Goblin 9-5

Goblin 9-5 was a project I did systems design on for a semester in my third year of college. The project wasn't particularly successful and the game never fully came to fruition however it served as a significant learning experience for me, emphasizing the importance of setting up a solid foundation and defining all of the steps of a game loop as early as possible in a project. 

Goblin 9-5 is an isometric two player cooperative game in which players control two goblins who must rearm and replace traps in a dungeon under a strict time limit. players can only carry one item at a time and must throw items (or the other player) over walls, tripwires, and pits to reduce the time spent navigating the dungeon in order to complete all the objectives. 

Goblin 9-5 suffered from a lack of planning early on that handicapped our development and lead to the project not taking basic shape until the second half of the semester after an extended design meeting where we outlined many unclear aspects of the game. As a result we were very late to make a true functional prototype for the game and struggled to complete the polish and implementation required to make the game fun. 

After this project I shifted my priorities to really emphasize getting a functional core loop implemented into projects as soon as possible even at the expense of immediate polish, in order to get players testing the game as soon as possible to reveal issues.