Greetings Nublings! Welcome to the very first edition of Weekly Nubby News!
My, my, it has been a week.
I'd like to start by introducing myself for those I haven't had the pleasure to meet yet. My name is Ethan, and I go by the alias, MogDog. I am the solo developer of Nubby's Number Factory and I run the game development studio, "MogDogBlog Productions".
The point of Weekly Nubby News is to keep you informed on what's going on in the development of Nubby. I plan on doing these weekly / bi-weekly and I'm not stopping anytime in the foreseeable future. I think it's important to stay transparent with where I'm at on progress with the game.
In these letters, I will be addressing player concerns and setting expectations for what's to come to Nubby. If you'd like to discuss ANY of the topics I go over in this letter, I am active in the community and I will try to participate. I'm very open to criticism and my opinions and beliefs can be swayed from a well-made argument.
I'll start with some FAQs from players in a Q&A format.
FAQS:
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Q: Are you gonna add more content?
A: Yes! Absolutely! Nubby's still got plenty of room for improvement, and I love working on it. I can't see myself being done with it anytime soon. You'll all be receiving plenty of free content updates to the game in the coming months.
Q: Will there ever be a DLC?
A: Most likely. There are a lot of concepts that I've been kicking around that are a little too deep to fit into the base game. I think these ideas would be perfect for people who love Nubby and are ready to take a step into deeper strategy, math, and progression.
Q: Is there going to be achievements?
A: Yes. However, I am going to take my time on them and think them through like a decent game developer, instead of rushing them and throwing out a pile of crap for players to stumble over. To be completely transparent, that's what happened with the challenges. I cannot give a specific date for the achievements, but they are coming.
Q: Will there be mobile port?
A: That depends on how well I'm doing financially a couple months from now. At the pace we're going, I would absolutely capitalize on the mobile market because I think Nubby is a perfect game for that format (no microtransactions, I swear).
Q: Will there be a console/switch port?
A: I have not made any plans to do so and the game isn't popular enough to get a port for those. Yet.
(I would do it if I got the chance)
Q: Will there be localization?
A: Yes! There will! I have people who I know will be localizing the game for Russian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French. If you would like to help out with localization, I am 100% willing to take you in. Reach out to me (@[email protected]) if you would like to help!
Q: When will there be localization?
A: Once the game is stable, and balanced (or at least sort of balanced), I am going to start allowing translations. I believe this will come in 1-2 months. Apologies for the wait time.
Player Concerns:
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-A lot of players do not like the challenges, and REALLY don't like that supervisors are barred behind challenges. I'm going to amend that in the coming update. More info on the challenges/supervisor unlock system rework below.
-There are remarks that the scaling in Nubby is fundamentally flawed, and restocks technically don't matter. I want to clarify some things, and talk about how I plan to fix the problem. I'll try my best to explain my rationale here - basically, I need the round goal to be consistently difficult throughout the game to make it exciting. The problem that people have is that they'll restock 5000x times, and be no better off than restocking 1x time in the next round. As many of you have noticed, this is because the round goal scales to how well you're doing. The round goal is calculated by adding the sum total of all pegs and their factors together, and multiplying the total by an ever-increasing number, which is consistent throughout runs. If the score scaled in a linear fashion and you just so happened to restock 9999x times at round 42 for example, the rest of the game would be stupidly easy. Because scores vary so much in Nubby throughout runs, it needs to be this way.
-Now that I've explained the rationale - the issue of "then why should I even care if I get 9999x restocks?" still persists and is completely valid. I want to amend this by implementing permanent stat/variable upgrades (that would cost a lot of coins) , and add more permanent buffs from food items in the shop. This is going to be an experiment. (again, feel free to discuss this in the comments, if you have another idea for a possible solution to the "coins are worthless" problem)
-Moving on, there have been concerns about there being too much RNG involved in various aspects of the game. I would like to say that the comments about this have heavily swayed my opinions towards my usage of RNG, and I want to rework some of those aspects to be more decision based, rather than luck based
The Future of Nubby:
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-Now on to the fun part, a big ol' content update (Version 1.3) is coming down the pipeline!
-I'm going to be adding (THIS IS TENTATIVE) ~12 new items, ~12 new foods, and ~10 new perks. This isn't going to be the last of this sort of update either. I have a lot of ideas for items, and I really want build variety and clear build paths to shine brighter than it currently is.
-In V1.3, I'm going to try my hand at delivering challenges that are actually decent. As of now, a couple of them are fun and actually make the player change their strategy to overcome a challenge, rather than arbitrarily disabling x feature and causing frustration. Not all challenges will be reworked, but most will have a change made to them.
-This update will change the way supervisors are unlocked. There will be an experience system, where you gain experience from doing well on runs, and supervisors will be unlocked based on your experience level. To me, this seems like a fair system that rewards good runs with new content. Once again, your feedback is appreciated.
-On a side note, the wonderful musician, Vinegart, is putting together some zone-specific variants of the theme songs to give the zones a more distinct personality. When this update is rolled out, the soundtrack will be available for purchase on the steam page. If you like the soundtrack, pick it up! All proceeds from the soundtrack are going directly to Vinegart, so support him. The man is an artist.
-Finally, there will be a plethora of bug/crash fixes for this update (the current version is admittedly a little rough around the edges. My bad...)
***You can expect this update to arrive before March 30.
Final Notes:
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To end on a high note, this week changed my life. I cannot believe that we're sitting here with such positive ratings in the first 10 days of release.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for the support. I truly love making games, and now I can focus on my passion full time.
Long live Nubby!
-Mog