This game really resonates with me, and so does the writeup.
I had the fortune to work a high-tech job (in person) and also own a 20 acre farm for a number of years, where we attempted to produce some/most of the food we ate. (That's a really hard thing to do by the way.)
Of course we raised goats, for the meat as well as the milk.
For those of you who haven't interacted with goats, know this: there is a hilarity about them that is difficult to describe.
They have some sort of almost human, child-like curiosity and bravery that was always refreshing. Add to that their willingness/desire to climb on/stand on anything, and honestly, they were just a hoot to have around.
They roamed fence free on our property for a time. I'd go out in the morning to ride my motorcycle to work, and there's be a couple of goats standing on my wife's car, just standing there, chewing cud. Or there'd be a goat balanced calmly on my motorcycle.
Or a small goat standing on the back of a larger goat.
Or a couple of goats dancing joyfully. Or a few goats gloriously playing with a piece of fiberglass.
And many of them were really, really friendly to you. My (then toddler) son enjoyed playing with them enormously.
Goats are awesome. I do miss having them around.
I liked to say that you could add a goat to nearly any somber real-life situation and it would instantly become funny.
Q. How do you keep goats from escaping their enclosure?
A. Rinse goat meat well, rub lime juice over it (from 1/2 whole lime), place meat in a bowl, then add salt, black pepper, Scotch bonnet, thyme, allspice, curry powder, scallions, onion and garlic. Leave to marinate for at least 2 hours in the refrigerator, longer would be ideal. Heat the oil in a skillet until it is very hot, and saute the meat until golden brown. Then add the marinade, tomatoes and coconut milk, if using, and simmer for approximately 3 more minutes. Add water, reduce heat and allow to simmer for 2 to 3 hours stirring occasionally until meat is tender.
Ha...that's funny. In truth, the 6-inch (I think?) 'hog fence' we used (you can see it in some of the pictures) was 100% as long as there wasn't anything they could use to get a boost over.
Note: they could and did move things...often times to the fence.
It was good to get them out of those small enclosures later on, since we had a lot more of them.
Did you end up eating them? I'd find it hard to eat them as I'd end up feeling like they were pets. Do you have any photos of them standing on your car or bike??!!
We did indeed eat some of them, but the meat wasn't as tasty as traditionally farm-raised animals. Ours lived mostly free-range, which is very good for them, but it makes their meat less 'yummy'. The meat most everyone (who eats meat) likes usually comes from animals who don't get very much exercise, and so has a lot less 'density' (not sure how to properly describe it.)
We also sold a number of them to Muslim friends and their associates for Eid al-Fitr, and even allowed them to consecrate part of our property to do the sacrifice. Previously they could find no place within hundreds of miles that would allow them to do that. That we were (and are) Christians, who not only allowed them to do this, but even encouraged it, kind of blew their minds. :)
I'll see if I can dig up some pics. It's a funny thing how so often you don't end up taking pictures of really neat, but daily things, but wish you did.
It blows my mind how you can enjoy the company of an animal and then not only eat them -- somewhat understandable as we need to eat to stay alive -- but... encouraging their ritual slaughtering? I'm speechless.
Not only "ritual" and "slaughtering" are words that should give goosebumps when used together, but even encouraging it, when you don't even believe in that barbaric procedure, it's frankly inhumane.
I don't think that the ritual slaughter of islam and conventional slaughter are different enough for the line between barbaric and non-barbaric to coincidentally somehow end up right between them.
As for slaughtering an animal that you've enjoyed the company of, I'm not sure how it is any worse than slaughtering an animal you didn't enjoy the company of. The former will give you a more intimate understanding of the impact your eating habits have, if anything.
My grandparents retired in Australia to a shoreside community with a golf course and Women's Circle. They stood it for about six months and then dropped out to become smallholders.
My grandmother was utterly sentimental; they always kept a calf, which was always called Bully, which was slaughtered after a year or so. She was quite capable of chomping though a steak while saying 'Bully was such a lovely calf that year'...
They did, however, tell stories (possibly true) about another couple of smallholders down the road who could never bear to slaughter their own pigs. So what they'd do was swap.
These days we are completely out of touch with where our food comes from.
