What's Next

Thanks to everyone who's been able to check out the kobold directly! With it came the release of Kobold Gardens Steam page which you can visit here:

Kobold Garden on Steam (steampowered.com)

Anyone who supported Kobold Garden before the directly was released will receive your reward of a Steam key for Kobold Garden when the early access verion is released. With it you will have the first and all future builds along with the final game on Steam, no purchase necessary as you already own it.

I'm looking to release the first early access build of Kobold Garden on Steam sometime in the late summer. The build will feature the first garden, a racing minigame, fully interactive kobolds and babybolds, and a dungeon gameplay loop. I'll be working hard to make sure this first build represents what Kobold Garden will be like.

I've seen some confusion to the changes of Kobold Garden from the directly. Kobold Garden is still very much a kobold petting simulator like it has been. It is now just more in line to a game called chao garden from the Sonic Adeventure series then to an open world game like it used to be a few years ago. The final version will have three handcrafted gardens with two being unlocked depending on how your kobolds are raised.

The minigames are just small games accessible in the gardens themselves where your kobolds can compete with others for prizes. The better your kobolds stats, the better chance they have at winning.

Something I haven't really gotten into is the dungeon gameplay mentioned on the Steam page. It's sort of its own separate game in Kobold Garden you can access in the central hub area. You'll be able to bring your kobolds along with you in a generated dungeon crawler, fighting mobs with gameplay similar to games like Pikmin/Overlord to gain stat items and loot for your kobolds to level up with.

I'll definitely get more into everything as I get to work on them but that's basically what Kobold Garden will be like. Eventually I hope to add more kinds of minigames and even different gameplay loops for a larger variety of ways to play with your kobolds.

For those who were looking forward to a more open world experience, I have not given up on the idea completely. I have been looking at what a sequel to Kobold Garden would be like and it will most likely be open world with a planned-out scope much greater then has even been shown. While working on the open world verion of Kobold Garden, I felt very limited in the technology I had at the time. Even though while possible, it was not ideal for the open world I wanted to make. For a sequel I'll be looking into things like Unreal Engine 5 and its nanite technology, it allows for large worlds with great amounts of detail. It's still a ways off before we get to a sequel, but these are my current ideas for one. 

Again, thanks to everyone who's managed to make this possible. This week's been pretty hectic, but I hope to get back on models and fleshing out Kobold Garden real soon.