Hello! It’s been a little while, so let’s update you on what’s happening.
Oddsparks 1.0 is currently in the stage of playtesting and bugfixing, and things are going pretty smoothly. We’re currently spending a lot of time going over the whole game! We’re changing some of the earlier quests to make the flow smoother and adding new quests to make some things clearer. We’ve added new functions to old path addons and the trains. We’ve done an overhaul on world generation, the glossary, the damage type system... And that’s not counting any of the strictly new stuff we’ve added, like the final biome and end game challenge!
Reverse settings filters on your spark and item filters and operators for your amount filter!
We want to put our best foot forward with 1.0 and make it a polished game that you can confidently buy and recommend to your friends. We’ve already started working with modders to test out our modding tools and making sure we have good documentation. (And if you’re maybe interested in modding our game early, you can join our Discord and apply there!)
In fact, if you enjoy the game and would like to help us have a great launch in general, you can give us a positive review on Steam, and tell your friends and maybe your favourite streamer and youtuber about us!
That’s it for the preamble. Things are going smoothly for Oddsparks 1.0, no release date yet but we’re looking forward to announcing something soon.
For now, let’s talk a little about two new features we’re going to have in 1.0!
Base Defense
So Base Defense only happens in the new biome. As seen in our roadmap, we have a new biome called the Corrupted Ruins and in this gloomy biome are not just the broken ruins of the past, but also some rather unusual looking enemies.
These little slimes can be fought relatively easily and drop Corrupted Aether. However, they spawn back pretty quickly and the real issue is that if you start building in the new biome, they will not be happy.
They’ll come to your base in waves and start spreading their corruption. These enemies will cover your buildings in a slime that’ll stop the buildings from working, cover your paths to stop Sparks from walking on them… If you let them, they’ll cover everything in the new biome and freeze your base.
Thankfully, you have a few different tools to take care of them. First, you’ll get access to a new Spark, the Scrubby Spark! These clean up corruption from buildings and the ground, although at some point, they can only take so much. Maybe there’s also a way to clean up the Scrubby Sparks themselves?
Knowledge is power and with the new Hostility Overlay, you can know the danger level of an area if you build there. In general, the corrupted enemies won’t attack you unless you build in these areas and they also won’t attack your base outside of the biome too. However, as you defend yourself, they’ll also grow stronger, so you’ll need to keep up with them and you can keep an eye out with the Hostility Overlay.
And then, of course, you have your new set of base defense tools. To add to the Animal Scarer and Spark Thrower, we now have the Defensive Wall, an Aetheric Attractor, an Enemy Sensor, and a Spark Cannon! The Spark Cannon is an upgraded version of the Spark Thrower, able to aim directly at whatever you want it to.
With it, you can have one cannon that uses Burning Sparks to set the enemies ablaze, another cannon with Stumpy Sparks to pick up the items that drop, and one last cannon with Scrubby Sparks to clean up the corruption, all working in tandem! We won’t spoil how all the different tools work, but we look forward to you playing with them.
World Settings
We also wanted to talk to you quickly about World Settings!
For us, Oddsparks is about solving open ended puzzles your way, and that can be pretty tough to design for. After all, one person’s easy is another person’s difficult, and we wanted to make the game fun for a very broad audience of folks. Because of that, we always knew that we wanted to add World Settings and Mod Support to let you play Oddsparks your own way! But what does that mean exactly for World Settings?
Well, a lot of it is just empowering you to mess around with a lot of stuff! Of course, you can start with parts of the game skipped, but we added a way where you can start a game with automation features unlocked for the folks who already understand many of the concepts.
So for example, you can start the game with the late-game ancient replicas, which functionally means that you’re not location restricted anymore. If you have this world setting enabled, the costs of these buildings also change so that you can use them from early game.
We'll also allow you to change a lot of values and give you access to a whole bunch of fun things. Give yourself a harder challenge by multiplying quest numbers, or by making all of the enemies aggressive and respawn faster. Or you can make the game easier by making fuel slower to burn, making yourself invulnerable to damage or access the Item Cheat Menu where you can give yourself any item for free.
You can play the game in an entirely flat world (the cave walls still exist though) and we even added a terraform tool option in there! (We didn’t want to add it to the default experience, but we know that people are sometimes looking for a more sandbox experience out of Oddsparks and we wanted to give you the option.)
However, you may not be able to earn achievements in a save game depending on the settings. In general, if we feel like something makes the game way too easy, we make it so that you can’t earn achievements, but we're pretty nice about it. You can also change some (not all) world settings while playing, but of course, if you had enabled something that turned off achievements, that save will continue to not get you achievements, even if you turn that setting off later.
Oh, one more thing. Maybe you were wondering what that little eye icon above the World Setting does? Well, it opens up a Seed Preview!
That's it for now. We've already shown a lot of this in our Discord, so feel free to hang out with us there for some more sneak peeks.
We look forward to announcing things soon!