Gnome More War Switch Preview: Characters Spotlight

In my previous article I announced the release of Gnome More War for the Nintendo Switch. I also talked briefly about the features I added to the game that sets it apart from its mobile counterpart that was released a year prior. One of the features I touched upon was the addition of a multiplayer mode. For today's article we will go a little deeper into that, and I will introduce the new characters of the game.

I don't think I've ever introduced the original characters though, so why don't we start with them?

The main protagonist of the game is named Freija Ylden Moonault. A high-spirited teenage girl who lives a simple farm life. Freija is a cheerful and adventurous person, but is not known to take things lying down. It's what drove this war in the first place-- she will not have any of the gnomes' nonsense!

As a combatant, Freija is pretty adept with sword fighting and magecraft. For this war however, she prefers the great staff. Aside from firing the normal magic missiles, the staff can sometimes conjure arcane missiles that does twice the damage. Freija is designed to be an all-rounder and is recommended for beginners.

Freija does not tolerate stealing their chickens.

Aiding Freija in her quest to stop these gnomes are her goblin companions. At a very young age, Freija's parents disappeared, leaving her at the care of the seven goblins. For the better part of her life, these goblins stood as her guardians, friends, brothers and sisters. In the game, these goblins are not playable characters; instead they serve as the support system of the game, from tutorials, to upgrades, to actual in-game player support.

Athos is like a younger brother to Freija, but don't let his stature fool you; he's a rather talented chemist. Aside from occasionally popping up to give the starting player some tips and guide, he's responsible for dropping the power-ups and all the upgrades related to the spawn rate of the power-ups. 

Filipo stands as Freija's closest friend and acts as somewhat of a bodyguard-- much to Freija's dismay. He's always on Freija's tail, keeping her out of harms way, which is a little hard to do considering Freija's rather adventurous nature. In the game he's one of the guys who operate the machine that the player controls. He's also responsible for the power-up capacity upgrades.

Kiki is one of the 3 goblins who offers actual player support. The player can unlock her via upgrade cards. After being unlocked, she will appear in the game at certain locations depending on the map where she will snipe away at incoming gnomes with her bow and arrow. She can be further upgraded to use a fire arrow.

Kookai is another on of the 3 goblins that offers in-game support after being unlocked. She's normally unlocked as a reward after beating a certain number of waves in a particular map. When unlocked she will stand at the roof of any one of the barns and drop caltrops on the ground. Any gnome that runs into these traps will be damaged. She can be upgraded to drop bear traps instead.

The final goblin that offers in-game support and is also the most expensive one is Monom. When unlocked he will bring out a catapult that can eliminate multiple enemies with its boulder projectile. He can be upgraded to launch flaming boulders for more damage.

Monom stands as the father of the group, and is the father of Kookai.

Mosha is the mother of the group, and is the actual mother of Kookai. She's in charge of barn upgrades, such as increasing its capacity and replenishing its supplies.

And finally there's Rethos. A natural born engineer, he's responsible for all the contraptions that Freija and the team depend on in order to rally against the gnomes and their own sets of machineries. In the game he's the other guy operating the pulley machine. He's also responsible for upgrades related to the cart's armor.

The goblins are helping Freija. Mosha and Athos are not in the screen.

And now let me introduce the new playable characters!

The first additional playable character I added was Nih Ichi. He's a friend of Freija from one of her adventures and has agreed to help her drive away the gnomes. Nih is also an engineer, and prefers a blunderbuss as his weapon. The bluderbuss offers some advantages to Freija's wand, as the former has a chance to fire a projectile that splits into three, scattering and covering a larger area. The projectile themselves are slower though.

He's from Lucero, the region north of the continent. He's not knowledgeable of any magecraft whatsoever. He has a magnetic personality, especially to women, which he is fully aware of. He likes to joke around, and prefers to se the lighter side of things. He has a laid back attitude, but an absolute genius when it comes to technology.

Nih Ichi in action.

The third playable character is Scarlet Hymnia. Her origin is a bit of a mystery, as she claims to be from a faraway land called Hymnia. Her homeland had also been ravaged by gnomes and she's also in a quest to rid of them, but is having a hard time waging war with the gnomes all by herself. As fate would have it she would meet the gang where she found the strength to continue fighting.

Scarlet uses a magical sword that can shoot beams. Every once in a while her magic sword would fire a red beam that pierces through all objects. Because of the size of the beam, she requires more precision than the other characters and is designed for advanced players.

Scarlet in action.

Fun fact: I had not originally planned for the character Scarlet. It was my daughter who designed and named her. I guess she drew Scarlet in her likeness. She then insisted that I add her as a playable character. She didn't stop there though. Beyond the character design she also makes some suggestions on the game mechanics. We've got a future game developer here!

And there you have it, the main characters of the game. In the future I plan to add more playable characters for the players to enjoy. As a parting note, take a look at some character sprites:

Gnome More War will be available on the Nintendo Switch e-shop on October 26. Pre-orders will be available on October 19.

