‘That Damn Goat’ now available for purchase on Steam

“It’s been a long journey,” said Aaron Nieboer, a MAGIC production associate. “We’ve been at it for three years to get to this point, and this is the culmination.”

Nieboer is referring to That Damn Goat, a game created by nearly 60 students and faculty at RIT, now available for purchase on Steam. 

Users have been able to add the game to their Steam wishlists, which allows them to be notified when it is available for purchase or on sale, or to let friends on the platform see that they’re interested in the game. 

As producer of the game, Nieboer explained that “this game was meant to give students an opportunity to work on something that was going to be released into the marketplace. So, the fact that we’re at the stage of wishlisting and purchasing helps people to get excited about this and starts to validate the work that we’ve done.”

While Nieboer has been a constant figure working on the game’s team a few months after its inception, students often come and go as they complete their education at RIT. In addition, the students and faculty who have worked on the game come from across RIT’s nine colleges, making it a truly multidisciplinary effort. “MAGIC is a little different in the sense that it’s not necessarily owned by any particular college, but it’s a collaboration of the colleges,” Nieboer explained.

Mike Santos, who is from Rome, N.Y., and in his second year in the game design and development master’s program, has been working on the game as a console port engineer.

“For me personally, being somebody who wants to get into the games industry, having on my resume a game that’s been published is super cool,” Santos said. “I missed the beginning of the game, but being able to jump into something that already had a pretty good foundation and being able to move forward with that was great.”

In the game, four players battle against each other to hold the crown the longest. The game gets its name from the non-playable character of the goat, which has the power to randomly create a vast array of changes in the game, including switching the environment, switching which character each player plays as, teleporting itself or players to other locations, and more. Players can compete against each other either locally in the same room or remotely through Steam’s Remote Play Together system.

Since the team showed the game at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) last year, they’ve added an improved user interface, a tie-breaker round, and more gadgets for players to use throughout the game. 

The completion of these updates and the release on Steam have solidified this phase as a milestone for the team. “Once we got our build of the game approved by Steam, that was the big moment for me,” Santos said.

But the release on Steam isn’t the final step for That Damn Goat. The team is working to release the game on Nintendo Switch next year.