EXCO KILL LIST #2: The explosion that celebrated the wrong thing
Kill list episode 2 - The Robbin’ Goblins EXCO Game Studio
The Extra Life explosion we killed in Robbin' Goblins
EXCO Game Studio removed a misleading "Extra Life" explosion from The Robbin' Goblins and rebuilt the UI around a clear heart counter. The game now makes the important bit obvious: what the player has, what they have spent, and why the reels are spinning again.
What Extra Lives do
In The Robbin' Goblins, Extra Lives extend a Sticky Re-Spin run. When an Extra Life is consumed, a simple rocket flies into the grid and the next spin starts. A Goblin-on-Rocket goes to the Power Bar to add a multiplier before the re-spin.
The cue that celebrated the wrong thing
The old sequence added an "Extra Life" explosion in the middle of the game view. It had all the required ingredients: big type, energy, the small sense that someone had just won the lottery. It appeared when a Life was consumed. So it looked like a reward arriving at the exact moment the game was spending one.
How the problem was found
Not in a playtest. In a piece of housekeeping.
A November proposal put the player's Extra Lives in an indicator above the reels: one heart per Life, each ticking away as it was spent. Simple. Literal. Extremely hard to misread.
Hearts were killed…
Then the first layout showed two hearts when the player had one Life. For a brief, beautiful moment, the fix was more confusing than the crime.
The verdict
Clarity is a feature, and ambiguity charges rent on every spin. An effect that looks like a gain when it marks a cost asks players to hold two contradictory meanings at once. That is not anticipation. That is homework.
Killed for: congratulating the player at the wrong time.
What replaced it
An Extra Lives indicator above the grid: one heart for each held Life, ticking down as each is consumed. The centre-screen explosion was removed. The simple rocket kept its job of starting the re-spin; the Goblin-on-Rocket kept its job of upgrading the Power Bar. Nobody had to die except the thing shouting in the middle.
The first indicator did not work. It showed two hearts for one Extra Life. The correction was deliberately literal: however many Extra Lives the player has, that is how many hearts appear.
What survived
The Power Bar and its per-reel multipliers, the Sticky Re-Spins, the four Free Spin modes, the five Goblin Modifiers, and a ceiling of 10,000× in the base game rising to 25,000× in the hacks. All taken apart in EXCO TEARDOWN #2.
The rule we kept
If an effect can mean both "nice" and "oh no," kill the effect.
The part we still argue about
The tempting version of this story is that we killed a rocket. We did not. The rocket earned its place because it starts the next state of play. We killed a burst of drama to protect a row of tiny hearts.
Sensible. Also possibly how a studio slowly turns into an airport. We would still make the same call. But the tension is real: the clearer a game gets, the more careful you have to be not to sand off the weird bits that made it yours.
If we wouldn't play it, we don't ship it. The Kill List is where that sentence gets expensive.
See the Extra Lives flow in the Robbin' Goblins demo at exco.gg.
Operators can access the full game sheet in the Client Zone.