Greetings first time nubbly nooblies and long-time nubbla lubbalos,
It's been a while since I've done a Nubby News post. The last one I did was edition #12 back at the end of September and in that one I was talking about all the crazy stuff coming to Nubby in v1.4 which is out now! I'm happy to announce that it's been generally very positively received by the player base at large, despite a couple issues I'm working on fixing up for ya. Mr. MogMan has got you covered, always. I usually don't do this, but this edition of Nubby News is a kind of large and it covers a lot, so I added a TL;DR at the bottom. If you choose to read the TL;DR instead of the full text, just be aware that there's some mega important things I have to say in this one regarding the path moving forward for nubby. Just keep that in mind for the next 5 seconds as you decide which version you're going to read. Okay! Enough ramblings! I have some juicy, exciting, and a couple bittersweet things on the docket I'd like to share today, so I'll get right into it. We're starting off with the juicy part!
Reddit AMA:
========== You heard that right, folks. Yesterday on the r/nubbygame subreddit I decided to open up an Ask Me Anything thread from yours truly! I did this completely on a whim and its just for kicks. I'll respond to any question you have. It doesn't even have to be related to nubby or game development. It doesn't matter to me. I'm a very transparent person and I'm on a quest to make every personal fact about myself as a game developer and as a human being publicly available on the internet, so knock yourself out! If you choose to participate, I can't guarantee I'll answer your question within 24 hours but I'm gonna seriously try to get to every question, even if there's like 1,000 questions. Check out unemployed andy ova' here!!!! Below is a link to the AMA thread (I'll archive / lock the AMA thread in a couple weeks if I remember to do that. In other words... Quit standin there and ASK ME A QUESTION BOUT SOMETHIN GOSH DARNIT!!! ) https://www.reddit.com/r/nubbygame/comments/1p3ajpa/i_made_nubbys_number_factory_ama/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Now, on to the meat of this post - discussing upcoming plans for NNF:
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Now that Nubby's big v1.4 update is released, I think it's time I discuss the direction I plan on taking the game over the next couple months. There are some great things in store for us in the short term, and I'm gonna go over them right now. The various upcoming things below are ordered by how soon I think they're going to happen but it's just my best guess. No promises except for the 11/23/25 v1.4.2 bug fix patch.
Firstly, I have some adjustments I'd like to make to the recent v1.4 update, so I'll be releasing the v1.4.2 patch tomorrow on Sunday, November 23. That patch will fix a bunch of bugs and there will be a couple balance changes, though no new content this time. Notably among the bugs, the notorious div by 0 crash that happens a lot around rounds 200-225 in endless mode isfixed in this patch. When you update your game tomorrow, it should be easier to get that round 300 achievement that's currently driving people nuts due to pre round-300 crashing.
After that (and randomly throughout the next couple months), nubby will be receiving several more patches that add translations for a handful of languages / dialects. The first few localizations to be added will likely be Japanese, Russian, and maybe French, but plenty more will come in future patches. These translations are created by some lovely volunteers in the nubby community who are determined to make nubby more accessible to everyone. The game has been needing translations for a long time. Now that the big v1.4 update is finally released, work on translations will be starting very soon.
[ Note: The paragraph directly below this message does not apply to you unless you speak a language other than English and have personally chatted with me through email/discord, where I verbally accepted your volunteer work offer to help with localization. ] If you've contacted me about volunteering to translate nubby to a specific language and I've verbally accepted your help, I will likely be contacting you on Monday November 24, or Tuesday November 25. If this applies to you, please understand that I have your contact information saved and I will message you first about the volunteer work. Thank you to everyone who has volunteered to help with localization, I'm grateful to claim you righteous and kind people as a part of the nubby community! :]
This is off topic from game localization and I'm all over the place in this post, but in late December - early January nubby will be getting a pretty significant discount for the Steam Winter Sale '25 - '26 (Dec. 18th - Jan. 5th). Big brother Valve doesn't like it when developers discuss specifics of steam discounts with their audiences before they happen and I really don't want to face his wrath so I'll play it safe and I won't say any specifics. All you need to know is that I'm feeling very generous - it's not even December yet and I'm fully locked into the Christmas Spirit. Anyways, mark your calendar! If you've got some friends who need some proper direction in life, give the gift of full time employment at the number factory this holiday season during the upcoming Steam Winter Sale. Also tell them that the gift is from me, MogDog. It comes with my warmest seasons greetings!
