Customize your character's clothing, hair style, and general look
Battle wild ooblets and fellow ooblet trainers using a turn-based RPG battle system
Explore a variety of locations across Oob, all with their own biomes, plants, characters, and unique ooblets
Grow new friends by planting ooblet seeds that will blossom into baby ooblets
Join an Ooblet Club that matches your personality
Unlock new shops and buildings in town as you complete quests and explore
Upgrade your house with new decor, furniture, and upgrades
Run a shop selling the produce you've grown on your farm and any other junk you've scrounged up
Level up your ooblets and unlock new moves through battles and feeding them crops you've grown on your farm
Collect seeds, items, furniture, machinery, badges, and friends along the way
Ooblets is beautiful. It’s billed as a game somewhere between Harvest Moon, Pokémon and Animal Crossing, so a farm builder and a battler where you make a home and build a squad of creatures—the titular ooblets. It’s not playable yet but gifs and screenshots from development keep popping up, offering glimpses of cute critters and bright, happy scenes. I’m too curious to wait for a hands-on so I email Glumberland—the tiny team of Rebecca Cordingley and Ben Wasser—to find out how the game is progressing.
To explain how work on the game divides up, Rebecca is the sole programmer and main artist for Ooblets. “95% of what you’re seeing in the game is her work,” says Wasser. His own role is as game designer, writer and “person who bugs Rebecca to make gifs (aka our entire marketing strategy)”.
The idea for Ooblets came from a desire to play a farming game with more RPG elements. “We had an idea that you could tie things like farm production to the requirements for unlocking creature moves,” explains Wasser. “Eventually we came up with more and more ways to weave everything together, like that you plant ooblet seeds to grow ooblets instead of capturing them in the wild and that location progression is tied to both battles and getting resources together.”
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Those ooblets include Shrumbo, a cheery pot-bellied fungus with a yellow cap, and Clickyclaws, a bell-shaped grump. Those are perhaps the best-known of the ooblets but I have a soft spot for Radlad, a spindly radish topped with a green leaf, and Dumbirb, a bird creature with a big blue head.
The games which inspired Ooblets tend to have their own tight systems but tying those elements together, getting them to feed into one another, means opening them up a bit, adding a bit more freedom or ‘give’ to the experience. In terms of how that manifests in the game right now, Wasser says that the player will split their time farming, interacting with townspeople, exploring Oob, building a little team of ooblets, and battling “in a friendly way”.
To my mind there’s a common thread of cultivation there, either with farm crops, with relationships or with small creatures.
“When we started, not much of the game was comparable to Animal Crossing, but over time we’ve embraced a lot more of the customisation and collection aspects,” says Wasser. “There’s an element of escapism in farming, building and town-based games that we’re drawn to. Building out the world of Oob has been really fun and we want players to feel like they’re a part of both the existing world and also its development."
Given that emphasis on self-directed play, I ask what happens if you want to focus on farming or on training ooblets. Could you treat Ooblets entirely as a farming game? Or as a battler if crops aren’t your thing?
“It’s a difficult balance between providing a core progression, connecting the gameplay elements and letting people play their own way,” says Wasser. “We’re aiming to let people focus on what they like best, but the general progress is tied to a mixture of all aspects of the game. Since it’s a laid-back game, we’re hoping that the progression won’t be ‘core’ to the gameplay.
“There are parts of the game that you’ll need to participate in to advance, like farming and battling, but there are ways to make different elements more or less challenging for yourself. We’re treating the overarching story as secondary to the mechanics, so progression through the game should be more about exploring and advancing at your own pace than feeling rushed to complete the game.”
Peering a bit closer at the farming, I remember that automated processes were mentioned a while ago. I mention automated farms to Wasser and he explains how that idea has been rejigged. There is still a degree of automation but not to the extent of industrial farming.
“In an ideal scenario, any automation that the player sets up will enable them to spend more time doing other stuff in the game,” he says. “We actually have had to scale back a lot of our plans for farm automation, so it might not be as much of a balancing act anyway. At one point I had imagined a sort of sprawling Factorio-inspired farm automation progression, but as our release window swiftly approaches things like that have been pushed further and further towards the chopping block.”
Farming and town-building games, like Animal Crossing, have been part of my gaming library for years so the talk of chilled out planting and progressing has the pull of cosy familiarity. Those games tend to be where I hide out from real world stressors. Battlers are less familiar territory. I managed to be exactly the wrong age to get properly captivated by Pokémon, preferring the cartoon to the game itself. But as Wasser explains that part of Ooblets we end up in the more familiar RPG language of tanks and healers instead of evolutions and elements.
“The plan is that each ooblet has a functional type, ranging from healers to tanks to weirder things like something I wrote down called a ‘targeted defensive mage’,” he says. “They won’t be called names like that in-game and likely won’t even have categories since there will probably only be one or two ooblets of each type.
“Your party can form battle teams of up to three ooblets that you’ll pick in relation to your opponent’s team. The current system lets you choose just one move per turn (across your entire team, not for each ooblet), and the moves have cooldowns. You’ll be using status effects, buffs and debuffs along with attacks and healing moves to provide strategy to everything. From what we’ve implemented so far, it’s promising, but we’ll see if it all works out and make changes to make it as fun as we can.”
Ooblets is currently intended as a single-player game so those battles are not going to be versus real-life friends, but against non-player characters. The structure of the game there is more fluid at the moment—a work-in-progress with a basic outline.
“The current plan is to structure difficulty along the physical locations you’re exploring,” says Cordingley. “But plans have been known to change.” The structure of battles and the way difficulty works also depends on what happens after a player has finished the meat of the game.
“We’ll probably need to work out some sort of adaptive battle difficulty curve in some part of the game eventually to let people continue to have compelling battles after they’ve completed the main progression and want to keep levelling up their ooblets, but we honestly haven’t gotten that far yet in development,” says Cordingley.
The ooblets and your player character both reside on Oob, rather than Earth, and the setting is a mixture of country village and curious alien life. When looking through gifs of character selection it was a nice surprise to note that character creation doesn’t ask you to pick a gender, you just apply the outfits, hair and other options that you fancy to a base model and create a sense of your character that way. I was curious as to where else Glumberland might be quietly setting aside or reassessing the standard videogame approach.
“We’ve set out to throw as many standard concepts out the window as we can,” says Wasser. “Ooblets doesn’t take place on Earth, so we’ve got a lot of freedom to build a society and world around our own whims and interests. There’s no way to get around all the influences of society and reality, so we try to weave them in from an outsider perspective and mess with them subtly where we can.
“We also don’t make any super strict rules for ourselves,” Wasser continues. “People ask us whether ooblets are plant-based since they’re grown from seeds in the ground, and the answer is that sometimes they’re based off plants, sometimes they’re based off jellyfish, and sometimes they’re just bears wearing pants. In everything we do in Ooblets, we’re free to infuse our own random interests and dumb ideas, and I think that’s what a lot of people like about it.”
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