March Ooblets devlog: Mamoonia, loading screens, and more!
March was a difficult month for us but we still managed to get a lot done. We've got the full devlog on our website here, but here are some quick highlights:
New newsletter
If you'd like to get Ooblets updates in your inbox, you can join our newsletter here. It's a good way to make sure you don't miss any future release date announcements!
If you were previously on our old newsletter, you'll unfortunately need to rejoin since we're dumdums who nuked our old mailing list...
Loading screens!
We saw this animated fan art from Sayman and loved it so much that we bought it and hired the artist to make a few more for our loading screens in-game.
Mamoonia
Our desert region is finally implemented! There's a couple roboty and other unique ooblets there and a lil quest involving keycaps for you to complete...
Another go at the friendship UI
I feel like we've redesigned this 100 times, but we've redesigned it again and this new version means you don't have to scroll vertically anymore.
New merch incoming...
We've got some new merch in our store and we'll be running a sale on our older largely-sized pins starting tomorrow or the next day. We'll announce it all on Twitter and probably the newsletter so be sure you're following us on one of those.
Thanks so much for being a part of our little community! We can't wait to have you all play the game!
How close are we to release? (and other updates)
It's a new month which means a new recap of everything we've been up to!
Overall progress
Our giant todo list has shrunk so much now but it's looking likely that when we launch, it will be as early access. Before you get out the pitchforks, remember that early access is just a label for us to say that we're still going to be working on the game and adding lots of content post-launch.
I think we'll be posting a more in-depth discussion about why and how we're planning on doing early access, so you might wanna wait until then before you start flipping tables.
Here are a few things we've still got to do before we can launch (even as early access):
Finish our badges/achievements system
4 more system introductions (scripts, quests, etc.)
Balance dance moves
Make a better main menu
Add another oven
Some quest UI changes
Friendship unlocks
Universal Windows build (surprisingly much harder than you’d think)
Xbox certification process
New stuff from February:
Settings page
Now there are loads of options for people who feel the need to be in control...
Messy farms
When you first start out, your farm now has all sorts of logs, rocks, and weeds on it you'll want to clear. Mixing the foraging systems in with the farming system was actually a pretty big project.
Gotsapon tokens
These are a rare alternate form of currency you can get from recycling stuff and use with the gotsapon machines to get new ooblet accessories.
Deflated balloon
Like a normal balloon but with less vivacity.
Interim decor purchasing
It's probably not our final pass at house decorations, but it's functional!
Recipes implemented
Our starter recipes have all been implemented (there are more than 2, don't worry). You'll get new ones in different crafting machines, some upgrades, and eventually through some other systems.
Thanks for reading!
What did we do last month??
So much work has been done on the game throughout January! Everything is actually coming together (we thought it never woullldddd) but we've still got a lot left to do.
You can get a better idea for how much work is left by reading our new devlog here.
It talks about our bug list, playtesting, a new character, move upgrades, and more.
An Ooblets year in review
Happy New Year!!
So much has happened in the world of Ooblets in 2018, we wrote a big post to go over it all:
I even made this clickbait thumbnail expertly tailored to YouTube sensibilities:
You can also read the devlog on our website, but here are some screenshots from it if you hate clicking ANYTHING but still wanna see what we were up to:
How we implemented gift giving in Ooblets
We're game developers, so we know how difficult social interactions can be. How to make friends is a problem we haven't quite figured out in real life, but we have come up with a solution in Ooblets!
Gift giving!
Okay, so giving gifts is not very unique to town-life and farming games, sure. It's also a little goofy... In real life, if you give gifts to people every day you're only going to weird them out.
In games, gift giving often has the issue of forcing the player to memorize or look up what people like, keeping track of when you can give stuff, and giving the same things over and over again.
We thought we'd take the concept of gift giving and shake it up a little:
WITH ROBOTS
More specifically, the Hankerbot!