Moving on, next up on the list is the release of nubby's mobile port! As you may have seen, newly posted on the bottom of the title screen in V1.4 is a banner that announces the mobile port of nubby as "coming very soon". I made that banner about 2 months ago, expecting that by the time v1.4 would release on November 16, the mobile port would release very soon after. I'm happy to announce that the banner is not lying, and that sentiment still holds up for the most part. I'll now tell you exactly how close the mobile port is to release and what's left to do. If you haven't been following the development of the mobile port, it's development began way back at the end of May 2025 and I've been working alongside an indie porting company, who has absolutely carried the port's development for the past 6 months. After months of optimizations and reworks, several rounds of closed playtesting and a lot of troubleshooting, the mobile port was pretty much done for both ios and android.
That was what the situation looked like about a week ago. We were just days away from releasing nubby's mobile port on all devices. Creating trailers and gathering screenshots for the appstore & google playstore pages was the only thing left to do. The problem is that this version wouldn't have released with the new v1.4 content added. Ultimately we both agreed that it would be more player-friendly if we just took a couple extra weeks to port the new v1.4 content to the mobile version so it would be up to date with the steam version on release day.... and that's exactly where nubby's mobile port is at. We're simply porting update v1.4 to nubby mobile.... and then we're releasing nubby mobile!!!! Now on to some more Important info about the mobile port:
The mobile port will release for both apple and android devices, hopefully on the same day if we do everything right.
The mobile port will be playable on large phones, small phones, long phones, and tablets. It's for any device with the appstore or google playstore.
The mobile port can only be played by holding your phone horizontally in landscape mode. There is no support for playing the game vertically in portrait mode. From what I've gathered, 50% of players prefer playing mobile games in landscape mode and the other 50% prefer portrait mode. For those who aren't happy about this, please allow me explain why we chose to go with landscape mode. My partner and I chose to go with landscape mode very early on because holding the phone vertically would have required me to rework like 90% of the games assets to be compatible with the new gui arrangement. It was just more simple to go with landscape, and fortunately we concluded that landscape mode feels pretty natural with nubby's simple gameplay and control scheme. If we decided that landscape mode felt horrible, we would have thugged it out and spent months reworking the games artwork out of necessity. Landscape does the job fine. Though admittedly, it might be a little annoying to have to rotate your phone 90 degrees whenever you want to play the game.
For ios and android users alike, you'll be able to find two apps for nubby on the appstore/google playstore. One version is the full mobile port of nubby - the complete nubby experience - purchasable for $4.99 USD. There are no ads or microtransactions in the full version; it's just pure nubby. The other version is nubby's mobile demo which is free, which has no microtransactions or ads either, besides occasionally telling you to buy the full version of the game to gain access to twice as much content.
For those interested in playing the mobile demo, please know that it is not quite the same as the steam demo. It's basically a more graphically improved version of the demo on steam, though they both have about the same amount of content and the same limitations.
Neither the mobile port demo or full version have any mobile-exclusive content. Content-wise, the full version is an exact copy of the full game on steam. I considered adding mobile-exclusive content or maybe even PC exclusive content, but ultimately I decided against doing both because I didn't want anyone feeling excluded just because they can't afford to purchase the steam version and the mobile version on top of that.
