This month has involved more secrets than we typically like to deal in… We’d love to tell everyone all the stuff that’s going on, but if something doesn’t work out we don’t want to have to walk it all back and look like real dumdums.

There are also some secrets we’re keeping because they’re fun to reveal later, like hypothetical new ooblets…

To give you a litttttle peek behind the curtain, we had thought that perhaps this month we could do a closed alpha (which we mentioned as a possibility in a couple tweets). We had planned to do it last week but some stuff came up that has made us have to put those plans on hold. So now we’re feeling bad about teasing it even though we were feeling pretty sure about it earlier.

Prepping for people playing

Whether we end up doing a closed alpha or holding off until an early access launch, we got a lot of work done in actually preparing folks to play the game.

You’d be surprised at how much stuff gets overlooked when you’re working on the game every day while your brain slowly melts. Once someone else gets their judgy lil hands on it, so many major issues suddenly become obvious.

We have no clue what people’s tolerance will be for bugs and unfinished things, which is why we were thinking a closed alpha would be a nice thing to do before doing early access. Theoretically, early access would be a good label to release a janky unfinished mess, but it seems like people keep having higher and higher expectations for early access launches so we need to figure out a way to really express IF YOU NEED TO PLAY IT NOW THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES AND THOSE CONSEQUENCES ARE THAT EVERYTHING IS BROKEN AND YOUR SAVES WILL BREAK AND YOUR OOBLETS WILL VANISH INTO INFINITY AND YOU WILL NEVER GET OVER THE LOSS.

Maybe we can call it “Early Access+”

Battle system work

The dance battle system still needs a lot of work but it’s seen a bunch of improvements this month. There were a lot of broken moves that got fixed, visuals that got toned down so it’s not AS wacky (sometimes we need to restrain ourselves) because it was hard to follow what was going on, and we made some parts of it move a bit quicker so it feels like less of a time investment.

Oh oh and we got the ooblets to finally DANCE TO THE BEAT of the songs. That might sound like a little thing but it was actually rEALLY complicated but we did it we really DID IT.

We’re thinking of doing a major overhaul of the balancing of it to make the battles a lot quicker and have more strategy, but it’s a bit of a gamble as to whether it’ll work out or be way worse so we’ve been waffling on it.

More CLOTHIES

We know how much people are gonna wanna play dress up so we’ve been meaning to add lots of more clothing choices forever but it keeps getting pushed down our list. This month we got a little progress though by converting a bunch of the NPCs’ clothes to be purchasable and wearable by the player. Which is not quite as simple as it sounds!

Now you can dress like you’re Glimbi or Phee or Plubbard.

Buncha badges!

Okay so these might be a lil temp still but they’re less temp than they were before. The badges are sorta like in-game achievements. We have this idea of making them eventually give you all sorts of potions or something but for now they basically just give you cupcakes and gotsapon tokens.

Progress on progression

A big chunk of this month was spent extending some of our core progression taskies/questies by adding some new ones, moving some around, and changing the rewards for them. It now takes us so long to get through the ones we’ve added that we hardly ever manage to play test it to the end, so as you play you just end up running into more and more and wackier bugs because we haven’t been able to get that far yet ourselves.

We’ll want to add a lot more taskies but we think the current set might be a good enough group to start with in early access(+).

Main menu redesiiiiign

We needed to put some more infotainment in the main menu landing page thingy so while we were messing around with it we changed it up in a bunch of ways. I’d show it to you but I think it might divulge some secrets we’re not ready to share just yet so just imagine something way better than what it probably is.

OKAY

We’ll be keeping everyone in the loop about whatever’s next through our mailing list and everywhere else we blab about stuff so please continue to hang on to your butts.