The Hankerbot is an AI sorta thingy that anticipates townsfolks' needs and lets you know a couple of them each day so you can give them those items, if you feel like it.
So far, it just sends a letter to your mailbox every day with 3 townsfolk hankers, but we may eventually try some other ideas.
We’re not even 100% sure we’re gonna call it Hankerbot in the finished game (so don’t start writing Hankerbot fanfic just yet).
On the game design side, it sorta turns gift giving into a form of daily mini-quests. Besides giving more direction to the player, this also limits the number of gifts you can actually give out each day (because you can only give gifts to the people listed in the hanker report). On top of that, it lets us do some pacing to increase the difficulty of desired gifts as you progress through the game.
So far, implementing Hankerbot has felt like a really big improvement that clarifies a lot of gameplay for us, so we hope you like it, too!
Happy Halloween from your Ooblets pals!
We take the whole Halloween aesthetic pretty seriously in Ooblets... from our spooky Nullwhere region, home of the Creep Cultists:
to Glanter, our sorta-Halloween-inspired ooblet:
and now to our whole Halloween-themed shop, Vampire Bento:
It sells all sortsa stuff like masks, candles, and spooky decor and furniture.
Here are just some of the models of items we've chocked it full of:
Besides all that, we've had a very busy month working on non-Halloween stuff, as well.
Like some progress on secret stuff for the overarching story in the game...
what could it be??
Implementing the bulk goods quest system...
More forageable goods like shells, coral, and mushrooms...
As well as more farm expansion stuff, friendship gifting systems, and other junk.
Everything is coming along pretty great!
Have a fun Halloween!
Rebecca & Ben
Announcing Legsy! [and a devlog]
People have been HYPED about this new ooblet since we first teased it with the image above. When we unveiled it on social media a couple days later, the response was pretty intense. It was even covered on a Japanese gaming news site!
Anyway, here it is in all its glory:
Say hello to Legsy!
It was modeled by Rebecca and based off of this concept by Miski:
We asked people on Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr, Facebook, and Discord whether we should call it Amblobious or Legsy and after a very close race and many fierce supporters on each side, Legsy won out. We’ll probably still put Amblobious in there somewhere in its lore one way or another.
OH and check out this animation a fan made of Legsy-- it's incredible!
And as if this new ooblet weren’t enough for you, we’ve got other progress updates:
Badges
What’s Badgetown without BADGES??
This month we’ve been working on our achievements system. We’d originally started implementing this as a research tree, but we eventually had to come to terms with the fact that Ooblets isn’t actually a strategy game and so a research tree really didn’t fit.
Instead, we’ve flattened it out a bit and made each achievement a badge you can earn that rewards you with items, game bonuses, and things like extra followbaby spots. It can still act sorta like a research tree in that different badges become available after you’ve earned other badges, but it’s less pressure to make each one do some gameplay-changing unlock.
Farm expansion
We start you off with a pretty dinky farm so you’ll want to save your gummies up for this big unlock! Get a whole new section of farmable land through our new farm unlock system.
This is nice because it lets us put some of the farm in another scene to lower resource requirements and adds a level of progression to the farm gameplay.
Fruities!
While we’re still figuring out all the foraging aspects of the game, we decided it was a good idea to implement fruit trees around Badgetown that you can shake to get fruities.
We’re thinking you’ll eventually be able to plant your own fruit trees on your farm later in the game to increase production. Fruities will be wanted by NPCs as gifties as well as used in recipes.
Release date thoughts
Just to keep everyone on the same page (and because everyone’s always asking), I wanted to chat briefly about our release timeline. There are a lot of big things we still need to implement and everything ends up taking longer than we expect, which is sorta the nature of indie game development.
Right now, we’re looking at a release some time in 2019 and would love it if that meant the first quarter of 2019, but that’s just a goal. We’re still a bit too far away for making an accurate estimate, so we hope you’re patient with us so we can release the game in a decent state. It will be worth it!
Apologies for not updating all you fine folks here sooner!
