#goblinfriday
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dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

Decided to do a test run through first two scenarios to find if any recent work broke any old content, plus noted any UX things that annoyed me.

Figured the first End Turn in the tutorial needed a bouncy arrow (this one is a bit too insistent, I did pull it back!):
July 31, 2026 at 4:27 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

I spent way too much time messing with shaders and (re-)learning how the heck to code the stupid things in order to implement better fog.

This is what it looks like, more or less:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nT_...

I am bad at video capture. Will (re-)learn it, too, someday.
goblin game shader fog
YouTube video by David Baumgart
www.youtube.com
April 24, 2026 at 6:32 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
#GoblinFriday !!

Today we're being BORING.

I'm setting up to allow a 'profile' model of saving gamestate so a player's run through a scenario stores meta-scenario data that can change later scenarios accordingly.

But I need to redo save/load handling and all save/load related UI. So, yep.
An exciting menu for loading an existing profile or creating a NEW goblin profile! Enter your profile name and hit cancel or done!!!!! (This doesn't work yet for various reasons, but I am looking forward? to doing text validation somehow to ensure that people don't enter really dumb things that break the save/load system.)
September 25, 2026 at 8:31 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

Today's bug hunt: Kreeee did not know that Kreeee was Kreeee.

(I wasn't storing a character's key in their memory. To call a char's memory you need the key: redundant! Nope: you can check #$SELF.key and "self" is replaced w/ active goblin. So $kreeee.key == kreeee was failing.)
Look at this silly goblin! He didn't even know he was him. Which is pretty fitting, all things considered.
September 4, 2026 at 2:19 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

Put together some test builds, then dove into 1. making the game camera less terrible, which led me to 2. redoing a portion of player turn time-logic handling (related to camera movement) (ooof).

Nothing fun to show for a bit except... some in-progress art for "the high road"!
Background art for my goblin game - a ruined roadway crossing bridges between tall seaside rocks with a cliffy coastline in the distance.
August 14, 2026 at 11:49 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #goblinfriday!

Diving back in after some rather pernicious bugs (Goblins love bugs, and love to hide bugs), and... ugh, finally setting up a github repo.

After being exposed to a decent git UI, my dumb-dumb system of backing up the dev folder manually has been confirmed as too annoying.
A screenshot of my goblin game with FOUR active goblins. Two of them are at Mudcrab Beach, and have a variety of (test) actions they can do. These goblins have hidden many bugs from me. Can I find them all today? Probably not.
May 8, 2026 at 2:21 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

Finished most Troll Bridge dialog. Finnicky bits remain; I had? to add a null memory type for reasons.

Copying a memory that doesn't exist should make it "false" - but not just a bool. So this is a universal false for almost all conditionals (vs. int, float, string, bool).
Hm.
Screenshot of my goblin game, just a bunch of goblins in the Goblin Swamp ready to move into the world and cause KAOS. I added shadows under the tokens. That's all I wanted to show off here.
July 24, 2026 at 7:45 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

I finally found the MSDF button & I'm trying to get my fonts in order, again. Tried some out (img):

1. goofy noir/steampunk game
2. way, way too twee
3. this might just be the one. A touch of whimsy + easy reading.
4. too serious
5. what I've been using all along, a little dry
A screenshot of cropped dialog boxes comparing various fonts for my goblin game. They're all from Google Fonts. 1. Oldenburg 2. Sour Gummy 3. Fresca 4. Gelasio 5. Lato
April 17, 2026 at 12:40 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
It is #GoblinFriday !

Observation: Calling things dumb goblin names like "sneek", "oooos" and "kreeee" is funny but also annoying when I keep getting string mismatches due to getting number of letters wrong, or spelling correct.

Now, god help me, I am writing a node-map navigation algorithm...
September 11, 2026 at 9:08 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

Still stuck in save/load revision boringland. Almost done!

Profiles now store completed scenario keys, scenarios store what other scenarios are required to unlock them, and it all works in the UI.

Next: just overhaul the in-game save/load modal menu to use the profile model!
Here we see that the Dave2 profile has completed "Wormsy Meets A Spirit"! ... actually, this is before it successfully unlocked "The Small Escape", but trust me bro, it totally works now. Here, the "Goblin Dave" profile has NOT completed "Wormsy Meets A Spirit", so it is disabled. The tooltip tells you what scenario you need to complete in order to unlock the scenario. ("Open World For Goblinning" is unlocked by being in dev mode, by the way.) And man, if you haven't done this sort of thing before, you'd be shocked at how much jostling data from various sources it takes to make this all play together happily.
October 2, 2026 at 8:01 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
It is #GoblinFriday!

