Summary

Goons is a wacky, mobile, music making experiment, featuring a cast of British stereotypes.

Goons was a passion project, intended as a vehicle to explore; game feel, audio engineering, mobile game design, animation, and it was used as an opportunity to make music and sound for a game.

The gameplay is simple; turn on the backing track, then tap the ‘Goons’ in time with the music to make them say a random word. Create enough ‘music’, and the crowd will go wild!

As you move through the levels, more music making features are unlocked, including,

3 Goons with unique voices, words and dances.
3 buttons which play melodies.
The ability to control the words the Goons say.
Crowd Keyboard! Tap members of the crowd for drum and bass beats.

Design & Programming

For a long writeup of Goons, with design and programming decisions and challenges, please read the article below.

Goons Closedown Report

Key Learnings

Integrated audio using FMOD, with some advanced features such as triggered events on a beat.
Keep it simple! The hand drawn characters and recorded facial motion capture were scrapped it in all favour of simple, abstract shapes.
Experimented with AI model generation, and solved the performance issues it caused.
Chose a diagetic UI, then realised this didn’t work in mobile game design.

From Prototype to Release

Goons was an experiment. The core mechanics of the game were built without much concern for how an end-to-end experience could work.

A Goons release would be marketed as a silly, quirky, music-making application for kids and young adults. The core community feature would be the ability to record and share your silly songs with friends.

Conclusion

Goons was a project intending to take a month to complete. It took three months, which included moving Unity audio to FMOD, and a re-write of many of the games features.

Goons is a tough game to demo. It was shown at Interactive Future 2024, but the show floor environment made the game difficult to hear. Sound is core to Goons, so successful demos weren’t possible. In the future, when I record music for a game, I’ll make sure to consider the platform it’ll be played on (in this case, mobile). Ultimately, Goons has multiple design choices that don’t fit a mobile game.

On the positive side, the game is charming, unique, it was a great learning experience, and a good addition to the portfolio.