Notes from the workbench. Progress updates, tinkering reports, and the occasional existential crisis.
A modern game costs two hundred million dollars and crashes on the title screen. A goblin on process bloat, pass-the-buck, and an industry that cares more about developer experience than players.
PATIENCE: █░░░░░░░░░ DEPLETED
Read full dispatch →The Gobs & Gears score is six phase-locked layers by Megahammer Studios that shift as your factory grows. How adaptive music actually works, and why the reverb tail is the clever part.
INTENSITY: ████████░░ CLIMBING
Read full dispatch →The Gobs & Gears demo is out on Steam, free, right now. You start with one plot and a lot of fog and dig a dead factory back out of it, all the way through the end of crafting Tier 2. Here's what you get, and the three things I'd like you to do about it.
DEMO: ██████████ SHIPPED
Read full dispatch →Gobs & Gears started life as Loot Route, a single-screen incremental. The folder on my hard drive is still called that, and it's the only part of the plan that survived. Twenty-seven building types, a procedurally generated world, a king with twelve moods and a voice made of consonants later, here's what happened, and why letting a game become what it wants beats chasing a genre.
ORIGINAL SCOPE: ██████████ LONG GONE
Read full dispatch →Seven years building my own engine from scratch, in C, nights and weekends. Everyone has an opinion about that. Here's why I did it anyway: because the mess is mine, and nobody can send me an invoice for it, change the licence on it, or take it away.
ALTITUDE: ███████░░░ STILL CLIMBING
Read full dispatch →It's official, GOBLINTEK exists, and Gobs & Gears is on the workbench: a goblin factory builder about wiring the Gob King's bomb factory back together for one BIG BOOM. There's a free demo, a Steam page hungry for wishlists, and enough caffeine to keep the boilers motoring. Let's see where this goes.
HYPE: ██████████ BOILER CRITICAL
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