-- LJ

To contact the author, just send your e-mail to hobbigames@gmail.com

Something BIG Is About To Happen

About a year ago I bought a Nintendo Switch at the request of my daughter. While I'm more of a PC gamer, I don't mind playing on consoles even if just for the exclusives. My history with consoles started with the Nintendo Family Computer (NES for you guys in the west), and I owned at least one console from each generation since then.

The Switch is a brilliant console; you can play it on the big screen and you can bring it with you when you go outside. The joy-cons are also an interesting concept. While it has its shortcomings, the fact that you get basically 2 controllers in one purchase is very favorable to consumers. Each Switch is a multiplayer console from the get-go.

The Switch e-shop catalog is very diverse. Triple A's, indies, obvious mobile ports, games for kids and adults alike. The system has been welcoming to both hardcore and casual games and seems to blur the lines between mobile and console gaming.

So why am I talking about the Switch all of a sudden? Well it's because Gnome More War is coming to the Switch console!

I have Keybol Games to thank for this, for graciously accepting my proposal to have the game ported to the Switch so that they can publish it. Making a game for consoles has been one of my lifelong dreams.

Porting a game from mobile to the Switch isn't unheard of. After all, I've seen dozens of games on the e-shop that I could have sworn were games for iPads and Android tablets. I felt encouraged by the fact that those types of games made it through and are accepted as console games. However, I wanted to do more than just adding joy-con support for the game. I went back to the drawing table and laid out the features that I think would make the game less of a mobile port to more like a game that would be at home for the switch. The first feature I thought of was adding multiplayer.

Character Select Menu

Every Switch comes with a pair of joy-cons that you can either use paired or separately. I wanted to take advantage of this and it just so happens that the control mappings for the game fits a sideways joy-con perfectly. The next thing I had to do was come up with a couple of new characters, with more possibly added in the future. After a few weeks of coding, I have implemented a co-op mode that is not possible in the mobile version. Of course, it would take a few weeks more to polish it up. After all, simply adding another player doesn't end with plopping another sprite on the screen.

Co-op Mode

The next feature I wanted to add was basically more content. A game that will be sold at a price should feel significantly different (in a good way) than a game that is free to download. I wanted more maps, more enemy types, and to overhaul existing maps. I've always thought of adding some sort of platforms and obstacles and various means to force the player to keep moving.

I don't want to make a very long post, so if you don't mind I will stretch this out across multiple articles. I will talk about the other notable differences between the mobile version and the Switch version in my upcoming blog posts!

For now, let me just treat you with a few screenshots:

Switch Version

Mobile Version

Nintendo Switch Trailer

Gnome More war will be available for the Nintendo Switch on October 26. Pre-orders will be available on October 19. Until then please enjoy these articles I will be posting as some sort of preview.

Haven't heard of the game? Well, you wouldn't be the first! You can download the mobile version of the game for free. Just head over to the Play Store

-- LJ

To contact the author, just send your e-mail to hobbigames@gmail.com

Gnome More War Update 1.0.5

In my previous blog post I talked about my plans for the June update. Truth is, I had planned for a late June or early July release for update 1.0.5. I was so optimistic that I thought I'd be able to set aside 2-3 hours everyday to work on the update. How foolish of me.

Excuses won't get me anywhere, and I guess all that matters now is that I pulled through and the update is out now on the Google play store!

So let's break down what's included in update 1.0.5.

Analytics

While the game is continually getting downloads (especially from Vietnam, of all countries), I've always wondered why the game only got 8 ratings so far, and only 4 reviews. Looking at the leaderboards, I could tell players have gone as far as the second map, which is kinda cool. At least there's a number out there who didn't just download the game and uninstalled after a few minutes of play.

I want to know how the players approach the game. I believe that if I can identify the parts of the game that makes the players drop it, I will be able to work on them, and hopefully improve the game's retention rate. Fortunately Unity has built-in features for analytics so it didn't take much to add one to the game.

Special thanks to my wife, Jacq Gutierrez for implementing Unity Analytics. You are awesome!

Squirrel Gnome

The game is lacking variety on flying creatures, I had always thought. I had always planned on slowly adding more and more enemy types post-launch. I always wanted to add an enemy that would glide across the screen and would occasionally spit out bullets at the player. This should force the player to move around and try to dodge the incoming bullets. Say hello to the Squirrel Gnome.





Lemur Gnome

Later on in the map, Squirrel Gnomes will start calling their more dangerous and annoying cousins: Lemur Gnomes. They basically do the same amount of damage and can easily be dispatched with a single hit. The only problem is that they are faster and moves around quite a lot.






Gnome Chieftain

This one definitely took the most hours to implement. The game has no existing boss encounter, so I had to do a lot of additional coding on top of new artwork and some code refactoring. It was a lot of fun though!

Chieftain appears on waves 10, 20, and 30. For his first two appearances, the player won't be able to kill him as he will escape when his life gets very low. He also have multiple sets of attacks and has changing attack patterns depending on his life force level. I won't spoil it to the players...it's best you find out for yourself!

