How Goblin Bet was born from a casino in hell

gamedeveloper.com:

If you were to drive over to goblin.bet you would find an entertaining bit of internet fluff: pixel art monsters fighting it out amongst themselves for your amusement and fake betting pleasure. The monsters use the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition ruleset and stats, in their System Reference Document (SRD) form for legal reasons. The fights are all completely automated, arranged into brackets, going from a challenge rating of 1/8 to up to 15 and above. Monsters that win a bracket advance up until the next, until an overall winner is crowned. And then it all starts over again.

These kinds of fun web games feel like they used to be more prevalent on the internet, and I was pleased to find a new web game of its ilk now in 2023. We spoke with its creator and maintainer about his project, where it’s been, and where it’s going. 

Who are you, and what is Goblin Bet?

I’m Misha Favorov, an indie game designer specializing in the space between digital and tabletop games. My most traditional digital game is probably Sumer, which I served as designer and lead programmer for, but even that was a hybrid of Euro-style worker placement board games and digital platformers. These days, I mostly work in the TTRPG space.

I also teach game design at LIU Post. I feel very fortunate to have been able to break into academia, although it is a bit of a double-edged sword; I can work on games like Goblin Bet without much worry as to their profitability, but as my responsibilities have grown, my time to maintain my projects is definitely a bit squeezed.

When and how did Goblin Bet get started?

Goblin Bet came out of Covid. I was stranded in San Diego, my teaching work mostly dried up, and I decided to teach myself web development. I’d already been