Friends and Soon-to-be-Friends,
Has it really been just one week after we launched into Early Access? We’ve had a pretty amazing launch and it’s been an incredible experience to see you play and enjoy our game. We've enjoyed so many streams and let's plays, articles and youtube reviews, fan art big and small! We've seen a steam review with already more than 50 hours on record? (Please don't forget to sleep, eat and stay hydrated when playing Oddsparks.) It's been wonderful to see the reception and we want to especially thank you for all of the Steam reviews because they really help us be more visible.
In general, we see this as a really good sign that yes, while our game is in Early Access and there’s lots of things that need more polishing (I’m looking at you, build menu), you enjoy our vision, and the core game really works for a lot of people! Most of our team are deep in working for the next update - and you can already check out the roadmap on the last steam news.
It’s a bit bare, but we don’t like to overpromise. Of course, we have broad strokes for the full game and know what we want to explore. However, until we feel more confident about what we want to show, we’d rather just focus on the next update, and in general, tell you our pace and and how many updates we’re planning.
Known Issues and Upcoming Patches
So let’s talk a bit about some issues our game has and what we’re planning to do with them. That’s the whole point of Early Access, after all. We’ve been looking at every review and read every email, discord messages, steam discussion post and there’s a lot of feedback.
We’ve been doing patches for crashes (you might have noticed), and of course, we’ll keep fixing crashes when we can, but we wanted to talk about a few issues, when and how we’re planning to fix it, and our thoughts behind why this issue popped up and also, when we fix these issues and why.
We figured it’d be interesting for you to know our thought process, so when you see an issue, you can already kind of guess when it’ll be taken care of.
Missing Localization
We’ll be patching in the localization as soon as we can - Oddsparks has a surprisingly large amount of text for something that’s not too narrative focused (about 30k words at the moment!), and sometimes things change last minute. In general, we’ve seen that people have been playing well with our core texts translated, but we completely understand that it’s annoying when things aren’t translated. We’ll update it as soon as we can. Likely, within a few weeks.
As we update the game, sometimes other languages may fall behind - but of course, we’ll update the game with the new text and new languages when we can. We want everyone to have a great experience with the game, whatever language you play it in.
Disappearing Teleporters
So while every person working on Oddsparks have about 200-500 hours clocked in Steam on the game, the collective amount of hours that the game gets played when it’s live absolutely surpasses the amount of hours we’ve spent playing and testing it. We never saw this bug before and, of course, it makes the game unplayable. So we’ve been trying to fix it as soon as we can - in fact, it's already been fixed since Tuesday!
In general, bugs that hugely affect gameplay are a high priority for us. We’ll try to fix these things as soon as we can. Of course, we first have to figure out why, fix it, test the fixes for stability, so it can take a few days.
Delivery Chest requirement not clear enough
Sometimes, when you’re developing a game, you get blindspots. We didn’t realise just how much people would get tripped up with the delivery chest! At some point in the game, you need to unlock and build the delivery chests, but we didn't make it explicit. We did a “quick fix” right before release, but it doesn’t help that it was only changing the quest text last minute. This meant that while people playing in English got a hint, people playing in other languages did not. Sorry about that!
But since we saw a lot of people getting tripped up by it, we’ll be making it significantly more obvious by asking you to build the delivery chests as part of first few quests that need them.
Design “bugs” like these are usually not high priority for us, but it depends on how badly they affect gameplay. We’ve seen multiple bug reports and questions about this issue, and when you didn't realise that you need the delivery chest, this bug is a blocker, so we’ve also prioritised it, and it’s on a similar level to the Disappearing Teleporters bug and was fixed on Tuesday.
Can’t trash items
This feature will come with the next big update in August! We already knew before release that we’d need an item sink or trash can feature. After all, Oddsparks is a game where you start with infinite resources and at some point, you just have too much stuff. However, we focused on a few other things first, especially because we wanted something a little more interesting than just to throw away stuff. So the feature will come in August with some fun bells and whistles.
In general, design issues that are not game blocking are tackled either in small updates in-between the big updates, or if they’re a bigger feature, in a big update. This is also often the case with some visual bugs. We’ll try to tackle them all as we continue developing!
Community Shoutouts!
We really want to shout out our Discord and the wonderful community that's grown with us. Now that a lot of people are joining with the game released, everyone is sharing so much stuff with such kindness. We love seeing people answer and ask questions, share builds, seeds and tips and tricks. We also see that a wiki is also being started!
We especially want to shout out and say thanks to each and every person writing out all the bugs that they're finding and working with us to answer problems about any issues that they face. It really helps us so much in making the game better!
We don't always have time to respond (We have a game to make! It's already hard enough not to just spend a lot of time watching people play.) but there's a few of us taking notes and seeing what we can do to make the game better and what we should do next.
For now, here's a few very cool things we wanted to share with you.
2-bit adder by Tsukaiyo
We're adding Logic in the next update, but we've seen folks already started to use Sparks to figure out how to make logic stuff themselves! It's still in progress, but here's a 2-bit adder that was shared in our discord. It's still some ways to go, but we look forward to someone recreating Doom in Oddsparks.
Retired Save by *&
*& showed off an amazing and annotated retired base in our Discord. Just like other automation games, if you want Maximum Efficiency, the bottleneck will end up being your CPU. However, if you want to try, there's nothing stopping you from building a base with literally thousands of Stumpies! You just... might not get a lot of frames per second in those areas anymore and might need to retire your base.
Aether Shard generator by Grand
So yes, there is a way to infinitely generate Aether Shards with just automation later in game. For proof, here is a screenshot showing off Grand's Aether Shard generator that's working at 100% efficiency, able to create 168 shards per minute!
We had to lower the quality of some of the images to make them fit Steam News, but you can find them at our #base-showcase channel!
As a final thing, we do want to say that while we love seeing people push our game to the absolute limits, we feel just as happy with people celebrating their little wins. We love seeing small spaghetti-pathed workshops that aren't particularly efficient, and just seeing people's delight at tackling a puzzle they perhaps never would have thought they could do. We're super happy to see folks who've never tried out this genre enjoy Oddsparks. We've even heard that people are playing our game with their 9-year-old!
Thank you so much for joining us in our Early Access journey, and we'll talk more very soon!