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Establish a thriving clan of idiosyncratic goblins to overtake hostile tribes!
Goblin Galore was an experiment in mobile session length, intervals and the time between sessions. It was created in five days at the flaregames’ internal GameJam week in 2014.
We started out with a team of 6 people (Rebekka Zorn, Nathalie Krugel, Jörg Rüppel, Rafael Van-Daele Hunt, Fabian Hanselmann and me) and brainstormed ideas and mechanics and goals for the same game concept. After two days we split up to focus on and prototype various aspects of our brainstorm results.
The concept
You are a god and you command a tribal village of primal goblins. Sometimes they even obey you. You try to get the coolest/bestest/oldest goblins by managing them well and trying to abduct the strongest goblins from other players while fighting over scarce resources.
• You’re never sure how the self-willed goblins will react to your doings and happenings in the world
• Goblins are prone to dying – if you want to keep them, care for them!
• Goblins are NEVER 100% tame.
One aspect is the active, real-time management of goblins the while playing, and some magic happening when the game is suspended. This is based on the current state of the village as the phone is turned off. Resuming, the player would see some small or big changes to his settlement. Overpopulation when suspended? come back to a much smaller population because everyone starved.
Think of Tamagotchi, but with a whole population instead of just one thing.
The prototype
Our team focused on the real-time management of goblins. We prototyped a game system where you have to constantly keep various resources (population, food, strength, etc) in balance. The balance is supposed to topple over into extremes without the player’s constant intervention.
Your goal: Obliterate the blue enemy tribe.
Game Mechanics
Goblins
Goblins have two needs: Health & Rage.
• Health decreases with time (it’s hunger) and increases when a goblin eats food.
• Rage increases constantly; it decreases with sexy time and brawling. Just like in real life.
• High rage makes goblins from the same tribe punch each other.
Goblins come in three classes and can be switched by tapping on them.
• Breeder: Looks for mating partners when happy (big eyes, tongue out) to “spawn” more goblins.
• Tinker: Can be sacrificed to spawn a worm hole. He wears a construction helmet because that’s what tribal engineers do.
• Brawler: Constantly looks for a fight, preferably with goblins from the other tribe. Antler Helmet.
You can drag and drop your own goblins to move them.
Additional mechanics
• Worm holes eat goblins and spit out food. If a worm hole eats too much goblin, it multiplies.
• Food will spoil if it’s laying around for too long. Spoiled food will kill goblins.
• When a goblin dies in a fight or from hunger, others will throw him into worm holes to make food.
• A goblin looking for food is VERY aggressive and attacks any friend or foe in his path to delicious omnom.
• If you drop a brawler onto a worm hole, he might be able to kill the worm.
• Drop a happy goblin onto another happy goblin and they will pop out a child instantly. It’s that simple.