Howdo, sprouts! I’m Rebecca (aka @nonplayercat) the programmer and artist on Ooblets here to fill you in on what’s been going on with our lives and the game’s development over the past month.
If you’re new to Ooblets, here’s a quick lil rundown:
- It’s an indie RPG about farming, creature collection, and town life
- Besides the namesake of the game, ooblets are little creatures you grow and befriend
- Ooblets is being made by me and @perplamps as well as a few incredible freelancers
- We don’t know exactly when it will be out but we’re trying to get it finished by the end of 2018
- You’re gonna love it!
Now that you’re all caught up, let’s dig into what we’ve been up to:
Oobcoops version twobcoops
Back in September we introduced the concept of oobcoops as the Ooblets equivalent of Bill’s PC sorta doohickey. This month we decided to revisit the idea and flesh it out into something a lot more fun than just a UI panel.
The main idea behind oobcoops is that if you’ve grown a bunch of ooblets that aren’t in your active party (your followbabies as they’re called in game) you don’t want them to be sad and cold back on your farm, so you have to build little houses for them. Then we added this:
Now you can pop your head in the oobcoops and see your lil babies running around!
It’s one of those ideas where we said “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” and then we did it.
We’re planning to eventually add mini furniture and upgrades to the oobcoop interiors but I dunno if we’ll get to everything before release.
Taxes
In North America, April is the month of spring, a time to relax and enjoy nature and also panic about taxes. Now that we’ve made a company for the studio, our taxes have gotten a lot more difficult, but now we’ve compiled all our papers, signed everything in triplicate, and mailed everything out CERTIFIED, so it’s a big weight off our shoulders. Sure, taxes aren’t directly game-progress related, but we’ve been dealing with them so it’s goin’ in here! Gotta get some value from it.
We tend to take elements of our life and integrate them into the game, so maybe we’ll eventually put in a taxes minigame one day. Maybe it will be paid DLC… Tax DLC.
Content for days
We’ve talked about our bud Sander a lot before. He’s been making a bunch of 3D models for the game so I can focus more on programming these days without slowing down the influx of content.
Lately he’s been designing all sorts of delicious furniture and this month I finally got around to importing and implementing most of them.
We’ve been aiming for more themed sets so you can match up the furniture in your house.
This spooky set is my favorite!
Bustin buggies
Like real life insect exterminators, the work involved in removing bugs from games is not very glamorous. So while I don’t have any pretty screenshots to show you relating to it, I’ve spent a lot of time this month fixing lotsa broken things.
OH WAIT ACTUALLY, I do have one bug related screenshot:
…which is incidentally…
The newest nooblet: Bittle
Bittle is both our first bug-type ooblet and our first design based off a concept by Miski.
Here’s what her original concept looked like:
And here’s what its butt/shell looks like because why not:
Our backers on Patreon helped decide Bittle’s name from a couple other choices like Badbug and Scrabby, so if you want in on things like that you should become a patron too!
Dialogue
Ben (@perplamps) has been busy writing a bunch of dialogue and quests for the characters of Badgetown and this past month we’ve been implementing it all. That’s involved coming up with all sorts of importers, special syntaxes, and editor tools out the wazoo.
There’s still a lot of dialogue and quests that need to be written, but we’ve got a decent base and a pretty good idea of most of the characters already. Speaking of which…
We have a new character! Meet Churles
Churles is Badgetown’s clothing designer and owner of the town’s clothing shop, Kibbon-bon. Sort of a vertical integration thing going on.
He’s a bit finicky and fussy and hates touching doorknobs just like any sane person would who was aware of what germs live on a typical doorknob…
And another whole new character: Millew
Not all of us are easy to love. Millew can come across as a little abrasive, judgmental, and bitter, but I think it might be because he’s covering up some insecurities. Maybe you’ll be able to get over his annoying defense mechanisms and find the soft dork underneath it all?
E3???
We don’t quite know exactly where or how the game might be shown off at E3 this year, but we’re planning to announce a huge feature reveal during it regardless of who’s listening! I think you’re really gonna like what we have to show you.
Also, we’re debating about going in person to LA for E3 this year. Are other devs and artists thinking about going? Let us know and we can meet up if we do end up there!
So that’s it!
Thanks so much for checking out this devlog and if you’re into what we’re doing, please follow and share our stuff on all the things so we can get too big for our britches:
Love ya!
Rebecca