update.

• Big Bold Combat Animations - Our first run at combat animations was timid. We wanted snappy controls so we stayed away from anticipation frames, but this left the goblins with weak little punches that hardly looked like punches. No more of that! Our new punches have a ton of windup. The Gob’s now step in with wild haymakers that put their whole body into the punch. It feels so much better. Shove and uppercut animations have a similar glow up.
  
• More Goblin Stabilization - We’ve got another sackful of tweaks and changes that all have the goal of reducing the “scrambling” that happens when the goblins take a big hit. Scrambling is much reduced in this build- but it’s still there. We are going to keep trying to reduce it but it’s a struggle Unity’s physics engine has when chains of joints experience extreme forces. Dedicated Goblins will probably always be able to find a way to scramble if that’s the kind of thing you are into.
  
• Christmas Cosmetic - A fun new piece of goblin garb to collect. Jolly good fun.

• A Short Holiday Break - At least next week, we are going to work on not working on WOFG! We are going to spend Christmas and new years with our friends and families. Don’t worry, we will be back to dev in 2025.
  
• Building a Great Goblin - We have a good goblin. We want a Great Goblin. This is going to take some time. Over the last month we’ve been skill building and planning out everything we want the new goblin to be able to do. Early work is moving in a promising direction. If you want more details (maybe too many details) you can check our dev blog here: https://sqyd.studio/dev-blog/

We plan to keep bringing improvements to the WOFG! The Demo! when they are ready. As always, thank you to everyone playing the demo and giving us your honest feedback. It only helps us keep making the game better.

We will be back early in 2025 with another development update. Over the holidays- remember to watch out for goblins wherever you go. I think they like to roll around in dirty snowbanks.

Hello Goblin Gang! Watch Out for Goblins! The Demo! has been live on Steam for about a month now. We have been watching people play, listening to feedback, and thinking about our next steps. Before I get into our development plans, thank you all for playing and sharing your experience with the demo. Seeing the big playtimes in our Steam stats gives us confidence that we are on the right track.

So what next? It seems that there is still some friction in our character controller. Game performance also isn’t as good as we’d like it to be especially on the Steam deck and older PCs. The path forward is clear– it's time to refactor. This means taking some time to go back to the basics of the project, looking to enhance what is working and fix what isn’t. We now feel we have a pretty good idea of what Watch Out for Goblins! wants to be as a game. Now the task is to rebuild the foundation into something that is stable and easy to expend, without sacrificing any of the wacky ragdoll action that’s at the core of WOFG!

• Character controller optimization. We love our character controller for a lot of things, but think it’s fair to say that it has some weird behavior that breaks the flow of the game. Sometimes the goblin is a little too stiff when they take a big hit, sometimes a mysterious force pulls the goblin off the cliff you’ve worked hard to climb. These problems can be very frustrating. The good news is that we think we can fix them, it’s just going to take a bit of an overhaul of some of the core goblin systems.
  
• Development tools. Now that we have a good idea of what a complete WOFG! will be, we are going to spend some time building custom development tools to help us create levels, mechanisms, and NPC behaviors quickly and easily.
  
• More models. This game needs some crazy creatures, super set pieces, and more bits of groady goblin garb to collect. We are going to spend some time toiling away in the Blender mines to make sure, when we have our character reworked and our dev tools in place, that we are ready to pack the game full of gooey Goblin content!

Thanks again for following along as we continue to build our little goblin game. If you want more technical (and overwritten, personal, and possibly navel-gazing) updates on dev progress please check in on the SQYD.studio Dev Blog[sqyd.studio]. If not, we will be back with another Steam Community Sate of Dev report next month.

Until next time, please remember to Watch Out for Goblins! wherever you go. I hear they like to hide under piles of fallen leaves.