The only civil reply to my comment above. We may not share the same opinion, but I appreciate your considerate response. My post above probably came out too harsh, that was unintended.
> I don't think that the ritual slaughter of islam and conventional slaughter are different enough for the line between barbaric and non-barbaric to coincidentally somehow end up right between them.
> As for slaughtering an animal that you've enjoyed the company of, I'm not sure how it is any worse than slaughtering an animal you didn't enjoy the company of.
If you actually believe that which you're saying, you'd have no problem slaughtering your dog.
Islamic ritual slaughter explicitly does not involve blunt force or death from falling. The animal is killed not by hacking, sawing or jumping at its throat, but by making a single clean cut at it with a non-serrated blade, which is not to be shown to the animal.
I'm really not trying to make a true scotsman argument here, but unnecessarily brutal treatment of animals is prevalent through the whole meat industry and sadly can't be pinned down to a particular religious practice or tradition.
I personally believe that this is an inherent problem of the industry. I think that repetitively performing these jobs hundreds of times a day requires that you have absolutely no emotional investment in the animals. Add to that otherwise stressful conditions, and you have to take care not to develop sadistic tendencies and loathing of the animals.
> If you actually believe that which you're saying, you'd have no problem slaughtering your dog.
I'd have a problem slaughtering my dog, but that's besides the point. I just don't believe that it would somehow be less humane than slaughtering some other animal. In fact, if I were to slaughter my dog, I'd probably take extra care to do it in the most humane way possible.
I totally hear your heart behind these posts. See my other response to you.
This isn't really a binary situation; we were friendly with our goats, but our dogs were practically members of the family.
Having said that, I'd have no trouble raising dogs for food if it made sense, and if we liked the way dog tastes, which we don't. Which has all kinds of cultural relevance.
I'll let the other responses to your comment, for the most part, speak for my thoughts as well. To that I will add:
I have always felt slightly conflicted about killing another living thing to eat it. But, if we are going to eat meat, I think there is some value in seeing where it comes from.
As far as the animals end, I always ensured the animal was eating some of its favourite feed, out by itself, when I shot it in the brain, top to bottom, with a .30-06. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1903_Springfield)
I'd argue that there's no easier way to die; the animal feels nothing. Though the shooter has something of a mess to deal with.
To milk a goat she needs to have had kids. The female kids can be sold on to other people who want milking goats. The billy kids get sold on for meat. It's pretty tough giving up a few days old goat kid for slaughter.
None of the goats are on conveyances, and you'll notice the fences and ropes, because this was pretty early on while we were still securing the borders of our property.
It looks like a nice place to live/grow up, why are you selling it - if you don't mind me asking? I am seriously considering living moving to the countryside in a few years and I am gathering all the information/knowledge/experience I can.
The only (substantive) high-tech employer in that area laid me and a whole bunch of other people off, so we moved to silicon valley in 2009. We really like it out here, though it's insanely expensive, we're getting along well.
More importantly, there is a lot more cultural diversity out here in Santa Clara County, California compared to McDonald County, Missouri. We prefer that our son grow in a more diverse environment.
Send me an e-mail if you want to chat more about living in the country; to me, it's a very interesting topic. We spent a lot of time exploring various aspects of sustainability.
Aye...I'll leave unsaid how one of our goats ended up in our attic. She had a much easier time getting around up there than I did while trying to catch her.
This Christmas instead of buying a console I built a PC and put SteamOS on it for the family. Of course I bought Goat Simulator. I got it on a Steam sale and probably didn't pay more that five bucks. We hosted a bunch of family from out of state, and the combination of the family visit with the ridiculousness of Goat Simulator really let me channel my inner Clark Griswold. Everyone who came over scoffed at the game yet at the same time the game had them all, from age two to age eighty-nine laughing or at least rolling their eyes. A lot of people who weren't at all into video games had a go. They still had a good time even though they weren't experienced video game players. People enjoyed it whether they were watching or playing. I guess we're all easily entertained.
While I do seriously think that Goat Simulator is one of the most underrated games-as-art works of our time, my main take-home message from the postmortem is:
If you take a perfectly sensible game development sentence and replace one of the nouns with a goat, it becomes intrinsically funny.
