For quite a while, we’ve been working super hard on a big new feature/reimagining of a core gameplay mechanic in the game, and we’re finally ready to reveal it.

We try to have a very open development and not keep secrets from our audience, but we thought this particular big feature needed a bit of work before we could properly show it off. Plus, we figured it would be fun to do a little sudden reveal!

But now we think it’s ready to share, so here it is:

Watch the reveal trailer here! <-- CLICK CLICK CLICK


In case it wasn’t clear enough in the reveal video, we’ve replaced our old traditional battle system with a DANCE OFF system!



No more dogfighting your adorable friends anymore!

Here’s how it works:

Wild ooblets and other characters will want to prove their dance skills against your ooblet team. Agree to a call out and the music starts pumpin and a crowd starts forming to watch.



Your ooblets have different dance moves they can perform that will either show off to your opponents, fluster them, or hype up your own team.

Here are the terms we’re using (although they might change):

• Ego - This is the equivalent to hitpoints, and if an ooblet runs out of ego during a dance off, they’ll run home in SHAME
• Crash - This is a randomized event that nullifies a move (like a miss), and can be affected by accessories or other moves.
• Fresh - This is a randomized event/buff that increases the power of a move, sorta like a critical hit. Its probability of happening can be affected by accessories or other moves.
• We’re still working out some of the other terminology!

As your ooblets get more experience you can teach them new dance moves. Each ooblet type will have a sort of moveset or specialty, like Pantsabears may all be ego healers or Clickyclaws may all act as tanks.



We’re also working on this Dance Barn locale and system that will let you jump into friendly battles in Badgetown against other trainers around town. You might have seen pictures of the barn before, so now you know what it’s for!


Since we first started showing our trailers and GIFs, people have really latched on to all the dancing we’ve shown in the game. But we didn’t know where dancing could naturally fit in the gameplay. Now we do!

People can suspend their disbelief a bit and be okay with their creatures fighting, but the idea that you’re throwing your tiny friends into the equivalent of dogfights doesn’t really fit the tone of Ooblets where everything is cute and friendly.



For a while we’ve tried to limit the violent side of battles by replacing hitpoints with ego, fainting/death with running home, and making the attacks look kinda goofy, but at the end of the day, it was still a traditional creature battle. Like everything we try to do, we wanted to base our ideas off of things we like but infuse our own personality and goofiness into them. Dance offs were the perfect solution!



On top of all this, we’ve had a bunch of people asking for ways they could play the game without getting into any fights, so this might be a good compromise.


We wanted dance offs in Ooblets to feel like those kids movies where people settle disputes through sudden choreographed dances that somehow take on a weird air of social importance. Crazy lights, a boombox that appears out of thin air, an excited audience gathered round…



From a technical standpoint, this involved a lot of things:

• Particles! - There are so many particle effects that need to be set up for every aspect of the dance-offs.
• Animation - We can’t mocap for ooblets, so we had to hand-make custom animations for each of the dances, reactions, and stuff. We’re aiming for about 4 moves per ooblet and will have about 40 ooblets by launch, so we knew we couldn’t get 160 unique animations. Instead, we’re going to mix combinations of particle effects and animations to get as much variety as we can out of limited ingredients.
• Music - Besides a greater focus on the battle music and adding some more variety to it, our composer Slime Girls has been experimenting with a few ideas about how we can layer stuff to do fun effects between the moves and music.
• Lighting - From the screenshots and videos you probably can see all the dancey lights flitting around. It’s a little thing but it took a while to get it looking the way we wanted.
• Writing - Thankfully we’ve been planning the dance battle conversion for a really long time, so most of the dialogue and scripts fit with everything. It has been a bit silly how we have to write around every dispute getting resolved through ooblet dance-offs, but I think that just adds to the goofiness of everything.

There’s still a lot of work to do on the dance off system. It’s got way more bits and bobs than a traditional battle system and we keep running into new obstacles all the time.



We’re still playing around with the UI so it will likely be a bit different at launch than you’d see in any current screenshots.