Diving (back) into the third scenario "The Small Escape". It starts w/ Wormsy escaping from a caged wagon. Or not.

I'm diving in & fixing anything broken, slightly broken, or annoying.

Example: big gob of weird execution order/timing problems at game start (more in alt text).
Here's a bit of dialog where Wormsy is escaping with the help of a friendly crow. (I see crows and goblins as potential allies, provided the goblins are willing to give up some number of snax and/or shinies.) Note also: the objectives widget on the right side has an expand/collapse button (WHICH WORKS). To explain the significance of this dialog, which is quite old: I changed how a lot of dialog script commands and basic timing things work ie. how a camera moves and how the game waits for it to finish, or not, before executing more commands. So when I loaded up scenario 2 (this one) I found that telling the camera to spend 2 seconds panning to Wormsy wasn't working - it'd move in about .3 seconds then fire the next thing. Turns out the time wasn't being used *at all*. Fixed that, then: the map was pitch black until *after* the camera finished moving. What? It turns out the map fog wasn't updated until the next step of game start. Fixed that. Then: no fog at all, no map connections drawn 'til the camera got to Wormsy. I was calling the functions to update map fog and refresh map connection visuals too late in game start. Fixed it. Then: opening the dialog flashed the background then faded quickly to black. Weird! Well- this is actually a dev command I set up, but I'd like to be able to *start* the dialog with a black background because it involves Wormsy waking up from unconsciousness with no idea where she is, so it fits to have the black fade to the background art after a few lines of text. So: made it so dialog BG color can be set from outside of dialog mode. And so on and so on like this. Just lots of little fixes and adjustments. (I am, of course, going to have to go back and fix the start of the other scenarios because they were janked together using slightly broken commands that now work correctly. Such is game dev!)
March 6, 2026 at 8:08 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

Sick this week, so brain work less good.
New dice roll widget (kinda) works, but needs much effort.

Data is passed through a LOT of places before turning into a roll: csv to rulesDictionary to ruleScript to ruleOption to responseButton to dialogBlock to diceRollWidget, oof.
A screenshot of my new unified dice roll widget working in-game. The key thing here is it's one class that drives ALL dice rolls (rather than unique code per type of roll). The dataset that ends up telling this widget how to look and act is also used for the dialog buttons, their tooltips, and even how dialog rules are executed - and has to be passed down a LONG chain of classes to finally arrive at actually rolling the dice. The problem is I also had semi-unique data structures for each type of roll, built to suit each individual type of dice roll. And: ugggh. So what I'm doing: putting everything into one simple data structure that is shared between all buttons, tooltips, and dice rolls so they're all pulling from the same source of truth. (This is not a great thing to do while sick, but watch me do it! I have coffee! It'll be FINE!)
April 3, 2026 at 6:28 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

Did a trawl through my Jira TODO board and shoved all the tiny bugs + polish tickets to one side so I could focus more on mechanics & content to build up a feeling for the 'critical mass' of the gameplay.

Here, a first look w/ sketchy background, at the Hilltop Tombs area.
A screenshot form my goblin game showing Bennybog the goblin first entering the "Hilltop Tombs" location. The background is extremely sketchy, but shows some windswept hills with piles of stones that enter into the underground. There's a slightly creepy description implying that dead spirits protect the place. Naturally these tombs contain neat items (and are completely a reference to the Tolkeinverse barrow downs), so go here if you need powerful magical items - or simply lots of Shinies. Will there be consequences like vengeful spirits and wights and curses? Who can say! Goblins don't worry about such things. Much.
May 22, 2026 at 6:17 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

I intended to work on the *Wizard Tower* location, but fell into fixing a list of annoying bugs.

The good news is: they're fixed!

Best bug: resource gains were limited by the pool of 'floating icons' I initialized at game start, just 20. Any gain over was lost to the aether.
A screenshot from my goblin game which shows a test dialog where Bennybog the goblin is rolling to gain lots of "snax" resource. He rolled and got 27 snax, and you can see a bunch of little turkey leg icons flying from the bottom of the dialog box over toward the resource display. Before fixing this, only 20 icons at a time could appear, and only 20 of whatever resource would ever actually make it into the player's resource pool. I do not wish to elaborate on the dumb code reasons for this, but I will (probably) fix various underlying issues. In the meantime, I just increased the floaty pool to 64.
June 5, 2026 at 5:01 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #goblinfriday!

