First devlog of 2020!!!

I don't want to get you excited, but ¡GET EXCITED! because 2020 is the YEAR OF THE OOB. It's been foretold in the prophecies/milestone calendar. That's really all I can say about that right now so feel free to draw all sorts of wild conclusions.

So what'd we get up to in January huh??

It's been a really weird year full of huge ups and downs for us. We weren't expecting it, but we've been on the receiving end of some of the worst and some of the best of humanity while we were in our pajamas trying to make a goofy little video game.

The outpouring of kindness and support we've received has meant more to us than anyone can probably imagine. We're so lucky to have such caring and friendly fans, and the negative attention from the usual corners of the internet really just highlighted that.

On the development side, everything is going really well. This year we got to a point where we could tie all our disparate wacky systems together and play with how they get along. From that starting point, we've been massaging everything into a cohesive, hopefully fun game by building up weaker systems, removing tangential stuff, and letting ourselves sometimes add a couple new systems (only where totally absolutely necessary of course...).

We thought we'd do something a little different this December, and post a normal devlog and a year in review separately because we didn't get around to posting anything for November and didn't want to skip out on two months of devlogs in a row.

We were all over the place this month, with progress on the intro, battle system, UI/UX, and balancing.

I really wish we had worked on some spooky stuff this month... but instead we were mainly focused on things like the dance battles and intro. Luckily we've still got some halloweeny stuff from last year that we'll have to live vicariously through for a second:

OKAY so back to what we were actually working on...

Hey everyone! We've been busy getting back in the swing of things and working hard on the game.

I don't want to get anyone's hopes up when I say this, but we've had a pretty playable version of the game for a while now. This has let us get some folks playtesting and giving us their feedback to help us figure out what we need to work on, and it's honestly still a lot left to do!

We took a bit of time to compile our thoughts about what's been going on since we first announced that we'd be launching on Epic. You can read it now at the following Medium link.

Before you click through to it, please be warned that the content includes screenshots that are very, very vulgar and upsetting and would not be appropriate for anyone sensitive to things like that (which is why we didn't post it here in our devlog).

https://medium.com/@perplamps/regarding-whats-been-happening-3af0f27d863c

Everyone kept talking about this "Epic" thing, so we thought we'd see what it's all about.

Here's what these Epic folks are doing: First they teach every kid in the world these obnoxious dances and now they're offering funding to game developers in exchange for PC exclusivity on their game store.

This is exactly what Marx warned us about!

Just imagine if other companies got it in their head to offer funding in exchange for exclusives. What'd be next? Game consoles paying for games to be exclusive on their consoles? Netflix paying for exclusive shows? Newspapers paying for exclusive articles? It'd be some sort of late capitalist dystopia.

Okay so goofing aside, yes, we've signed with Epic for PC launch exclusivity. It's incredible news for us and I'm hoping you all can be excited about it, too.

We asked Epic if we could talk frankly about the situation and they were like whatever, so here's a bit of insight into what this all means and why we did it:

This month has been punctuated by some big news that's kinda Ooblets-adjacent as well as some fun new stuff in the game itself. We're working as hard as we can to get the game finished (and fun) while also having a tiny itsy bitsy life outside of Ooblets, too.

This month has involved more secrets than we typically like to deal in... We'd love to tell everyone all the stuff that's going on, but if something doesn't work out we don't want to have to walk it all back and look like real dumdums.

There are also some secrets we're keeping because they're fun to reveal later, like hypothetical new ooblets...

Hello again! I try to write up a summary at the end of every month of what we've accomplished and dealt with. This past month has involved a lot of... unexciting changes, like balancing, bugfixing, filling in missing animations, and UI tweaks—but that's a good thing!

If the number of systems I'm adding or drastically changing is decreasing, it means we're not sooo far from a launch (there were still a couple of new systems we added though...)

So what have we been up to in April?