If you have been following the twitch stream or watched the videos you will know that we have been working on the seasonal system in the game so you will know and see when the seasons change, which of course is important.

As you can see the trees change colour as the seasons go by and then lose their foliage in winter. This system is not as advanced as I would have liked to get it, but as we didn’t make it to this stretch goal I didn’t want us spending too many resources and too much time on something too complex either.

We haven’t only been working on art stuff of course. We have done lots of good work on improving performance and fixing bugs in preparation for the alpha release as well as added the Shaman and Priest jobs to the game!

Here is a male and female shaman casting magic missiles at a wraith:

and here is a Priest healing an injured sleeping goblin:

This is all still a bit rough and will keep improving over time but its very exciting that we have magic in the game now!

Social Stretch Goal Story Moment

Speaking of stretch goals, one that we DID make was the 500 likes for our Facebook page and 2000 followers on our Twitter page!

So here is how this is going to work: We will be posting the scenario and rules on our social media page in the next few days and everyone that is on the page (liked it) will be able to vote for how the story moment will work! This is the first time we are doing an open design like this so its a bit of an experiment but lets see how it goes. If it goes well we can do more of them in the future, especially if we hit some more stretch goals! As always, keep sharing our things wherever you do your social media.

Alpha releases

Of course the most important thing is the upcoming Alpha release to the alpha backers. This release will be exclusive to the Alpha tier backers and we’re very excited to get it into your hand and cant wait to get your feedback and help to improve the game going forward. We’re still aiming to have this done by end of the month and everything is on track to do so. Game development has lot of unexpected challenges however so if anything changes I will make sure to let you know.

We will most likely be delivering the game to you via a itch.io key – we are in the process of sorting that out. More news on this soon.

Forums

We have the forums up but I’m not convinced of how good they are going to be, especially for the King backer tier group. I suggest the best way forward to be using the forums for general discussion and bug reports and the like and then having a Slack channel for the King and Chief backers for community and chat. Please let me know what you think in the comments. I will be emailing a registration out for both soon anyway and we can again see how it goes and make adjustments along the way as needed. My main priority is having an easy and accessible channel for the Stonekickers to discuss Goblins of Elderstone and for us to chat to you about updates and designs and for you to report bugs and other issues.

Reward orders

We will start the physical reward orders over the next few weeks. The TShirt final art is still underway, we haven’t had much time to get to this as we’ve been very focused on the Alpha build. Once the build is out and we feel we can divert some time back to these we will do so. I’d like to at least get the TShirts and Posters done in February.

Names

We’ve collected all the goblin names from almost everyone (we’ll reach out to the handful that have not provided those yet) and added them to the names database (slight modifications made here and there due to size or format or copyright concerns). So you will potentially see your goblins name in a game very soon! 😀

That’s it for now. I am genuinely excited about getting the game into your hands (as well as nervous of course!) and look forward to your reactions and feedback. Keep in mind that this is ALPHA, a game in this state would never be released to public, it has lots of bugs and tonnes of stuff missing, but the core foundations are there. We still have 6 months of alpha polish to do and then once we go to steam early access mid year we will do at least 6 months more of beta polish so its a long road yet. Your feedback, support, comments, bug reports and input will all help us tremendously to deliver an amazing video game when its done.

As always thank you so much!