We were traveling across the country for PAX West and XOXO Fest this month and as expected, got sick right at the end which knocked me out for like 5 days after we got back.
Anyway, now that we're up and running again I wanted to share a big new change we made to how the game plays.
BUT didja know how the dance battles actually worked??
Neither did we... Until we redesigned and reworked all the mechanics! Let's go over everything:
But first, a look back
So originally, our battle system was a sorta traditional RPG affair where each turn you could pick one move between up to 3 ooblets.
Typical damage, heals, buffs, cooldowns. BORING.
Then came the dancing...
When we did the dance battle conversion, it was basically just a really time-consuming reskin of what we already had.
Moves became dance moves, HP became "ego", poison became "lingering doubt", and the goal became to outdance your opponents. Underneath it all was the same basic mechanics as before. And it wasn’t really… fun.
We wanted more randomness, clearer strategy, and prettier images associated with the moves, so what else would we go with than…
CARDS!
Here’s how it works:
Each ooblet has a “deck” of dance moves that are randomly chosen from each turn to create a hand.
Your team's ooblet decks are combined if it’s a 2v2 or 3v3 match so some ooblets may have more/less moves than others each turn (each card border corresponds to its ooblet).
Moves have "beat" costs which are like action points, and you can play as many cards as you have available beats that turn.
The way we have it balanced now is that in a 1v1 dance you get 3 cards each turn, 2v2 you get 4, and 3v3 you get 5. That all might change eventually.
Some cards will give you more beats or more cards or do all sorts of weird stuff.
Deck building
After your ooblets level up, they’ll be able to learn new moves, which is basically just getting a new card for their deck.
We’re also planning a system for upgrading cards by feeding your ooblet different crops you grow on your farm.
What's cool to us about this card-based system is that we'd always wanted to put in an extensive collectable card minigame in Ooblets but figured we'd never actually find them time... Now it's part of the core gameplay!
Other stuff
There are a bunch of other little improvements as well, like changes to status effects to make them last the whole round (unless it's counteracted by another card). An example of this is our power buffs which we call "hype", which you can keep stacking on your team's ooblets to boost their moves.
Before, there were a bunch of confusing numbers all over the place for each buff/debuff to indicate its power and duration, so these changes make everything a bit clearer.
What do you think?
All in all, this new card-based gameplay change has finally made the battles FUN (at least to us, but we think you’ll agree).
It’s way easier to balance the overall game now and everyone who’s played the new demo at PAX seemed to grasp it really quickly and would keep trying to get into battles. That's gotta be a good sign!
But we'd love to hear your thoughts on everything. There are still lots of things we need to iron out with it and your input is always appreciated.
Thanks!!
-Ben & Rebecca
---
EDIT: Just wanted to clarify a few things based off of the comments we've been seeing:
The card system will be the core "combat" gameplay as part of the dance-offs.
Cards are not like a MAJOR departure from how it worked before... Each move before was basically a card without a picture. The new elements are that the available moves are somewhat randomized and instead of cooldowns it uses action points for what you can play.
It's not hard or complicated at all! In many ways it's easier than the previous system. Everyone who played the demo so far (which was a lot) figured it out instantly. It was honestly surprising how quickly folks took to it!
For people saying they liked the way it was before better, I really, really don't think you played the old demo-- and it's not like we went into a lot of detail into how things used to work. It really was slow and the cooldown mechanic meant you had to keep checking on stuff or trying to remember what moves were available-- it seriously just never worked and was always going to be replaced regardless of which direction we took it.
Thank you so much for all your feedback (good and bad)! Even if we don't necessarily agree with some interpretations, your responses help us figure out how to improve how we communicate the features and introduce changes!
Anyone else going to PAX??
BECAUSE WE ARE!!
We'll be at Booth 106 on the 4th floor near the Playstation area.
There's hopefully gonna be a little playable demo and some merch there, so come stop by and say hi!
