Goblin Camp 0.15

It's once again time for a new version of Goblin Camp! Go download it from goblincamp.com. Right now, the blog post can wait.

Once upon a time, Goblin Camp looked like this:


These days, it looks like this:


There's been quite a lot of effort put in the tile support, and community has produced a number of tilesets for your enjoyment. And if, like me, you prefer kicking it old school, ASCII mode is still there for ya.



The new version, naturally, comes with new features along with improvements to existing ones. The feature you're likely to notice first is seasons. Come winter, ground gets covered in snow and the river freezes over.



And when spring comes around the ice melts, leaving behind drifting ice floes.



Also pictured: water pollution spreading from your camp.

As everyone familiar with the game knows, the world of Goblin Camp is dangerous, and your fragile camp is surrounded by monsters. In previous versions all they wanted was to kill your people. This is no longer true in 0.15: now some of them just want to steal your stuff, and some, like the pair of cyclopes here, want to destroy the results of your hard work by trampling your camp to the ground.



Luckily, you aren't completely on your own. Some monsters, like the troll represented by 'T' to the left of the cyclopes, may choose to join your camp and fight alongside your orcs. Orcs have also made some military innovations, like battlements that allow them to fire arrows over walls, as demonstrated here to some pyromaniac imps.



And if imps do succeed in setting your camp on fire, goblins have gotten a lot better at firefighting.

The new defenses come in handy, because, as if the monsters weren't bad enough, your so called 'civilized' neighbors are also getting in on the action. If your camp becomes successful enough, jealous humans send entire armies to crush you.



And this time around, the game keeps track of everything you do. Want to know just how many poor goblins have died along the way? Just check the statistics.



All this, and more, awaits you a mere mouse click away. Just go download the game already!

Bog iron in Goblin Camp

Okay, so Blogger tells me that over the last few weeks, several people have come to my blog by Googling for "goblin camp bog iron". In case you're doing this because you're wondering how to gather bog iron, here's what you do:

1. Designate an area of bog (Orders -> Designate bog for iron)

2. Go to the Territory menu and mark the bog you've just designated as part of your territory

3. Designate a stockpile to receive Metal ore

4. Order up some bog iron in the Stock Manager

Your goblins will start collecting iron. I imagine the trouble is caused by phase 2, which is undocumented.

Hope that helps!

**

If you need more pointers to get your Goblin Camp going, there's a video tutorial series on YouTube.









That should get you started!

Goblin Camp 0.14 out!

The new version of Goblin Camp is out! Get it at goblincamp.com. I had a go at it over the weekend.

Here's a lovely view of Camp Sixteen...



...just before imps attack from the charcoal burning clamp and set it on fire.



It wasn't so bad, actually. I only lost 5 orcs and 8 goblins. That is, until a swarm of killer bees and another bunch of imps showed up, and set everything on fire again.



At the end of the day, I'm down to five orcs and 16 goblins. Any way you look at it, it's way too few guys to defend a camp this size, which is conveniently proven true by two packs of starving wolves and, yes, a third group of imps. Now my camp is on fire and overrun with wolves.



After a party of kobold raiders also pays us a visit, I'm left with two orcs and six goblins, and a wrecked camp.



Having gone from a total population of 50 to eight, and with the camp in ruins, I might as well quit. It's hopeless.

Or is it?



Incredibly enough, I've managed to get the camp cleared up somewhat. At best, I had four orcs and over a dozen goblins! A fired golem later, the orcs were down to one and the goblins had taken a beating, but it looked like I might get this thing up and running again.

Until the imps showed up.



And it was all over.

**

No matter; let's try again. Here's Camp Seventeen:



And just as I was getting it up and running, guess who waltzes right in?



And this is what happened.



Goblin Camp. Harsh, but fun.

Camp Five

Here's a composite image of my fifth Goblin Camp camp:

Population around one hundred; click on the picture for a closer look. You can see some of the main features of the camp pretty well in this large-scale image. Your orcs and goblins muddy up the ground and leave copious amounts of filth behind; you can see the main thoroughfares outlined in brown, as well as the brown piles of filth at the south and west gates, because of the permanent guard stationed there. And then there is, of course, the giant pile of filth that is the main camp, slowly spreading outward and seeping into the river.