The best about this is that for those multi-worded titles, you can create a different goatified name for every single noun (and most adjectives) and imagine a surprisingly different goat-game for each version.
Goat Space Program, Kerbal Goat Program, Kerbal Space Goat.
Goats of the Old Republic, Knights of the Old Goat, Knights of the Goat Republic.
Sins of a Goat Empire. Sins of a Solar Goat. Goats of a Solar Empire.
Goat War: Rome. Total War: Goat. Total Goat: Rome.
Each of the variations tells the condensed story of an entirely different imaginary goat-game and all of them are good (the stories, not necessarily the games).
I met the same thing before, only with movies instead of games and Jesus instead of goat. Had an IRC channel full of people who don't mind religious jokes running for hours.
When you’re making a joke prototype game where the main character is a goat, you don’t exactly focus on thinking proactively. In hindsight, it’s resulted in a lot of extra work.
The entire bit about customer interaction was great too.
> When you’re making a joke prototype game where the main character is a goat ...
Kind-of tangential, but speaking of goat-themed video games... around the same time Goat Simulator was released, there was another video game released called Escape Goat 2[1]. I've played it and it happens to be a wonderfully-crafted, well-executed puzzle platformer. At the time it came out, I remember thinking it was unfortunate that a 'joke' game (Goat Simulator) got a lot of attention, while there many more heart-felt indie efforts out there that struggle for similar exposure. But I suppose that's just how it goes.
> Fun fact: the 3-D model for the actual goat in Goat Simulator cost $25 on TurboSquid. But it was on a 75% off sale, so we got a pretty good deal on it.
As interesting as this is, I don't know how much of this is applicable to anyone else. Goat Simulator was a fluke which gained popularity just by the idea being funny on its own. The game itself really didn't matter. It was supposed to be bad. For 99% of products, game or not, that's not going to fly.
I also think it's actually a pretty good game. There's a surprising amount of stuff to do, and things to discover, and puzzles you need to solve, but you have to go look for them --- unless you're the type of person who likes poking into corners you're unlikely to find them (like that famous review from someone who said they'd finished all the content in an hour... uh huh).
I think the same thing could be said about Flappy Bird. That game were also considered a joke but gained a following. The fact that the developer pulled it out of the market oddly enough skyrocketed it's popularity.
I also remember the Beavis & Butthead game becoming pupular, even though it was a joke game too.
Flappy Bird was not a joke as such, it was a proper game that just happened to be simple but very hard. Somehow Gears hit a sweet spot that was 'hard' but also 'addictive'.
So, I'm taking from this that the moral is to always do your best work no matter if you think it's a just a toy or if you actually want to sell it. Sometimes toys accidentally become products.
Nope, because its quite rare for toys to accidentally take off like this. If you 'always do your best work no matter if you think it's a just a toy or if you actually want to sell it' you'll just waste loads of time polishing things that no-one will ever see.
Survivorship bias. There's probably a million developers out there who poured their heart and soul into their game, only to have it languish with single-digit sales figures.
I thought the take-away could be something a bit more specific, like, make your games fun to play.
Al Lowe gave that interview a little while back and it showed up here on HN. He said he was a little sad that people didn't make funny games any more. Well, sometimes they do, and it turns out, people are willing to buy them.
A friend made a platformer for an incubator called "Runnin' Around With No Shirt On" where it's basically about a (shirtless) guy running around in hell (and dodging all the basic platform obstacles like spikes, moving platforms, etc.). The goal of the game was to defeat Satan in order to get his shirt back.
It was the most ridiculous thing I've ever played but I couldn't go one second without laughing at how ridiculous and how much fun it was to play.
I love "serious" kinds of play and games with these awesome narratives but sometimes you just want something funny and fun to play!
I can't believe the same studio that made Sanctum (a really good game) also made Goat Simulator. I figured it was a one-person weekends-only throwaway joke effort. Cripes. On Steam, Goat Simulator has 20x as many reviews as Sanctum, but they all appear to be sarcastic, so that's good.
Yet, according to wikipedia, they sold 2.5 million copies. Bizarre. Anyone want to explain that one?
Goat Simulator is the perfect word of mouth game. It's really bizarre and it fits perfectly into internet culture. I don't follow youtube personalities, but I could see this being the kind of game that does really well for them and in return well for the developers.