We need to design a lot more moves, which involves coming up with what they do, their names, their animations, their particle effects, and hooking everything up in engine.

The biggest task left, though, is LOTSA playtesting and balancing. Gotta make it fun!


Our launch is still a ways off, but you can follow along with Ooblets development by becoming a $1/m member of my Patreon, which will send email updates and behind the scenes looks at what we’re doing.



If you haven’t wishlisted Ooblets on Steam yet, do that now! It should email you when the game is released. Our goal is still to launch by the end of the year but it may very well be pushed beyond that, so we don’t want to make any promises just yet.

Thanks for being a part of Ooblets!

Rebecca

We're suuuper happy to announce that we've been invited to the E3 PC Gaming Show!

There will be a lil reveal of something we've been working really hard on in the game so you'd better be there!

Catch it June 11 on https://twitch.tv/pcgamer

You can find more info about it here

---

Make sure to keep up with oobnews on our Discord and Twitter!



Love ya!

It’s ya girl Rebecca here, trying to sound cool (I’m still workshopping personal intros).

So it’s the end of another month and that means that the only thing you’ve been looking forward to all this time—another Ooblets devlog—is here.

Despite spending most of our time working on something super top secret that we’ll be revealing around E3 (which I’ll talk a bit more about below), we actually still ended up with a decent amount of cool things I can show you.

Take a look IF YOU DARE:


E3 is fast approaching and folks have been asking us what our involvement might be this year.

We’re not gonna make it there in person and I think we can safely say we won’t have a demo or anything on the show floor, but Ooblets will be a part of the festivities in one way or another.

We recently found out that we get to be a part of something we’re super excited about but I don’t think we can announce it just yet. WITHIN this secret thing we’ve got an even bigger secret thing to show off, so there’s a lot to get hyped for.


Most of the work we’ve done this month has actually been related to the big secret thing we’ll be revealing around E3, so that’s like 90% of our potential devlog content we can’t post. Instead, please accept this gif of some dumb mocapped gestures I did:




As you can see above, we’ve been adding in a bunch of new animations. We do the mocap ourselves on a cheap-as-far-as-mocap-goes $1000 system that involves strapping a bunch of sensors all over our bodies. [That product link isn’t an endorsement just yet since we want to play with the system a bit more before giving a final verdict, or until they give us a bunch of money to say nice things about them.]



There’s a whole post about it on my Patreon if you’re interested.

We’ve also been working with an animator to get sleeker hand-made animations like this hoeing one:



If you think that’s the sort of thing we could mocap and not need an animator for, you should have seen us trying to mime what we imagine farming looks like in our living room…


Ben has been working on filling in all the dumb dialogue for the townspeople of Badgetown. We’re aiming to have about 40 dumb things each character will say (which could range from a single dumb line to a whole dumb conversation), and across 16+ characters that ends up being a lot of dumb lines.




In the latest cake-based scientific breakthrough, characters can now visually hold items.



We’ve had item holding for a little while, but this month I came up with a new way to get them to adjust their arm/hand positions to actually sorta grasp the items with their useless little club hands instead of just awkwardly hoverhanding them.


Since I’ve made way too many feminine hairstyles, I asked my bud Sander to design some dude-style hairdos to even things up, and he went all out. Here are just some of them:



Now you can be a conehead, a stooge, one of those dudes from the Matrix 2, or an Elvis impersonator. Like some sort of fever-dream Village People.


I’ve taken a break from outer-Badgetown region design for a while, so we thought we’d ask Sander to do it instead. We’ve tried doing the layout for our desert region like 3 times and not been super happy with it yet, so maybe he’ll come up with something we can use.

Here’s a little peek at what he’s done so far:




Even we were not immune to the effects of the GDPR, and so as to not have to deal with too many hassles, we decided to just shut down our mailing list after just 4 emails.

For you weirdos who want to keep getting emails from me, the best way is to join the $1/m tier on my Patreon which will get you even more emails from me.

