About Goldbar Games

About Us

Goldbar Games LLC is an independent company dedicated to creating fun and engaging video game experiences.

At Goldbar Games, we’re committed to raising the bar. We value quality in games and quality in the tools that make them.

Each game has its own individual page, with a full list of collaborators who worked on that game.

For any business-related questions or comments, please use our contact form.

Origin Story (2010 to 2013)

Goldbar Games is the creation of Anton Strickland, with help from various friends and independent contractors for each game.

In 2010, Anton started publishing visual novels under the name "Kinjo Goldbar", a portmanteau of two characters from his favorite visual novel, Umineko no Naku Koro Ni.

The name "Goldbar" is derived from a translation quirk of the word "Kinjo". Read the Japanese kanji as a Chinese word, and translate that back to English, and you get "gold bar".

Goldbar Games was officially formed in 2011 after Anton published the hit fangame When the Seacats Cry. He then decided to create his own original work, Detective Butler.

Anton has an appreciation for games of all genres, but his favorites include Super Mario 64, Kirby Superstar, Runescape, Umineko, Braid, The Witness, and Factorio.

You can learn more about Anton by visiting his website and watching his home movies.

2014 to 2022

From 2014 to 2017, we extensively used Unity to build a wide variety of games, many of which unfortunately never saw a proper release. Some were scrapped or put on indefinite hiatus, while others were quickly rushed out the door. We plan to revisist all of these games and give them proper remakes at some point, as soon as we can.

From 2018 to 2021, we consistently streamed game development every week-night on Twitch. We may resume streaming in the future after a short break.

Both 2019 and 2020 were spent building our own custom game engine, and we ported Detective Butler to it. We plan to release the game engine for others to use in the future.

We actively embrace cutting-edge technology like blockchain and generative AI, and learning these tools took much of our focus in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

Current Projects

Our current project is Detective Butler and the King of Hearts, though once again it has been put on hiatus due to our current financial situation. When we have enough money to resume full-time work, the game will be quickly finished up. In the meantime, we continue to release small side projects, such as Running Late and Echo Chamber.

Anton's main focus since 2023 has been Mystery Gamedev, a community of fans and developers for mystery-themed video games. We've been building a suite of tools and resources for developers, and ultimately these resources will benefit our own game development as well as helping countless others. We see this as a worthwhile investment of our time in the long run, and will return our focus to Goldbar Games as soon as we can.