Apologies for not updating all you fine folks here sooner!



We were traveling across the country for PAX West and XOXO Fest this month and as expected, got sick right at the end which knocked me out for like 5 days after we got back.

Anyway, now that we're up and running again I wanted to share a big new change we made to how the game plays.

You've probably seen the new dance battle changes (the battles are dance-offs now!) which we talked about a couple months ago.



BUT didja know how the dance battles actually worked??

Neither did we... Until we redesigned and reworked all the mechanics! Let's go over everything:


So originally, our battle system was a sorta traditional RPG affair where each turn you could pick one move between up to 3 ooblets.



Typical damage, heals, buffs, cooldowns. BORING.


When we did the dance battle conversion, it was basically just a really time-consuming reskin of what we already had.



Moves became dance moves, HP became "ego", poison became "lingering doubt", and the goal became to outdance your opponents. Underneath it all was the same basic mechanics as before. And it wasn’t really… fun.

We wanted more randomness, clearer strategy, and prettier images associated with the moves, so what else would we go with than…




Here’s how it works:

Each ooblet has a “deck” of dance moves that are randomly chosen from each turn to create a hand.

Your team's ooblet decks are combined if it’s a 2v2 or 3v3 match so some ooblets may have more/less moves than others each turn (each card border corresponds to its ooblet).



Moves have "beat" costs which are like action points, and you can play as many cards as you have available beats that turn.



The way we have it balanced now is that in a 1v1 dance you get 3 cards each turn, 2v2 you get 4, and 3v3 you get 5. That all might change eventually.

Some cards will give you more beats or more cards or do all sorts of weird stuff.


After your ooblets level up, they’ll be able to learn new moves, which is basically just getting a new card for their deck.



We’re also planning a system for upgrading cards by feeding your ooblet different crops you grow on your farm.

What's cool to us about this card-based system is that we'd always wanted to put in an extensive collectable card minigame in Ooblets but figured we'd never actually find them time... Now it's part of the core gameplay!


There are a bunch of other little improvements as well, like changes to status effects to make them last the whole round (unless it's counteracted by another card). An example of this is our power buffs which we call "hype", which you can keep stacking on your team's ooblets to boost their moves.

Before, there were a bunch of confusing numbers all over the place for each buff/debuff to indicate its power and duration, so these changes make everything a bit clearer.




All in all, this new card-based gameplay change has finally made the battles FUN (at least to us, but we think you’ll agree).

It’s way easier to balance the overall game now and everyone who’s played the new demo at PAX seemed to grasp it really quickly and would keep trying to get into battles. That's gotta be a good sign!

But we'd love to hear your thoughts on everything. There are still lots of things we need to iron out with it and your input is always appreciated.

Thanks!!
-Ben & Rebecca

---

EDIT: Just wanted to clarify a few things based off of the comments we've been seeing:

• The card system will be the core "combat" gameplay as part of the dance-offs.
  
• Cards are not like a MAJOR departure from how it worked before... Each move before was basically a card without a picture. The new elements are that the available moves are somewhat randomized and instead of cooldowns it uses action points for what you can play.
  
• It's not hard or complicated at all! In many ways it's easier than the previous system. Everyone who played the demo so far (which was a lot) figured it out instantly. It was honestly surprising how quickly folks took to it!
  
• For people saying they liked the way it was before better, I really, really don't think you played the old demo-- and it's not like we went into a lot of detail into how things used to work. It really was slow and the cooldown mechanic meant you had to keep checking on stuff or trying to remember what moves were available-- it seriously just never worked and was always going to be replaced regardless of which direction we took it.
  
• Thank you so much for all your feedback (good and bad)! Even if we don't necessarily agree with some interpretations, your responses help us figure out how to improve how we communicate the features and introduce changes!

We'll be at Booth 106 on the 4th floor near the Playstation area.

There's hopefully gonna be a little playable demo and some merch there, so come stop by and say hi!

Howdo oobfans!



We've got a progress update with a buncha behind-the-scenes stuff about what we've been working on.

The full devlog is here

In case you don't like clicking links, though, I'll give a recap:


It's been a while since we've unveiled any, but we've got some new friends for ya:



Meet Clomper, which was a concept by our pal Miski and modeled by our pal Sander



and Tud, another Miski/Sander creation:






Previously, when you interacted with an NPC, it would have this zoomed-in camera angle where you're facing the NPC chatting:



This month we decided to test out a less invasive style of just showing a talk bubble next to the NPCs without moving the camera:



It makes interacting with characters a bit less of a chore, so we'll probably end up using it for townsfolk interactions but keeping the zoomed-in stuff for important things.


Most of the month was spent on big changes to the actual mechanics of the dance battles-- changing move costs from cool-downs to action points and adding a bit of randomness to which moves are available each turn. We'll have some screenshots of it once it's further along.

What I can show you is our new dancer chooser UI:




This one is a pretty big change but it's hard to show in screenshots. We did some fiddling with post-processing order and color-correction so everything's a lot more colorful.

Here's what it looked like:



And here's it now:



Here's an admittedly color-lossy gif switching between them:




Since we want the player to fix up their shack at the start of the game, we needed a shack worthy of fixing up. Here's the new and unimproved starter shack:




There's been a bunch of people asking about the release date, and we didn’t want to leave everyone in the dark. We don't have a great estimate of how much more we have to do, but our goals are still the same (i.e. get the game out as soon as we can!).

Our plans for a 2018 launch might have been a bit overly-ambitious, so I hope you all stick by us until the game is ready, whenever that is. We’d rather disappoint you with a delay than a poopy game.


Thank you so much for following along with and being a part of our work. And let us know what you think about all this stuff!

June was a big month for us!

We wrote up a real humdinger of devlog for you that you should read here.

I'll just post a quick recap here for people who can't be bothered to go see the full devlog, but seriously, you can just click the link to get the full experience!




FINALLY! We have a place outside our apartment to work on Ooblets from. It costs $300/m and is just a small room, but it's a big step for us. Being able to afford it is thanks to our lovely Patreon supporters.


Ooblets was at E3!



We unveiled a new trailer at the PC Gaming Show at E3 that revealed a big change in the game: Battles are now all DANCE-OFFs!






Now you can collect friendship stickers from the townfolk when you are friendly with them or fetch them stuff. Collect enough and it'll unlock new items and junk!




Your watering can now is finite, as in, it runs out and you need to refill it.






We also now have a dialogue system that supports multiple response options:



So many possibilities!


The town you live in in Ooblets is called Badgetown, and we've just added a whole residential area so you can see how your neighbors live:




We made a bunch of new ooblet seeds for you to plant and grow your own ooblets, like this Shrumbo seed:




It's still gonna be a while until we're ready to release so I hope you all stick with us and participate in Ooblets' development.

Feel free to leave your feedback as comments to this post, we read them all!

If you want to get more frequent Ooblets updates, you can follow along on:

- Rebecca's Patreon
- Ooblets on Twitter
- Ooblets on Tumblr

Thanks for reading!
Ben

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