Yes, it's a hashtag. I'm good at social media.

Having done a dev build, I'm digging through Jira tickets and figuring out what's now irrelevant, what comes next, and what I need to re?design.

Pictured: it took me a _few_ minutes to figure out what past me was thinking here.
A screenshot of my Jira page which shows an item "make BubbleZone game map element". It took me quite a while to figure out what the heck past me was talking about here, then it came to me: as a first-take on adding animated elements to the world map, I want to be able to define an Area (that's a Godot object that can be a polygon, an ellipse, a capsule, etc) in which animated bubbles appear out of liquid and pop -- in this case used for the swamp part of the map to liven it up a bit. Not super high priority, but I still do want this. I'll write an actual description so I don't forget what this means again.
February 27, 2026 at 2:41 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday !

Redid turn handling logic which is Not Interesting (well, it is, but. Moved from using C# async to FSM structure that gave me more discrete control), but then indulged in a tiny bit of work on some of the creepy bits on the eastern side of the map. (Deets in alt text!)
How do you make a location more interesting? Give it a deep implied history! As I develop the setting of this game, I'm finding what I need to do is 1. make everywhere have something very old and unknown have once been there. And whatever that is will probably never really be fully explored; it draws an intentional void which is filled with implication and imagination. And 2. animate the inanimate! To goblins, the landscape itself, the forces of nature are animate beings with feelings and grudges and *moods*. (Which makes for a more evocative setting, because in a fantasy world, a cliff or mountain can indeed be actively malevolent! Or merely hungry... for goblins.) Yeah, you're going to want to be careful here.
August 28, 2026 at 10:28 PM
someidiotgames.bsky.social
Happy Goblin Friday!
Do you know how many goblins are in Wizard's Loot? It's a few. More than some. Less than plenty.
Art: @go_rillafish
Fun Fact: Mia [the artist] and I [idiot] once got really drunk and entered G O B L I N M O D E and she suplexed me.
#goblinfriday
May 22, 2026 at 8:54 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #goblinFriday!

Sorting out the Troll Bridge. Been here a while, I know - but it's helping debug dialog/rules logic.

You can cross by offering 1d6 snax to the troll. If the troll rolls higher than your snax, the troll just eats them and you can't cross. It wasn't hitting the fail state! 1/2
Dialog screen from my goblin game. Here, Bennybog is attempting to offer the Troll snax to cross the Troll Bridge. Bennybog only had 1 snax, so the troll would have to roll a 1 to accept this offering. Unfortunately, the Troll rolled a 2 and just ate Bennybog's 1 snax anyway. Fortunately for Bennybog, this still hit the "success" outcome for some reason. What the heck is going on??? Here's a look at the dialog rules logic behind the scene. ... Unfortunately the full condition for the fail state is cut off (sorry!), but it is: $scenario.lastResourcesRollBlockChangeAbs > $snax_just_had What's notable here is I'm comparing two int 'memories' stored by the dialog system referenced by string 'keys', and it turned out to be the root of the problem.
July 10, 2026 at 3:02 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
#GoblinFriday!

Okay, so making dice contests (pictured) work wasn't hard, nor was building out tooltips.

The "cool" thing today is hunting down rules condition error(s).

Part 1: At some point I commented out the conditional token parser so everything got set to "equals".
Part 2: another thing???
A screenshot of my goblin game! This is an example "dice contest" where Bennybog has a roll against Jorten. This is working great and has nice tooltips. There's a bunch of extra padding at the bottom of the widget that I didn't notice 'til I started posting this - it's due to the minimum height of the widget being set to the old value for the old layout. This layout has less junk, so it can take up less vertical space. That's good!
April 10, 2026 at 7:54 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #goblinFriday!

Working on Scenario 2: "The Small Escape", where the game becomes a lot more freeform after some linear tutorial scenarios.