Since shutting down the mailing list a couple days ago, like 65 new people decided to become patrons, which is nice consolation.

Over the past month, my patrons have gotten to see new potential pin designs, a guide on how I mix 3D meshes in UI, a look at the terminology we’ve come up with in the game, and that mocap post I talked about.


Our next big focus will be finishing Badgetown, the friendship system, and trying to get the game in a state suitable for early testing. So much stuff to do… but we got this. Just gotta keep telling myself that.

Make sure you’re following along with all our junk on Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook so you don’t miss anything, especially with whatever might be unveiled around E3…

Love ya!

Rebecca

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:




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.


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.




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!


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…




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!




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…




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…




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?


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!


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:

• Twitter
• Youtube
• Patreon
• Tumblr
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Reddit
• Discord

Love ya!
Rebecca

Check out the video here!

Welcome to the highly-anticipated March Devlog. And what a wonderful March we're having! It's the beginning of spring here, there's no international trade war, and we're all having a great time doing typical March things.

Okay okay so we're a little late getting this devlog out but we've been told that's just how indie games go 🤷

Without wasting any more time, let's jump right in to all the fun stuff we've been up to:


We've made a lot of character designs throughout development— over 40 so far. Here are just a few:



Most of these were designed with the main concern being speed of implementation. Over time, we've thought a bit more about what resonates with people and decided to take another pass at our core neighborhood cast to be more visually identifiable, unique, and interesting.

Making characters takes a long time, so we've only made a couple new ones so far, but lemme introduce them:

Rugnolia



She's 1 part scientist to 1 part hipster, and can be found experimenting on things you probably haven't even heard about over in the Lernery. She's too cool for school because she was advance-placed right out of it.

Gimble



Gimble is Badgetown's balloon pilot, which is much rougher work than it sounds. She's been through her share of scrapes but is always ready for the next ill-fated adventure. That ear-horn is so she can hear you ring the balloon bell from anywhere in Oob and come pick you up.

Tinstle



Tinstle is not only the most popular and well-liked girl in Badgetown, she's also the mayor. You can tell from her little hat and sash. She's all about helping people reach their potential and become good tax-paying citizens.

Urpa



Okay, this one isn't all that visually distinguished but she's got a springbean in her hair so that's something. Urpa runs the café and we'll try to add some more character to her later. Check back with us.

If you're wondering who the green-haired hippie from the GIF at the top is, so are we... We haven't sorted out a character for that model yet.


Besides building up your farm, house, ooblet team, and item collections, we wanted to add some personal development to all these progressions.



We decided to create a player level system where you meet different requirements to level up and then use your level points to unlock bonuses like faster crafting speed or more followbaby spots.

We'll probably make either the levels or the bonuses take the form of badges since we've not really implemented many badges in the game and need to live up to Badgetown's name.


In the last devlog, we introduced the concept of the grumboire. We can now show you what it looks like:



So fancy!

And we can introduce a few of its features that have been implemented so far, like ooblet and plant panels:





Consider them introduced.

There's not much to say, but each ooblet or plant you grow will show up in your grumboire in these panels so you can keep track of what you've discovered so far.




Scavenging for items and clearing out weeds from town has been totally revamped. Throughout Badgetown and other regions, there will be set "grow points" where things can spring up. Each grow point has a list of potential items and will pick from them randomly when it's empty.




While a lot of farming games tend to use a box at your farm to sell things to, we decided to go with selling things in the seed shop. To buy things you just interact with the physical items in the shop, but if you want to sell stuff from your inventory you interact with the cash register.

It's going to be limited to specific items that would reasonably fit the theme of a seed shop (mainly crops and craftables) so we may expand the system to the other types of shops for other things. I'm hoping we'll have enough time to make the player shop functional and fun enough to take on a lot of the sales gameplay, but we honestly haven't touched all that in a while.