For security, I've gone with a concentric layout of palisades and moats. There are gates and bridges only at certain points, which channels incoming attackers there, to be dealt with by my guards. The other security risks are the improvements that occasionally spawn monsters; ants will attack from your stone quarry, golems from the clay pit and so on. You can see all of these improvements just south of the south gate, meaning that mostly (mostly) the guards at my south gate deal with the bad guys before they get into my camp.

Another notable feature are the huge lumber yards that dominate the outer two circuits of the camp. The game is set in a forest, and one ends up cutting down quite a few trees to make way for moats, workshops, stockpiles and so on. Of course, you could just leave the logs lying around, but I like my huge lumberyards.

**

Now that I have a camp this size, I thought I might weigh in on some problems I've read about people having with Goblin Camp. For starters, several people have complained that their camps get bogged down with interminable hauling jobs, especially of seeds. If you take a look at my camp here, you may notice that the fields aren't very large at all. That's because in my experience, it's very easy to destroy the efficiency of your camp through one simple expedient: overfarming.

Starvation is a constant threat early in the game, so I see the appeal of planting as many crops as possible. The problem is that the yields in the game are quite generous: bloodberries IIRC 5:1 and nightbloom trees 4:1, and with very little wastage. In 0.13, you start with 30 bloodberry seeds. Plant all of them, and by next fall you have 150. Another year of maximum bloodberry farming? 750. And so on. See where the endless seed hauling jobs come from? The size of the fields needs to grow relative to the size of the population in the camp. It's not that hard; as you might guess from the name, this is my fifth camp, and because I got the farming right from the get-go, I never had a problem with starvation.

The other point is that the day-to-day operation of a goblin camp is messy in many ways. Seeds and other things just end up lying around and if you're anal-retentive, they need to be cleaned up into their appropriate stockpiles. Another essential thing is to give your goblins time to do that. If they're constantly running around on errands and constructions jobs, the hauling jobs are going to spiral out of control because nobody's doing them. So take a break every now and then and let your goblins clean up the camp. Even with that camp, I've managed to get my jobs list down to one screen.

Managing your job queue is a question of resource management, and that is, after all, the point of the game.

Let's play Goblin Camp!

As it happens, Minecraft doesn't actually run on my personal laptop, because my display drivers are just that old. It's a good thing, really, as it means I have to do something other than just play Minecraft. These days, that other is Goblin Camp.

Now, if that looks like a totally incomprehensible blob of ASCII art, it's because it is. Never fear; I'll walk you through it.

**

Goblin Camp is an opensource indie game developed by some goon. You can get it on the website here, and we impartially reviewed an earlier version here. This is version 0.13.

As that goon has it, Goblin Camp is a roguelike citybuilder. Your mission is to build and manage, well, a goblin camp in the wilderness. This is what you start with:

The blue "o"s are orcs, and the grey "g"s goblins. Using your initial population and the tools you're given, your job is to transform this forest clearing into a thriving camp.

The first steps are to place some stockpiles and farm plots. Everything you gather and produce in the game is placed in stockpiles, and crops are grown on farm plots. In the picture below, the three brown rectangles are my farm plots, and the larger rectangles are stockpiles.

Placing stockpiles and farm plots is easy; select either one from the Build menu and paint them onto the map by click-dragging.

When you click on a stockpile, it opens a window where you control what kind of goods get placed in the stockpile:

Similarly, on a farm plot you toggle what kinds of crops get planted in the plot. Crops are planted in spring and harvested in the autumn.

After placing stockpiles and farm plots, it's time to get building! The basic building material in Goblin Camp is wood, which comes from trees:

Getting your goblins to chop down trees is as easy as anything. All the commands in the game are simply accessible through a right-click menu:

There, simply select "Orders" and "Designate trees":

And select an area.

The trees in that area will be tagged for cutting if and when wood is required.

You manage your inventory through the Stock Manager, seen here:

We're going to need some logs to build a saw pit, so we just order up logs in the Stock Manager.

Building a workshop is as easy as anything else: select the building in the Build menu and place it on the map.

