Goblins have been stepped on by adventurers for far too long. Not any more. It’s time to gather your ragtag group of greenskins to take on your enemies and fight back.

From finding and creating your own goblin lair that allows you to manage and improve your roster, to mapping your lineage and drafting the perfect raiding party, Goblin Stone offers both charm and depth. With difficult choices to make, which goblins will you keep for a stronger future?

Offering deep but accessible tactical turn-based combat, Goblin Stone has a fully narrated story voiced by Scottish actor James Smillie, accompanied by music from award-winning composer Peter McConnell of Hearthstone, Broken Age and and Monkey Island.

Are you ready to save the goblins?  

Players are invited to check the public demo and give feedback directly to the development team via Goblin Stone’s Community Hub.

It’s been more than a month since Orc Chop Games released their demo. Since then, they’ve been fully focused on new features and content as Goblin Stone's Early Access release date comes closer. We’d like to take a moment and give all of you a quick peek at some of the upcoming features and content we’ve got brewing.

Orc Chop Games shares significant updates on development: a new minimap, classes, zone and enemies (slime!) players can expect to slay along the way. 

Like any roguelite, knowing where you're going is vital to plotting your next adventure. Displayed in hand-drawn parchment, the map will help you chart your progress and show how much you’ve explored a certain area. It indicates treasures, enemies, resources, and loot left behind by foes.

The Minimap

very essential piece to all rogue-lite games is the map to your dungeon. Unfortunately, we were not able to squeeze this feature into the demo, but it was the first thing we worked on since releasing the demo. The map will help you navigate Goblin Stone’s many locations. Some locations can get quite complex where you could lose your way easily without a map. With this feature in place, you’ll be able to chart your progress.

The map will include a handy percent indicator showing how much you have explored the location. It has indicators for treasure, resources, enemies and will even display loot drops from enemies. The map will show you things you have collected and will even show you any loot you may have missed by accident. The whole thing is all scrawled on a tattered piece of parchment and displayed with a hand-drawn look to it. Drawn by goblin hands, of course.

New Goblin Classes

We released the demo with 3 classes the Raider, the Guard, and the Shaman. Now, we’ve got another three Goblin classes in the works, each one putting their own spin on a classic adventuring archetype; The Bandit, The Mystic, and the Hunter.

The Bandit acts as a melee support class that commands other goblins. These guys are real bossy. They are experienced, cunning, and able to take and deal a decent amount of damage by themselves. They prefer to use swords and blunt weapons (a new weapon class). The Bandit’s true strength is in their leadership. Their abilities revolve around barking commands at the rest of the squad, giving them buffs. They can also rearrange their order so that defenders can take the blows and attackers can score clean hits.

The Hunter is a wary combatant, armed with either a spear (another new weapon class) or an axe, but unlikely to use them until a kill is all but assured. The Hunter’s abilities mostly revolve around delayed and pre-planned damage using their powerful traps, with each trap having a unique trigger condition. They are also a very strong-ranged class making use of arrows to pick off enemies or inflict debilitating status effects on their prey.

The Mystic, armed with a wand, is a surprisingly well-read and studious magic-user. While physically fragile (even by Goblin standards), they’re able to punch well above their weight with powerful offensive spells that can reach targets behind the enemy line. They can also use frost magic to freeze enemies in place, offering ways to delay damage and mess with enemy positions. But most surprisingly, they can perform tank duties and absorb damage in certain situations, especially versus other magic users. So long as you keep attacks from landing, Mystics can be one of your heaviest hitters.

New Abilities!

We’re aiming for every class to have a full eight abilities (possibly more), providing depth, utility, and real opportunities to synergize and come up with your own strategies. Here are four more abilities we have lined up for the Guard, providing interesting new ways to protect your fragile goblins:

• Stay Back: Push back all allies by 5 Time Units and Stand Guard for 10 Time units, pausing your movement on the Time Bar.
• Protect: Protect an ally and Intercept the next attack on it.
• Harrowing Shout: Inflict slow on all enemies.
• Charge: Knockback the enemy. Other enemies it moves past after being knocked back, become Stunned.

New Location!

Part of the story will lead you through burning camps. Who do these lands belong to? Who destroyed it, and how long will the fires burn and battles rage?

You’ll have to play the Early Access version of the game to know the answers. But just in case you’re still hungry for any last titbits of information, we have five full story chapters lined up for the Early Access release. These five chapters together make the first arc of the story. Each chapter features about two or more hours of gameplay.

• Chapter 1: Home in the Woods
• Chapter 2: To the Hinterlands
• Chapter 3: Queer Incidents
• Chapter 4: Audience with a Rat
• Chapter 5: A Strange Fellowship

New Monster!

What fantasy adventure would be complete without the humble slime?

Sadly, the ones you’ll be encountering in Goblin Stone are more intimidating than adorable. Roughly cuboid in shape, they appear in many sizes and colors, denoting their strength and ability-set. These ornery cubes of goo are aggressive and filled with corrosive juices that can melt your armor away with their unique ability: Sloppy Caress. They can be quite hard to kill as they tend to multiply when attacked using their ability: Bifurcate. Lastly, they can pick off any weak party members with their nasty ranged attack Expectorate. These slimes are an ever-present menace and one any Goblin party must be prepared for.

We hope you enjoyed this sneak peek at the new stuff coming to Goblin Stone! If you haven’t already, please add the game to your Steam Wishlist so you can be notified of new development blogs like this as we journey into Early Access.

Key Features:

• Explore a vast world with procedurally generated hand-drawn 2D levels.
• Build a great goblin lair chamber by chamber, where only ruins stood before.
• Battle despicable humans, elves, and dwarves in an innovative turn-based battle system.
• Take a feeble ragtag group of goblins and selectively breed the next generation of genetically superior fighters.
• Listen as the narrator tells your story as you experience it.
• Expect many goblins to perish. Permanently. With each death, a new ancestor strengthens your lineage.
• Build an adventuring party by mixing unique goblin classes such as the Raider, Guard, and Shaman.
• Difficult choices await you as you decide which goblins to keep and which to toss.
• Turn up the music and listen to award-winning composer Peter McConnell

Goblin Stone is coming to Steam Early Access later this year with full launch scheduled for 2022.