I've snuck glimpses of Rebecca surreptitiously experimenting with different wavy flag techniques for months. It's clearly some sort of passion project; her white whale. But just the other day she comes up to me pleased as punch to announce she's now a flag expert and has figured out how to make the perfect low-resource-using flags by modulating frequencies and amplitudes and it involves sine waves or something— I wasn't really paying attention.

Regardless, this was a big step forward in Ooblets flag technology and it's bound to revolutionize Badgetown.

The cupcake graphic on the flag represents the Frunbuns ooblet club and was drawn by our lovely pal Bree Lundberg Here's the set:



In case you need help, the order is: Mimpins, Peaksnubs, Mossprouts, and Frunbuns.


You may know that we have a little Patreon where we post more behind the scenes stuff and other oobletty goodness. Over the past month we shared:

- A set of phone wallpapers



- Ooblet concept designs by Miski



- Results of our first newsletter



- How we recolor assets with lazy unwrapping



Plus:

- A sneak peek at our sales UI
- How we felt about missing GDC
- A bunch of cat GIFs, pictures, and videos for people in the Cat Weirdo tier

If you'd like to see more of this kind of thing, you should become a patron now!




Clicky here to get to her profile!

Rebecca has started using Instagram again and this time I'm intent on getting her to post to it more, so you should go follow her to justify my nagging.




We asked our friend Mark Usmiani to design some new emojis for our surprisingly vibrant Discord server. You should join up now if you haven't already and then you can try to obnoxiously fit these babies into all your conversations.


As always, make sure you're following along with all the Ooblets stuff on Twitter, Tumblr, and our new mailing list so you never miss anything. We're looking forward to sharing more with you as we continue our journey through making Ooblets, so I hope you stick with us!

Ben & Rebecca

Check out the video here!

Welcome to the highly-anticipated March Devlog. And what a wonderful March we're having! It's the beginning of spring here, there's no international trade war, and we're all having a great time doing typical March things.

Okay okay so we're a little late getting this devlog out but we've been told that's just how indie games go 🤷

Without wasting any more time, let's jump right in to all the fun stuff we've been up to:


We've made a lot of character designs throughout development— over 40 so far. Here are just a few:



Most of these were designed with the main concern being speed of implementation. Over time, we've thought a bit more about what resonates with people and decided to take another pass at our core neighborhood cast to be more visually identifiable, unique, and interesting.

Making characters takes a long time, so we've only made a couple new ones so far, but lemme introduce them:

Rugnolia



She's 1 part scientist to 1 part hipster, and can be found experimenting on things you probably haven't even heard about over in the Lernery. She's too cool for school because she was advance-placed right out of it.

Gimble



Gimble is Badgetown's balloon pilot, which is much rougher work than it sounds. She's been through her share of scrapes but is always ready for the next ill-fated adventure. That ear-horn is so she can hear you ring the balloon bell from anywhere in Oob and come pick you up.

Tinstle



Tinstle is not only the most popular and well-liked girl in Badgetown, she's also the mayor. You can tell from her little hat and sash. She's all about helping people reach their potential and become good tax-paying citizens.

Urpa



Okay, this one isn't all that visually distinguished but she's got a springbean in her hair so that's something. Urpa runs the café and we'll try to add some more character to her later. Check back with us.

If you're wondering who the green-haired hippie from the GIF at the top is, so are we... We haven't sorted out a character for that model yet.


Besides building up your farm, house, ooblet team, and item collections, we wanted to add some personal development to all these progressions.



We decided to create a player level system where you meet different requirements to level up and then use your level points to unlock bonuses like faster crafting speed or more followbaby spots.

We'll probably make either the levels or the bonuses take the form of badges since we've not really implemented many badges in the game and need to live up to Badgetown's name.


In the last devlog, we introduced the concept of the grumboire. We can now show you what it looks like:



So fancy!

And we can introduce a few of its features that have been implemented so far, like ooblet and plant panels:





Consider them introduced.

There's not much to say, but each ooblet or plant you grow will show up in your grumboire in these panels so you can keep track of what you've discovered so far.




