Spilt Milk Studios Spills the Tea on Upcoming Game Gobble Inn
Spilt Milk Studios, the team behind the cozy artifact-restoration game Trash Goblin, is currently working on their upcoming follow-up, Gobble Inn.
I recently had a chance to sit in on a preview event and spend some hands-on time with an early demo build. It’s still pretty early in development with plenty of placeholders, but it has good bones, and I’m excited to see where it goes.
Andrew Smith, CEO, Founder, and Creative Director of Spilt Milk Studios, did all of the talking as Gobble Inn was being demoed, and he had me sold at “non-violent.” Sure, and there you are closing my article. But hear me out: there are lots of violent games already, with non-violent games being much more limited. So to make a survivors-like without any bullets—heaven or hell—sounds to me more like a creative exercise than a limiting one. And I’ve obviously liked what I’ve been seeing.
For fans of Trash Goblin, the gameplay is significantly different, though the wholesome atmosphere and cozy vibes remain intact—even when you’re down in the dark depths, hunting for supplies. Here is how Smith describes the core loop:
“Essentially you’re playing as Auntie Val. You’re digging for ingredients in the chasm, and then you’re using those ingredients to keep the inn stocked up so you can keep feeding people. So you’re discovering recipes, you’re levelling up, you’re having choices—you’re doing all that good run-based stuff.
“You’re doing it, though, without any combat, without any sort of death or anything like that. So that’s kind of like the big twist that separates us from things like Megabonk or Dave the Diver.”
The games that immediately came to mind for me while watching the gameplay were Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and Moonlighter.
“Food is like a system, and that’s gonna be fun too because, canonically, goblins are affected by what they eat physiologically,” Smith continued.
And those food buffs can be powerful, especially based on what I saw during the preview event and experienced in my own time with the demo.
In Gobble Inn, you play as Auntie Val. They’re a licensed Delver, and tough as nails. Even so, I found myself wondering: why Auntie Val? Why base an entire game around them?
“We were thinking quite hard about what our audience would want from Trash Goblin, and what that would mean for our next game. And we knew that there were characters here that people love and that match known genres,” Smith said.
“So if we were going to make a romance visual novel game, then Mushromeo, right, is going to be the player character. No doubt there’s something with Donoval and being a wandering merchant or something like that. And then, yeah, digging."
“Auntie Val’s a delver: they dig all day, so it made sense to look at Auntie Val. But also, there were quite a lot of people who just genuinely are like, ‘Oh, are you ever going to do a DLC where we get to do the digging and find the trinkets?’—that sort of thing. So there were a lot of layered elements. We’re just like, okay, if we’re going to do a digging game, then that’s what has to happen. It has to be Auntie Val.”
So why make a new game in the Trash Goblin universe? And why veer into survivors and roguelike territory—which is much different than the artifact restoring and upcycling of Trash Goblin?
“Separately, the idea for a run-based roguelike without violence led to it being a digging game, and then it all just kind of made perfect sense,” Smith explained. “And frankly, it’s kind of cool because it’s another goblin game, even though it’s a different goblin."
“We were being quite cautious around not wanting to leave our Trash Goblin audience behind by making something that’s in a very different genre. So any element that carried over and made sense in our hearts and in a vibe kind of way—that made us more confident.”
One thing Smith said early on stuck with me throughout the presentation: “We delight players specifically—not people with funding amounts or people in suits, but people who play our games.”
Gobble Inn is still in development, but you can help support it soon: the game's Kickstarter goes live on October 29.
Comments