It’s been a really weird year full of huge ups and downs for us. We weren’t expecting it, but we’ve been on the receiving end of some of the worst and some of the best of humanity while we were in our pajamas trying to make a goofy little video game.

The outpouring of kindness and support we’ve received has meant more to us than anyone can probably imagine. We’re so lucky to have such caring and friendly fans, and the negative attention from the usual corners of the internet really just highlighted that.

On the development side, everything is going really well. This year we got to a point where we could tie all our disparate wacky systems together and play with how they get along. From that starting point, we’ve been massaging everything into a cohesive, hopefully fun game by building up weaker systems, removing tangential stuff, and letting ourselves sometimes add a couple new systems (only where totally absolutely necessary of course…).

We’ve got an internal development roadmap with all our features, content, and cert stuff that we’ve been pretty good about staying on track with. We’re actually a bit ahead of schedule right now, but I don’t want to jinx it! Our next big effort is going to be a round of professional playtesting (unfortunately not public), region work, and a lot of animation stuff for our dance system.

With Epic’s help, we’ve been able to go from a studio apartment to an actual game studio with employees and an office. Well, we have one (great) employee so far, but we’re hoping to get a couple more soon. We’re taking a pretty conservative pace to expanding because we’ve already got a pretty fast development pace as it is and there’s an unavoidable time investment for getting new employees up to speed and contributing.

It took us a while to find a suitable office, but now we’re all settled in with our fairy lights, fan art, and custom-made Ooblets plushies (also desks and computers and stuff). Oh and it also came with a legit Being-John-Malkovich-half-floor in it for some reason.

There’s been an uptick of people asking about our release date, and while it miiiight be true that there is indeed a secret tentative release date, we’re not quite ready to share it yet. We will once we know for sure we can hit it. If you join our mailing list we’ll be sure to let you know.

In this new year, we hope everyone can find some time to share joy, kindness, and empathy with each other, oh and also play Ooblets at some point!