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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DB2 - Gameplay Design

So, it has been a while since the last Detective Butler update, and I've made a lot of significant progress over the past few months. I figure I should go into a little detail explaining a few new features of the game.

Firstly, in terms of choices: there will be none. Like its predecessor, the game will be considered a "kinetic" visual novel. The reasoning for this is as described in our July update about serial games -- we can't allow you to make decisions that will permanently steer ...

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How to Write Characters

For anyone who clicked on this wanting to know how to write ASCII characters to an LCD screen, I apologize in advance for misleading you. This post will discuss some of my recent thoughts about how people should go about writing good characters in visual novels and why it works. Specifically, I'm going to go over a few different things I do in order to write mine, in order to achieve what I believe is a well-written character based on some of my favorite games, books, and TV shows.

So ...

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WDK - Playable Engine

Happy Halloween! For tonight's update, we're pleased to show off our new engine for Witch Doctor Kaneko! That's right -- you can play it right here, in this blog post!

We're going to do something different from now on. We'll try to integrate actual gameplay into our blog posts (like the previous one) so that you can really get a feel for what we've been working on. As they always say -- show, don't tell! So we'll show you our latest works in progress by allowing you to play them yours ...

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