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Hello! It's me Ben writing to you. In case you're unfamiliar, I do the game design, writing, and other odds and ends on the game. Rebecca does the programming and art, and we also have a couple wonderful freelancers to fill in the gaps.
For those of you who are tooootally unfamiliar with all of this and don't know what this game is or where you are or how you got here, Ooblets is a game we're working on that's all about farming, creature collecting, and town life.
Let's do a quick recap of all the stuff that's gone on this month!
Grumboire
Want to check your quests, fiddle with some research tree junk, or see how your friendships are coming along? What about tracking all the ooblets and crops you've grown? You need a GRUMBOIRE!
A grumboire is a scientifimagical book you carry around (aka UI panel) that keeps track of all these things.
We were calling it "the almanac" internally but realized that name would not fit in the game at all, so I came up with the word grumboire which is a mix between grimoire and a nickname we gave to our cat (Grumbo).
One of the nice things about being an indie developer is that stuff doesn't go through a committee for anything so all our dumb ideas maintain their dumbness completely intact into production.
Introductory quests
We actually have two introductions concepted for the game...
One is a long weird intro we haven't talked about before that gives a lot of background as to why you're arriving in Oob, but we're not sure we'll have time to implement it.
The second intro is everything that happens when you arrive in Oob after that first possible intro. It's basically what you'd expect the game to start with, and it's what we've been working on this month.
We'd really love to complete both intros, but besides the development constraints, we're also a little worried that our entire intro sequence will take too long for players. For just the first two days of gameplay there's already 9 pages of dialogue I've written...
New ooblet??
We just have one solitary little ooblet to introduce to everyone this month. Rebecca's Patreon backers helped us name it Gumple:
We currently have 31 ooblets implemented so far and we're aiming to have at least 40 on launch.
Pantsabear Hill
Probably the first region you'll be visiting outside of Badgetown is the unassuming Pantsabear Hill. It's got a similar biome to Badgetown but there will be new plants and ooblets for you to discover there... and possibly a dangerously-brittle bridge...
Oh, and it's full of ticket scalpers in pantsabear costumes, but we'll explain all that in the game.
This month we also actually reimplemented the Nullwhere region with a new level design, but you'd only be able to notice the difference if you were playing the game!
The Dance Barn
After we switched the Mossprouts clubhouse over from a barn to a treehouse, we had that spare barn lying around unused. Now it's a dance barn! For when you want to dance in a barn.
10 million new hairdos
When Rebecca's feeling overwhelmed or stressed out, she retreats to making hairdos for a while to regroup. This has resulted in us having a LOT of hairdos. Making games is stressful.
Free cam prototyping
Our original plan was to have a sorta fixed camera angle but we've been testing out the ability to move the camera around the player. It adds a lot of work to make sure our scenes look decent from every direction, but there are scenarios where we might need that anyway. We'll see what future testers think about it.
Loading screen
Up until now, when you'd open the game you'd be met with a blank screen for a few seconds while everything loaded. Now, we've finally got a loading screen. We've spent a lot of time perfecting the artistry of this and I hope you can appreciate the finer details of it. We wanted it to really show the depth of personality Ooblets has:
But seriously, there must be some work that goes into this I assume since Rebecca called me over to show it to me when she added it...
Furniture
Our lovely pal and amazing freelanster Sander made a bunch of new furniture for folks to decorate their houses with. These are what they look like before being put into the game:
Newsletter
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We actually spend a lot of money on this dumb mailchimp subscription to be able to send out all these emails, so you'd better read them!!
Anyway!
That's it for this devlog. We'd love to hear what you think about it all, so let us know through any of these social media-y thingies:
Thanks for being our pals!