Scavenging for items and clearing out weeds from town has been totally revamped. Throughout Badgetown and other regions, there will be set "grow points" where things can spring up. Each grow point has a list of potential items and will pick from them randomly when it's empty.




While a lot of farming games tend to use a box at your farm to sell things to, we decided to go with selling things in the seed shop. To buy things you just interact with the physical items in the shop, but if you want to sell stuff from your inventory you interact with the cash register.

It's going to be limited to specific items that would reasonably fit the theme of a seed shop (mainly crops and craftables) so we may expand the system to the other types of shops for other things. I'm hoping we'll have enough time to make the player shop functional and fun enough to take on a lot of the sales gameplay, but we honestly haven't touched all that in a while.




I've snuck glimpses of Rebecca surreptitiously experimenting with different wavy flag techniques for months. It's clearly some sort of passion project; her white whale. But just the other day she comes up to me pleased as punch to announce she's now a flag expert and has figured out how to make the perfect low-resource-using flags by modulating frequencies and amplitudes and it involves sine waves or something— I wasn't really paying attention.

Regardless, this was a big step forward in Ooblets flag technology and it's bound to revolutionize Badgetown.

The cupcake graphic on the flag represents the Frunbuns ooblet club and was drawn by our lovely pal Bree Lundberg Here's the set:



In case you need help, the order is: Mimpins, Peaksnubs, Mossprouts, and Frunbuns.


You may know that we have a little Patreon where we post more behind the scenes stuff and other oobletty goodness. Over the past month we shared:

- A set of phone wallpapers



- Ooblet concept designs by Miski



- Results of our first newsletter



- How we recolor assets with lazy unwrapping



Plus:

- A sneak peek at our sales UI
- How we felt about missing GDC
- A bunch of cat GIFs, pictures, and videos for people in the Cat Weirdo tier

If you'd like to see more of this kind of thing, you should become a patron now!




Clicky here to get to her profile!

Rebecca has started using Instagram again and this time I'm intent on getting her to post to it more, so you should go follow her to justify my nagging.




We asked our friend Mark Usmiani to design some new emojis for our surprisingly vibrant Discord server. You should join up now if you haven't already and then you can try to obnoxiously fit these babies into all your conversations.


As always, make sure you're following along with all the Ooblets stuff on Twitter, Tumblr, and our new mailing list so you never miss anything. We're looking forward to sharing more with you as we continue our journey through making Ooblets, so I hope you stick with us!

Ben & Rebecca

Real quick before we start, you should join our newsletter! We haven’t sent any yet but I think we’re going to soon.

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.


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.

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…

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.



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!





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.



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.

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…

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:







Are you one of those weirdos who does something other than scroll through thousands of posts on social media all day??

Then this is for you: Ooblets news tooted directly into your inbox!


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!!

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:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Discord
• Tumblr

Talking about and sharing Ooblets stuff really helps us out as we try to get the word out to the unwashed masses. If you need even more Ooblets news and behind the scenes stuff, check out Rebecca’s Patreon.

Thanks for being our pals!

Real quick before we start, you should join our newsletter! We haven’t sent any yet but I think we’re going to soon.

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.


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.

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…

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.



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!





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.



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.

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…

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:







Are you one of those weirdos who does something other than scroll through thousands of posts on social media all day??

Then this is for you: Ooblets news tooted directly into your inbox!


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!!

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:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Discord
• Tumblr

Talking about and sharing Ooblets stuff really helps us out as we try to get the word out to the unwashed masses. If you need even more Ooblets news and behind the scenes stuff, check out Rebecca’s Patreon.

Thanks for being our pals!

Watch our January 2018 devlog video here

What a month it’s been! We’ve gotten so much done on the game that it’s crazy to look back on everything– but that’s EXACTLY WHAT WE’RE GONNA DO!

So what have we been upppp tooooo? Read on in what we hope will be delight, fair oobfans:



You know all those towns that are situated on artificial floating islands you see everywhere? Even Ooblets isn’t immune to their presence, because that’s just what Port Forward is. It’s the newest region we’ve added and it’s also probably the most complete, as well.



