New Year, New Update

Welcome back! It's 2017 and we've been up to a lot of things behind the scenes. During the past few months, we've been working diligently on both Detective Butler 2 and Witch Doctor Kaneko. Let's start with talking about Kaneko first.

In order to get both games out in a timely manner, we've been focusing on Kaneko during the latter half of each month. Mostly dealing with programming as well as sprites and tile sets. I have to say that it's been a very fun experience learning how to co ...

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Goldbar Game Jam 2 - Werewolf

Now I do realize that our last Goldbar Game Jam took place nearly a year ago, but I still believe we should keep up with this because it's a great opportunity to publish short and simple games. This game, Werewolf, was actually the game we worked on for Ludum Dare 33 (and went unfinished, again) which I happened to bring up in the previous GG Jam blog entry. I suppose it's finally time we released this thing, as I took the last few hours to put it into a slightly more polished state.

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DB2 - To-Do List

We have two great announcements. Firstly, if you haven't noticed, we updated the look of the website a few days ago. Secondly, the prototype for Detective Butler 2 is now officially bug-free! Let's go into some details about what remains to be added in.

1. In-game download counter. With this, we'll be able to keep track of how often each time a chapter has been played. Mostly just useful for us, but this can get quite tricky to code if you don't know what you're doing.

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DB2 - Distribution Thoughts

Hello, world! It's time for our July update.

During June we sent out a prototype of Detective Butler 2 for testing. It has since gone through three rounds of revisions, and currently it's in pretty stable condition. We still have a few small bugs to iron out, but it's looking really good right now.

Upon the release of the game, players will have access to our free game client. This game client will be a small download that provides a user interface to download additional chapt ...

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A Real Update

I couldn't resist the title because it seems like this is the first real update in quite a while. We seemingly took the months of March and April off, (in which I spontaneously decided to fly to Japan -- and I still intend to write a blog post detailing my adventures there!) but in reality the team has been hard at work on finishing up things for Detective Butler's sequel.

I say finishing, but really, we're just getting started. There is so much for us to update people on, because of ...

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Billions Upon Billions of Sprites

So, let's take a moment to discuss the way I'm handling artwork for Detective Butler 2.

When writing a detective story, you come to realize that characters are important. Not just like any other story, but in the sense that you NEED certain characters for the plot to exist. You need a culprit, a victim, and at least a few suspects... Maybe a doctor to confirm the body is dead, and the police inspector to arrest the criminal. Possibly some red herrings, the spouses of said red herrings ...

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WDK - Puzzle Design

During my latest ponderings of how to design some levels for Witch Doctor Kaneko, I had to ask myself the question: what exactly -is- a puzzle? How do I know if the level I've just made is a puzzle or not? And that's not even getting into GOOD puzzles! Well, here's what I came up with!

I think we can all agree, to start off, that a puzzle must have a solution. After all, the point of the game is to solve puzzles. So we must have a solution, but then, what is a solution? We can define ...

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End of 2015 Review

Happy Holidays! It seems appropriate to have one last blog post before the year ends. It has been a very productive year for Goldbar Games. To give a quick summary:

We found artists for Detective Butler and Witch Doctor Kaneko. We attended two anime cons as panelists, which were major successes. We traveled to Chicago to meet Ryukishi07 in person and learn his secrets. We gained an additional 100+ followers on Twitter this year. We started our own series of game jams to promote produc ...

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