Alas, I can't place the saw pit yet because I don't have any logs. Don't worry; Koppak the goblin is here to fix that problem!

You can see what your orcs and goblins get up to in the Jobs screen. The tasks are color-coded for priority, with green being highest and red lowest.

The last step to getting your camp up and running is to place the spawning pool. If you look closely at the above screenshot, you can see some brown tildes (~) scattered around the camp. Those, dear readers, are filth. In this game, goblins and orcs reproduce via the good offices of the spawning pool: goblins dump filth and corpses in the spawning pool, and orcs and goblins crawl out. As more filth and corpses are dumped in, the pool expands.

**

Once you've placed your spawning pool, you sort of start playing and forget that you were supposed to be making a blog post. And before you know it, the camp looks like this:

Oops.

One of the cardinal design principles of Goblin Camp is that as your camp gets more complex and you're able to do more things, it also gets more dangerous. The grey area on the map is exposed rock, and the square in it is my stone quarry. All the carnage around it is a result of the quarry's twofold nature. On the one hand, it gets you stone, which is handy for a lot of things; on the other hand, soldier ants occasionally attack from the quarry.

Above, I've added more hazard-producing constructions next to the quarry: a charcoal burning clamp and clay pit. You can see how that's worked out from the blood spattered all over them.

Here's another innovation: a pontoon bridge. There's a bog on the other side of the river, and I've sent my goblins to gather bog iron from it. The bridge is there to speed up the trip.

As you can see, the camp gets pretty muddy, so I've built duckboards through it; they're the brown double exclamation mark. Without duckboards, the interior of your camp will fast become unnavigable. When you've placed some duckboards, you again forget that you're meant to be writing a blog post, and so don't have any more screenshots.

**

As I've said, this is still version 0.13. Most of the features that goon is planning for his game aren't there yet, so at the moment it really is just a sort of ASCII Simcity with orcs. One big warning, though: it's a fun ASCII Simcity with orcs. This thing is eating up my leisure time like, well, Minecraft.

If you're at all interested in this kind of game, go check it out. It's an open source project and there are functioning forums, so if you get into it, you can get involved with the development. I have some faith this game might be going places, but even if it doesn't, it's fun right now.

Character Assasination

Some of the gamers out there may remember an ambitious "roguelike" game called Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, developed by Tarn Adams from 2000 to 2005.



In 2002 he started working on a sequel, Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress, and has worked exclusively on it since 2006. In the past eight years Dwarf Fortress has acquired impressive depth and list of features while still officially remaining in alpha stage. The game has also attracted a number of dedicated followers, exited at the prospect that it will "Drag the world out of the Dark age of Gaming kicking and screaming!"

Now it seems some Goon has decided to create a clone of Dwarf Fortress, called "Goblin Camp", in a move which has been perceived as a personal attack on Mr. Adams.

Goblin Camp is, not surprisingly, quite similar to Dwarf Fortress, as this screenshot demonstrates:



This picture shows a very early camp with a general stockpile for goods, a small farm for growing Bloodberries, a small workshop with an orc working in it, and a protective fence. There's not much else to the game yet, and it is this general dearth of features and lack of polish in a game in beta stage (remember, DF is still in alpha after eight years!) that has led some commentators to already write the game off.

Though Goblin Camp is ultimately developed by some Goon, he has opened the source code, and accepts additions and improvements from volunteer contributors. So far he has had programmers suggesting rewriting the whole thing, preferably in some other programming language, while some other suggestions for features are, well... see for yourself.



Here we see a more advanced camp with more stockpiles, more extensive fence, a bakery and a brewery. Bakery turns berries into pies, and brewery turns berries into wine.

Notice the brown '~' and '#' symbols near the left edge of the picture. They represent different depths of pools of filth; a great example of features internet forums can collectively come up with!

After your camp has reached this state, there's very little to do yet but watch your goblins harvesting berries and your orcs defeating the occasional attack by hostile animals.

Speaking of hostile animals: because, so far, animals can open doors, you have to come up with creative ways to protect your camp from attacks, like this maze entrance:



There's really not much else to say about the game or the Goon behind it. If you feel like wasting a few minutes of your time, here's the official website of Goblin Camp.