The idea behind it is that it’s a little eclectic town that floats in the water. We’re planning on putting in a few smallish shops in it that you’ll be able to visit during and after completing the region storyline. No spoilers, but the story involves ¡REVOLUCIÓN!

Were you under the misconception that all ooblets were plant-based just because you grow them in the ground? We’re here with a handful of nooblets to prove you completely wrong once and for all. You should be ASHAMED



Meet Firmo and Sidekey, two new little robotic-themed babs that were designed and modeled by our very talented friend Sander.



And these delightful and distinctive babbos are Gubwee, Kingwa, and Skuffalo. I guess Gubwee is sorta plant-based but that’s beside the point. These three were all designed by bitmOO and modeled by Sander.

Didja know?? Ooblets have different rarity levels, but by far the rarest of all ooblets are their GLEAMY variations.



They’re pretty easy to spot in the wild. Battling one has a pretty good chance of producing a GLEAMY seed for you to grow your own GLEAMY.



Why do I keep writing GLEAMY in all caps? you might ask. Well dummy, it’s because THAT’S THE OFFICIAL SPELLING. Also it doesn’t stand for anything, it just needs to be said with excitement.

✨ GLEAMIES! ✨



We’ve now got a PLETHORA of crafting machines, ranging from your bog standard gooperator to your more high-end soggifier.



Check out these babies! They’re ready to ground your springbeans, goop your clustered custard, and slurry your nurnies.



We’ve also made a brand new crafting system and UI to go along with it:



There’s always room for bloppycake!

You’ve got [test]!



Who doesn’t like getting mail huh?? Unfortunately our example correspondent Bazil here isn’t the most articulate just yet, but we’re hoping his vocabulary will expand in time.

We’ve got some new interiors made, like this Mimpins underground clubhouse:



And this hair salon:





It might not sound that interesting, but it’s actually a really cool feature! It allows you to place certain smaller objects on top of other furniture so you can get that Sims 4 style decor going. Eventually you’ll be able to place little plants, figurines, trophies, and other junk on your dressers, bookshelves, and tables!



Cover girl! Ooblets was on !!the cover!! of PC Gamer’s Indie Issue with an awesome article feature. I don’t think there are enough adjectives to describe how excited and floored we were about this.

Ooblets was also featured in a bunch of fancy lists for anticipated games of 2018, like IGN’s, GamesRadar’s, Sweety High’s, and les Inrocks’ (which is French I guess!). Now we just need to get the game finished in 2018…

We had a couple big milestones over the past month or so on Patreon. We surpassed 500 patrons and $1750/m, which is totally nutso. People keep joining all the time so we keep posting more fun stuff:


Who is this handsome lad??

This past month, patrons have gotten to hear a new music track from the game, seen new ooblet concepts like the ones above, participated in a super secret live stream Q&A we did, got a sneak peek at all the new crafting machines and the new crafting UI, saw some dumb cat gifs of our dumb cats, and hung out in the supporters channel in our Discord.

If you’d like to join our Patreon, you can do so here, but only do it if you want the rewards and have the disposable income. We’re not struggling for money (yet, at least) so please don’t feel any pressure to support us.

We haven’t done one of these fanart roundups in a while, but we got so much crazy good stuff recently that we had to make a couple shout outs:



These are by @ChocoAnouki, @mrpibno, and @TheaTurbo. Click those names to see bigger versions of each piece.

I wonder what we’ll come up with next! If you’re wondering that too, you should be sure to check back with us each month and don’t forget to wishlist Ooblets on Steam to get notified when we release. If you want even more Ooblets news and stuff, you can follow us on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Discord, or Patreon.

Thanks for reading all this and being into what we’re doing,

Rebecca & Ben

Watch our January 2018 devlog video here

What a month it’s been! We’ve gotten so much done on the game that it’s crazy to look back on everything– but that’s EXACTLY WHAT WE’RE GONNA DO!