Eagrett Cart Skin

Defeating the Gnome Chieftain will award the player with a brand new cart skin: Eagrett. It's more of an eagrett inspired cart made of wood than an actual eagrett mount.

Aside from the highlighted features, I also updated the loot collection animation-- enemy drops are actually being shown to be collected by the player, accompanied by a sweet "collect" sound effect. The player is also now rewarded with power ups, an upgrade card, and a free cart skin up to the 20th wave. I hope it incentivises the player to keep going and explore power ups and upgrades. 

You can download the game from the Google play store.

-- LJ

To contact the author, just send your e-mail to hobbigames@gmail.com

Gnome More War June War Plans

Hey everyone!

Not a day goes by that I don't think about what more I can do to make this game more fun for me, and hopefully for you. After launching a somewhat paltry May update, I think now I have enough ideas for a more content-filled one, which I plan to release in July. This gives me the month of June to work on this-- so I must make the best of all the free time I can get this month!

Anyway, here's a snapshot of my post-it notes. Come take a look:

The game is really young, and no one has even played the 3rd map yet. Most players just played the first map, and judging by the leaderboard scores only a few has made it to the second map. I want to improve the experience for beginning players, and hopefully get them to stay. In order to achieve this, I've thought about introducing a number of things: improved rewards, more enemy types, and boss battles.

I think the game should be rewarding players as they progress through the first map. This could also work as an introduction to the game's customization features (i.e. power-ups, upgrade decks, and cart skins). Furthermore, players should be awarded with cart skins when they beat the map for the first time. For these new features I will be adding 4 new cart skins! I will be revealing the designs on my future articles.

Aside from an improved rewards system, I had always planned on slowly adding more and more enemy types post-launch. I was thinking of adding an enemy that would glide across the screen and would occasionally spit out bullets at the player. This should force the player to move around and try to dodge the incoming bullets. I would call this one the Squirrel Gnome. It's still in the early concept stage. I'll let you guys know more about it on future blog posts!

And finally I think I'm gonna start to push through with my original plan of adding bosses in the game. In case you're not aware, I had launched a crowdfunding campaign at Indiegogo in order to raise funds for the game's further development. While that didn't go as well as I had hoped, it's no reason to just stop updating the game. I already have a few concept artworks done for the bosses, but for the next month I think it's more reasonable to target just one; the others can come in the future.

I will talk more about the upcoming boss, the Gnome Chieftain, on future blog posts, so stay tuned and bookmark this page!

You can check out Gnome More War on Google Play right now!: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hobbigames.gnomemorewar

-- LJ

To contact the author, just send your e-mail to hobbigames@gmail.com

Tiny Monkey Escape

Hello everyone, it has been a while...especially to those following us exclusively through this website!

A lot has happened since last year, but I've only been able to post my updates on Facebook and Twitter. Honestly, I'm finding it hard to be a developer, designer, artist, and publicist. It's inevitable to favor one role above others; or to have a least desired one.

Anyway, why did I suddenly decide to show up again? Well, I'm excitedly working on a new game (that is not Super Tiny Monkey)...but before we can get to that I must first get you guys up to speed with a few things.

First, Hobbi Games has partnered with Play Play Fun for at least 4 games. Their role will be as our exclusive publisher for mobile and non-exclusive publisher for web games. The first project we collaborated on was Super Tiny Monkey, re-branded as Tiny Monkey Escape.

I didn't take down my previous articles on Super Tiny Monkey, because TME is basically it, with a changed title. As you know, the game is not finished yet (story wise), but we released it and hoped for a monthly update, optimistically speaking. I'm at least glad to let you guys know that we have delivered a new map (5th in total) post-release-- our first major patch.

What does our first patch do?

Well, aside from the usual bug-fixing and performance optimizations, the highlight would have to be the new map called "Island Town".

TME's map selection screen

In this map, the player will be facing new (and old) obstacles and enemies-- all bent on catching or killing our tiny friend.

Rico the poacher is still after you!

Remember the poacher on the trees in Forest Edge? They're back, but this time they'll be hiding behind trash cans, so instead of looking up, keep your eyes down this time!

Trash can snipers

A new type of obstacle; these snipers hiding inside trashcans will shoot down our unsuspecting hero. Watch out for those bullets!

Avoid the hornets

Live wires dangling must be avoided (or use the shield)

A familiar friend is also once again here to help. Beaks the Hornbill will fly our friend up in the skies to gather golden bugs. But as usual, no place is safe for Goggles and his friends.

Even pelicans are out to get you, it seems

I actually enjoyed designing this map more than the previous ones. Looking back, I could have implemented similar obstacles to the older ones, but this map just inspired me to add more and create variety.

Who let the dogs out?

This update is live and was actually put up a couple of weeks ago. I wish I had the time to get this write up done by then, but I'll do better next time. If you want to play this map, you'll have to pass the level requirements, which means you'll have to play the earlier maps first.

So get downloading now:

-- LJ

To contact the author, just send your e-mail to hobbigames@gmail.com