Need to write a TON of content for locations - much of the 'meat' of the game is random events hit while running around.
(more in alt text for images.)
This is how the map for Scenario 2 starts, more or less. In the upper left are tokens for Jorten the Fighter and Kreeee the Goblin - Kreeee has been captured (note the bars on his hotbar element in the lower left) and Jorten's goal is to sell Kreeee before Wormsy can help him escape. Wormsy, meanwhile, is on the right side of the map, across the river. Based on decisions at the start of the scenario, she can appear anywhere between the Goblin Swamp (lower right, bushy trees) and the Tavern itself, where Kreeee is. Crossing the bridges requires being sneaky, clever, or having lots of resources. And Wormsy starts with *nothing* on this map, so basically the player has to figure out the basic mechanics of exploring locations and acquiring resources in order to solve the problem presented by the map in order to fulfill their objective(s). Like I said: open-ended. _However_ this requires that all those circles have something interesting to do in them! That's a lot of scripting and dialog to write, but: it'll pay off, because once I have something there, they'll be useful for every other scenario I make in the game. This shows off how the custom CSV scripting system works to set up Scenario 2. Starsector modders will recognize this, some with horror, as essentially a copy of Starsector's rules.csv system. And yeah, I coded my own version of it! Because I'm already using it almost every day to create content for Starsector; my brain thinks in it now. Anyway, just reading through as plain text should tell you more or less what is happening there: setting up the map, the player resources, and character in-play, and the basic properties of the scenario. In the second row the game actually starts, with the "StartScenario" trigger. The script block, the next column over, executes each script in order from top to bottom and in my implementation it is possible to add time delays, or a condition to fulfill, before firing the next line of the script. SetBoardModeTo has a default delay that waits for UI elements to fade in and out before proceeding (0.3 seconds, if I recall correctly.) CameraPanToEntity will pause execution until its at the target position. Wait, of course, simply holds a position for the given number of seconds. (And so on.) -- Because the game is turn-based, not real-time, I can safely script on-map sequences like this using the rules.csv system. The possibilities are pretty wild, but for now it's all pretty simple "move camera here, pause meaningfully, then open a dialog" type stuff. Here's my token worksheet. I think I've showed this off before, but here I've added a bit more to it - at first I experimented with more naturalistic renders of characters, then figured it'd be better to make them more symbolic, like little carvings on an ancient chess set. This signals to players the board game-like interaction metaphor of the game map.
March 20, 2026 at 6:01 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

I have 4 unique layouts & classes for rolling dice in slightly different ways. I need to unify them into one widget + class that handles all dice rolls so I can have shared UX & effects.
AND add exploding dice!

Here's the base template so far, just need to code... everything.
A base template for a simplified, and unified, dice rolling widget. It will handle all of the different ways the player rolls dice in the game, and it'll use a simplified layout that offloads extra data into informative tooltips. A classic coding situation: It's not that this is hard, it's just work I've avoided doing. And now that I have all the ways dice rolling works more-or-less coded out already, I just need to pull all of that one-off code into a unified Thingy that is adaptable enough to cover each case. And this shouldn't be hard, they're not that radically different. And what I gain: in the future, as I iterate effects and UX, and fix bugs, and improve the art, it'll all happen *in one place* rather than having to update everything in four different places. Now, um, I just need to do it. I'll get back to work.
March 27, 2026 at 3:54 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

Added interactions to another area today: the Windy Path

(I love the double meaning. Could actually draw it to be windier though, come to think of it.)

This location is a transition zone meant to be a moderately dangerous/costly place to linger. Encounters reflect this.
Screenshot of a dialog encounter from my goblin game. This is the default long description you get when you first enter this location, ever. I think maybe I'll add a location name title drop to emphasize that this is supposed to be a "congratulations! you found a new place!" moment. Screenshot of a dialog encounter from my goblin game. Here, Wormsy has a bad encounter trying to hide from crows. (Crow-goblin relations will be an important factor in this game. And making crows friendly? That will cost you lots of shinies, my friend, because there's little that crows love more than shinies.) Screenshot of a dialog encounter from my goblin game. Here, Eyeball has run into an encounter with not just high winds, but a Gale Spirit of some kind. Luckily she's *very* skillful at dealing with spirits, so can easily talk this one down. There are a few other ways to deal with the windstorm, and failing them comes with great risks considering the high altitude... Screenshot of a dialog encounter from my goblin game. Eyeball is successful! This will give her more of the Oooos resource that will allow her to call upon spirits and their boons. Note: only 6 dice in the top row! It should max out at 7. I have some work to do...
May 29, 2026 at 3:58 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
#GoblinFriday!