So what have we been upppp tooooo? Read on in what we hope will be delight, fair oobfans:



You know all those towns that are situated on artificial floating islands you see everywhere? Even Ooblets isn’t immune to their presence, because that’s just what Port Forward is. It’s the newest region we’ve added and it’s also probably the most complete, as well.



The idea behind it is that it’s a little eclectic town that floats in the water. We’re planning on putting in a few smallish shops in it that you’ll be able to visit during and after completing the region storyline. No spoilers, but the story involves ¡REVOLUCIÓN!

Were you under the misconception that all ooblets were plant-based just because you grow them in the ground? We’re here with a handful of nooblets to prove you completely wrong once and for all. You should be ASHAMED



Meet Firmo and Sidekey, two new little robotic-themed babs that were designed and modeled by our very talented friend Sander.



And these delightful and distinctive babbos are Gubwee, Kingwa, and Skuffalo. I guess Gubwee is sorta plant-based but that’s beside the point. These three were all designed by bitmOO and modeled by Sander.

Didja know?? Ooblets have different rarity levels, but by far the rarest of all ooblets are their GLEAMY variations.



They’re pretty easy to spot in the wild. Battling one has a pretty good chance of producing a GLEAMY seed for you to grow your own GLEAMY.



Why do I keep writing GLEAMY in all caps? you might ask. Well dummy, it’s because THAT’S THE OFFICIAL SPELLING. Also it doesn’t stand for anything, it just needs to be said with excitement.

✨ GLEAMIES! ✨



We’ve now got a PLETHORA of crafting machines, ranging from your bog standard gooperator to your more high-end soggifier.



Check out these babies! They’re ready to ground your springbeans, goop your clustered custard, and slurry your nurnies.



We’ve also made a brand new crafting system and UI to go along with it:



There’s always room for bloppycake!

You’ve got [test]!



Who doesn’t like getting mail huh?? Unfortunately our example correspondent Bazil here isn’t the most articulate just yet, but we’re hoping his vocabulary will expand in time.

We’ve got some new interiors made, like this Mimpins underground clubhouse:



And this hair salon:





It might not sound that interesting, but it’s actually a really cool feature! It allows you to place certain smaller objects on top of other furniture so you can get that Sims 4 style decor going. Eventually you’ll be able to place little plants, figurines, trophies, and other junk on your dressers, bookshelves, and tables!



Cover girl! Ooblets was on !!the cover!! of PC Gamer’s Indie Issue with an awesome article feature. I don’t think there are enough adjectives to describe how excited and floored we were about this.

Ooblets was also featured in a bunch of fancy lists for anticipated games of 2018, like IGN’s, GamesRadar’s, Sweety High’s, and les Inrocks’ (which is French I guess!). Now we just need to get the game finished in 2018…

We had a couple big milestones over the past month or so on Patreon. We surpassed 500 patrons and $1750/m, which is totally nutso. People keep joining all the time so we keep posting more fun stuff:


Who is this handsome lad??

This past month, patrons have gotten to hear a new music track from the game, seen new ooblet concepts like the ones above, participated in a super secret live stream Q&A we did, got a sneak peek at all the new crafting machines and the new crafting UI, saw some dumb cat gifs of our dumb cats, and hung out in the supporters channel in our Discord.

If you’d like to join our Patreon, you can do so here, but only do it if you want the rewards and have the disposable income. We’re not struggling for money (yet, at least) so please don’t feel any pressure to support us.

We haven’t done one of these fanart roundups in a while, but we got so much crazy good stuff recently that we had to make a couple shout outs:



These are by @ChocoAnouki, @mrpibno, and @TheaTurbo. Click those names to see bigger versions of each piece.

I wonder what we’ll come up with next! If you’re wondering that too, you should be sure to check back with us each month and don’t forget to wishlist Ooblets on Steam to get notified when we release. If you want even more Ooblets news and stuff, you can follow us on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Discord, or Patreon.

Thanks for reading all this and being into what we’re doing,

Rebecca & Ben