A sneak peek into what we’re adding to Oddsparks as you’re reading this
Explorers, Builders and Spark-petters,
We’re working hard like the Sparks in your future workshops to get Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure in your hands as soon as we can. While everything is very work in progress, we already want to show you a few cool things about our game that we think are interesting.
Wandering around an early mountain prototype with the very early ziplines!
Our first Zipline blockout! We reused a lot of parts of other buildings to put it together.
Today, we have the Lead Game Designer, Brenden, and he’s going to talk to you about… Ziplines! Ziplines is a new logistics building that can carry an item from a higher position to a lower position, made to help you create production lines in mountainous areas. Let’s take a quick dive into the feature!
So, when we started making the game, we knew that we wanted to add verticality into the gameplay. In our first biome, which we refer internally as the woodlands, we knew that verticality would be a small-scale problem for the player and then we would ramp it up in our second biome, the mountains, and really force the player to solve vertical logistic challenges. It was natural that a zipline came to mind in the early ideation sessions.
We’ve been pretty sure we wanted ziplines in our games for the past year, and finally it was time to work on them properly. We’re currently still fiddling with the UX and how we restrict their use – we’re always really wary when we’re providing logistical tools that don’t involve Sparks and just carry items, but they’re in and we absolutely love them.
Figuring out the perfect restriction is always difficult. We want to carve out a specific niche for every logistic tool and ensure the balance with every tool feels great! We want you to look through your Sparks and the build menu like it’s a box of chocolates. You’re spoiled for choice, but aha, here’s the perfect thing you were looking for. Hopefully we can hit that feeling just right.
Zipping down our current zipline. Note that we’ve changed the model to clearly show that you have to build it on the cliffs.
What also helps us get it right is that with every logistics tool, there’s both a use for the Sparks and for the player! You can go close, interact and slide down the zipline. It’s a great tool for both carrying items and navigating the world and makes it really fun to explore your workshop!
It’ll take a bit of time to unlock them since they’re for the second biome, but we hope you’ll love them and zipline around just as much as we do.
Other features this month!
We’ve also worked on a lot more things. Here’s a quick list of five more features we’ve recently added. Comment with what you’d like to know more about!
- A Spark Pen was invented to keep your non-working Sparks out of the way, but ready to be called anytime. You won’t need to fiddle with equipping Sparks if you quickly need a new set.
- Speed Booster Path Addons to get your Sparks to reach places even quicker! Be careful, they go a bit too fast even for them and won’t be able to do things like pick up and drop off items when they’re boosted.
- You can now throw Sparks at a workstation to assign them to produce stuff there. We’re working on calling them back from workshops, in case you need them for other tasks.
- A Scouting Spark (names not final!) is now made for locating and knowing what’s around you. If you need to know which way to find something, this Spark is for you!
- Wooden and Magical items are being renamed and given a new look. We want to make sure you won’t mix things up!
