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[bananatron]

Ooze Saga is a browser-based 'game' where you collect and farm oozes. It's been a silly side project for a while, and it's still early days in development. I figured I'd throw some thoughts and progress screenshots here as I continue to build it out.


Website: oozesaga.com







Progress so far

As of now, you can obtain Oozes by hiring foragers which scour the wilderness to find oozes for you. You can plant them on your farm and harvest mojo (the primary currency), but must wait in real-time to take actions. The kingdom is under the rule of an idiotic king (although there isn't much evidence of this now).



Goal

- To build a game with enough interesting design space that I can continue to add to the system as a solo developer (hence why it's a browser-based game made entirely of static assets, html, css, etc.).
- To fill the void inside me that terrible web-based games of yesteryear have left
- To make something cute and funny

[bananatron]

Some issues I'd like to resolve soon:

- Harvesting is done manually (every 6 hours), this should probably be automatic
- In general, the timings of actions need tuning (the entire reason real-time mechanics exist is to add meaningful value to currency)
- You can currently interact with other player's farms, but there is no way to find them
- There is no way to upgrade your farm's size (even though this this feature is built)
- Lots of visual inconsistency - polish is needed


Dungeon Orders (WIP)
Dungeon orders will be an area (probably inside the castle) where military trainers buy sets of oozes to fill their training dungeons for aspiring soldiers/adventurers. An example might be that an order is out for 3 oozes which produce 12 mojo (in total). Something like this is critical to keep the churn on the farm high and for you to sacrifice your most valuable oozes (and to play to the interesting interactions of boosting oozes). Thematically, you'll be sending your oozes to their death, which is kind of funny in a sick and twisted way.


There are a LOT of other things I want to do, so I'll try and keep the posts coming if there is any interest.

[lululuprimal]

Cool, I like the art, it's cute and has a lighthearted feeling to it, interested to see your progress!

[Zireael]

Seconding the feelings about art!

[bananatron]

Progress Update

Still adding more stuff, and trying to commit code to the project every day. There isn't much to do in Castlebrook right now, but you now have the ability to obtain all the ooze varieties by using different kinds of foragers. Ooze collection still takes a lot of real time, and I'm still tuning this. It never quite feels like enough progress is made, there is still an endless todo list, but it's inching closer and closer to a more engaging and full experience worthy of a community.

I'm still not yet at a place where I'm trying to attract players (although the game is playable now), but it feels right around the corner.

- Added Rare Collectors
Previous foragers could only collect basic oozes. These, more expensive foragers, take a lot longer (their contract lasts for 3 days), and their delivery is more infrequent, but when they do deliver something, it's more rare. A few of them are now in the tavern for hire.


All forager's looks are based off their random uuid on creation.



- Added Tax Office & Throne Room
No new content here really, but eventually the tax office will allow you to upgrade your farm and show weekly leaderboards (which are half-built).

- Automatic Harvesting
Harvest used to be done w/ a button on the farm, but now is done automatically every 12 hours.



- Forager Delivery Mailers
Now when a forager delivers something to your postbox, you get an email if the delivery hasn't been seen by the player. I need to put in preferences for what communications folks want so you can tune how many emails you receive.


Until next time...

[bananatron]

Not as many changes this week as I'd like (as per usual), but at least regular progress is being made and I'm still having fun with it.

This week:

Taxes (taxes are charged every week, at a rate per square of your farm)
Taxes simply exist to give more persistence to the world, and curb the income of farms that are much larger. Most importantly, though, they will likely be one of the only signals to identify you as a long-term player, as most of the leaderboards will be rotating on a weekly basis. These taxes paid will later change the game world further.

Newest player banner
The newest player that joins will be shown on a banner over castlebrook. I want this to look more subtle in the future, and am working on real-time indicators for who's in the game on the overworld screen (I want it to feel like there are other people there).

Farm Details
Working out the details of an event storage system that I can use for leaderboards and 'high score'-esque records (largest harvest ever, etc.). This will give players more goals to work against, but for now it just lets us put a simple details pane on the farm.

Public routing
Most of the game space is now public without sign-in (taking advantage of having a web-based game).
For example, here's one of my favorite oozes AND here is castlebrook.


I'm still tuning the timing of the game. It's still 12 hours between each harvest and about an hour for an ooze to sprout. Because of these pseudo incremental features (combined w/ the rest of the game's mechanics), I'm still struggling to figure out how to describe this game to people. More importantly than any of that, the sort of primary 'game loops' (for the lack of a better term) aren't really complete. The pace of the game is intentionally slow, so the plan is to make the goals clear and variable, fostering interactivity between players, which simply doesn't exist yet.

Until next time...

[bananatron]

This week was a big one for OS. I posted the game to r/incremental games to (ideally) start a discussion on how this kind of game would be categorized. Since that post a few days ago, I've been getting a new sign-up about every 15-30 minutes, and am at nearly 300 registered users.

The game is still far from feature-complete, so I expect most of these users won't stick around, but am already getting a lot of good engagement from some players who have really taken to the farming system. I've gotten a lot of good feedback as well.

The main thing I've had to do is release farm upgrades. A 2x2 farm is really boring (and, in general, the beginning of the game leaves a lot to be desired) so allowing users to pay to upgrade it over time was, in my view, a critical feature.

Still working on optimizing for mobile and working on a few big community-centric features.

Until next time...

[bananatron]

LOTS of updates since I last posted, visual and otherwise.

Dungeon Orders are finished and the playerbase is growing. We have a rad group of people in Discord and a lot of people regularly playing the game. As always, there'a ton I want to do, and prioritisation is hard. I'm regularly adding oozes and will be working on some features to prevent foragers from being the ONLY way you can obtain anything - likely with players being able to take on craft specialisations to make items themselves over time.

By design, oozes are some of the easiest things to add, as the initial lifecycle setup was pretty thorough, but as the interactions get more complex, I need to put more automated testing in place. Players have already found ways to boost their oozes by so much that the view breaks, which is a pretty cool thing to see!

I'd love to hear your thoughts if you happen to stop by (especially everything wrong w/ the new player experience (of which there is lots)).

Until next time...