Pretty scattershot today: did some dialog scripting fixes/features, started Spirit Invocation UI v2 (integrating it into current character info panel, see shot 1), and going to clean up some more of Scenario 2's intro dialog... then maybe adding actual new encounters to the map???
Character info panel. Not great, not terrible. The new part is the left section with the "Will-o'-the-wisp" placeholder - this will show all the spirits that the goblin knows about, and show what boons that spirit may grant. I'd like to have this all be a bit more wishy-washy so it feels like ~*~* magic *~*~* and less a grid of buttons, but I'll worry more about all of that in a later pass. In the short term: I just need to get this working. Which I won't do today, but I've revised the design doc slightly and got the placeholder layout done. Just, ya'know, it needs all the code now. A peek into Jira tickets. Under "testing" there are mostly minor script things to fix, plus a couple bugs. The "$profile" item is interesting because that's me setting up the whole meta-game of the "campaign" and save system (which I'll have to revise). Basically: you get a "profile" and all progress is saved there. Whether each scenario has been played, and what the end result(s) was/were can be stored. This will become important in later scenarios! Ie. at the end of Scenario 1, Wormsy can either be caught by hoomans or she can escape from them. This will change the start of Scenario 2. I like the idea of tracking *every separate ending* that's been achieved for a scenario, and allow the player to choose which one is "true" in order to manipulate the start of further scenarios. This will, of course, be excused by the fact of Goblin Chaos Magic. The key thing about Goblin Chaos Magic is that while they appear to the common observer to lose almost all the time, they can gradually construct a timeline in which they *don't* lose. Then they win. So everything thinks goblins are terrible, but it's all a matter of perspective. *taps side of head*
March 13, 2026 at 6:18 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

Quiet day before a couple weeks off, so going through old locations to touch-up events and add new ones, mostly Dark Forest and Troll Bridge related (see shots).

Found obscure bugs to fix (goblins love these).

And the game camera is annoying me so might move up redoing it.
The extremely complex start dialog for the Troll Bridge crossing sequence. This is meant to be a bit easy in relative terms, with reasonable options for almost all character types so it can be the 'best' way for goblins to get from one side of the map to the other. If you just sit at one end or the other there will be a few random events that won't give any particular risk or gains - it provides a good neutral ground to catch your breath on your way to somewhere more useful. Unless, of course, you somehow truly piss off the trolls. I haven't figured out what that looks like, but you have to account for all possibilities with goblins... There are a couple interesting repeatable encounters you can only discover if you're lost (as in, have the Lost status) in the Dark Forest. The theme here is lost secrets, so _of course_ you have to be able to discover some of them. And is this going to be a riff on Old Man Willow? - Kinda! Maybe also that tree in Heroes of Might and Magic where you bury 30 gems at its base to get a level-up... You can find mushrooms. Did you know you shouldn't eat every mushroom you find in the forest, especially those you can't identify? Bennybog doesn't. This is a case where a character has rolled against his own stat (Mouth vs. Smarts) and lost, forcing him into eating *every mushroom*. (I'll tell you now, Bennybog absolutely picks up a couple bad status effects from doing this.)
June 19, 2026 at 8:28 PM
dgbaumgart.bsky.social
Happy #GoblinFriday!

Short day- more camping to do!

Set up the "Haunted Pines" location - a foreboding, hostile area which will have lots of spirit interactions.

Fixed annoying UI movement tweening interrupt error for certain buttons!

Also: a coconut test shows the spirit affinity notification.
A screenshot of my goblin game, showing a dialog panel with a description of the Haunted Pines location. This is meant to be another hostile area that discourages lingering unless a goblin is very well prepared to deal with hostile spirits and extreme weather. It's on the right side of the map, where there is less hooman "civilization" and more hidden treasures - and powerful, ancient things that perhaps don't wish to be awoken. The plan is you go this way if you need to find some good tools to use against the encroaching hoomans - but such a quest won't be easy! A screenshot of dialog from my Goblin game. Now THIS is pure test dialog, hitting a bunch of different game systems in succession: applying a negative status effect that halts movement, giving the goblin a new item (a coconut), and giving the Goblin affinity for a spirit. The coconut was to test if my item save/load code was working correctly because I thought it was double-adding the coconut item. I think this was a false report and I just ran the dialog twice, because this time it seemed to work correctly. As for the spirit affinity: this is used after the Goblin has done something (via the narrative dialog) that gives them affinity for a spirit. The goblin may then draw upon powers granted by that spirit by using their Ghosties stat and spending the Oooos resource. Each spirit has "domains" they can affect, and spirits can have overlapping domains. These are used as tags within the narrative dialogs - so, for instance, a dialog can change based on if a goblin can call upon a spirit with the MEMORY domain ie. if they get lost in the woods this spirit can help them remember the way back out.
June 12, 2026 at 1:52 PM