Also Sanctum is another tower defense game in a market overflowing with them. It's interesting and does coop well, but it didn't set the world on fire because it is honestly pretty average. I like it, but I understand why it isn't super popular.
> I don't follow youtube personalities, but I could see this being the kind of game that does really well for them
you are correct - especially the highly edited short-ish videos (ala, 10-15 minutes) of jump cuts to all the funny bits. Personally, i don't really like the game, as it seemed too gimmicky to play for more than a few minutes.
I bought Sanctum a long time ago and honestly I could not play it for more than an hour. I LOVE tower defense games, but there was just too much stuff on the screen for my taste on Sanctum. By the way: the same happened with Dungeon Defenders, never got to really enjoy it.
Those are two great games that lost me because of their excess.
Goat Simulator is a joke-game. It's absurdly hilarious all the way through, and purposedly idiotic. There is a lot of fun to be found on the game, but you got to have the right type of humor, and be very fond of goats, to find it.
Also it is a sandbox of sorts. Sandbox games please a range of gamers, but they're not for everyone. This could be your case.
Goat Simulator is a product with a simple target : provide youtubers like PewDieDie with a perfect 'game' for their let's play/review videos where they can make an engaging video based on the silliness of GS.
Just like Sanctum caters to Tower Defense fans, Goat Simulator is also a niche product, just an unusual one.
"2. We should have focused on optimization since day one"
The oposite could have been even a bigger mistake, "first impressions persist" but that first impression is much better that no impression at all, very often optimized games don't see the light, ending as that pet project that I'll finish some day.
Didn't expect this at all. When I first saw it go viral I thought they'll have no problem selling it. So I guess this reinforces the importance of execution vs idea.
Kudos to Armin and the team for taking on a project like this.
From the article: it’s the most successful game we’ve ever made
A game 'Post Mortem' doesn't mean its been a failure, the 'Post Mortem' is just a discussion of the development project (now its mostly finished) with analysis of what worked well and what didn't.
edit: from the wikipedia page:
Ibrisagic stated that Coffee Stain Studios made their money back on the development costs within a few minutes of the game being offered on Steam.[16] As of August 2014, the studio has reported that nearly a million copies of Goat Simulator have been sold, outperforming their other games over the previous four years.[7] The mobile release for iOS and Android systems reached 100,000 downloads within 6 days of launch.[46] By mid-January 2015, over 2.5 million copies of the game were sold across all platforms
I'm confused. The title makes it sound like they're ending development, the post refers to the game in future, present and past tense... are they killing it off or not?
It was a very popular feature of the print version of GameDeveloper which were post mortems of games after they were finally shipping. They all follow the same basic formula, what worked, what didn't, what we learned. A collection of the 50 or 60 post mortems from Game Developer is probably the single greatest text book on starting a Game Studio that you can't buy.
I would be very surprised if they killed it off, it's just that the title made me think that's what they were doing. Thanks to you and others for explaining why the title is as it is anyway.
I had the fortune to work a high-tech job (in person) and also own a 20 acre farm for a number of years, where we attempted to produce some/most of the food we ate. (That's a really hard thing to do by the way.)
Of course we raised goats, for the meat as well as the milk.
For those of you who haven't interacted with goats, know this: there is a hilarity about them that is difficult to describe.
They have some sort of almost human, child-like curiosity and bravery that was always refreshing. Add to that their willingness/desire to climb on/stand on anything, and honestly, they were just a hoot to have around.
They roamed fence free on our property for a time. I'd go out in the morning to ride my motorcycle to work, and there's be a couple of goats standing on my wife's car, just standing there, chewing cud. Or there'd be a goat balanced calmly on my motorcycle.
Or a small goat standing on the back of a larger goat.
Or a couple of goats dancing joyfully. Or a few goats gloriously playing with a piece of fiberglass.
And many of them were really, really friendly to you. My (then toddler) son enjoyed playing with them enormously.
Goats are awesome. I do miss having them around.
I liked to say that you could add a goat to nearly any somber real-life situation and it would instantly become funny.
EDIT: 'add a joke' -> 'add a goat'. Ugh.