As of the time of writing, there is currently not a confirmed release date for the mobile port on apple or android. As soon as I have this information, I'm going to put it on blast to the whole nubby community across all platforms, so stay tuned if you don't want to miss it :]
Lastly, a good handful people have been asking me this question, so I'll address it here to manage expectations. Several people have asked me if they will be able to get a free copy of the nubby mobile full version if they already purchased the pc version from steam. Firstly, I am very grateful for everyone who's supported me by purchasing nubby through steam, no matter if you picked it up when it was on sale or not I'm very grateful for the support. I wish I could return the favor and offer nubby license owners on steam a free copy of the full version of nubby mobile, but I unfortunately cannot, so you will need to make another $4.99 purchase to have nubby on your phone. The biggest problem with the license sharing idea is that that there's no good way for me to implement a reliable system that can check if you own the game through steam and then offer you a free copy of the game on mobile. The effort, and cost of setting up and maintaining something like an account system to make this possible is not ideal for a solo indie studio. My second reason for not allowing steam license sharing is pretty simple, in that doing this would probably cut the total revenue I make from the mobile port in half, which is bad. Don't get me wrong - that would be a fantastic thing for strengthening my reputation as a nice person on the internet, but from a business perspective that would be bad for obvious reasons. My main motivations for making the nubby mobile port a reality have always been to give people the option to take the game on the go, and also to hopefully eventually reach a wider audience, specifically the casual non-pc market. However, it can't be ignored that I've sunk a lot of money and time into the mobile porting of nubby, and I'd like to make that back eventually.
Now on to even more porting-related exciting news! I'm pretty stoked to announce that after the mobile port is released and stable there is a very good chance that I will continue to work with the same porting company who's currently leading development on the mobile port, except this time we're gonna bring nubby to console! XBox, PlayStation, Switch/Switch 2, you name it!
As of now, I can't positively confirm it, but I'm 90% certain we're going to follow through with porting to console. The only case where we would cancel the console ports would be if we can't find a gamepad-based control scheme that feels good. Due to the relatively straightforward nature of turning a PC game into a console game, I'm hoping that we could finish the console ports faster than the mobile ports. A lot of work is involved in turning a game that's played on your monitor into a game that's played on your phone screen, it's more complex than the PC to TV transition. But then again, what do I know? I've never ported anything to anything before!
Moving on, discussing the distant future of nubby:
==========
To be honest, the future of nubby is a lot less clear to me when I attempt to imagine the state of the game past February/March 2026. March 7th will be nubby's 1 year anniversary since it was officially released on steam... which is nuts to think about for me. The mobile port will have been out for a couple months by then and maybe even a console port or two will be finished. After the console ports, I've been starting to seriously consider the idea of adding Mac and Linux support to nubby. Although, I've witnessed many Linux nerds who have gotten nubby to run well on their weird command line operating system for penguins, so Linux might not be necessary. If you run linux, I'd really appreciate hearing your thoughts on if I'm correct in questioning the necessity of adding official Linux support. Anyways, the Mac support would come first, maybe around late spring / early summer 2026 if all goes well. Linux would follow shortly after if I still think its necessary and also don't hit any major roadblocks.
In conclusion, some bittersweet news about future content updates to nubby:
========== What's that? When will there be more new game content for nubby, you ask? Of course! I would never write such a massive Nubby News post and leave you hanging!... - Ok maybe this is a bit cruel, I'll turn into serious tony again now. Now that v1.4 is out and all of the promises I made for future content in nubby have been fulfilled, the problem with me discussing the future of new content updates to nubby is that I really can't give any satisfying answer without sort of lying. I've made a decision recently, regarding my relationship with the development of nubby, but there's still some stuff I'm trying to figure out. So, instead of pretending I know things that I do not, I'll let you know what I know and leave the rest up to your imagination.
One part of the equation that I'm certain of, and the aforementioned decision I made regarding nubby's development is that I'll be taking a break from my role in nubby's active development, meaning that I'm not going to work on or add any new game related content to the game during this period. The other part of the equation I'm that I'm also certain of is that I am definitely not done adding new content to the game. I will eventually return someday to keep adding more content. Unfortunately, the big unknown variable is that I have no absolutely no idea when I'm going to put an end to my nubby dev break. I just don't know when the next new content update to hit nubby will come out or let alone enter production. I'm not gonna lie and make up a date or try to dodge the fact that the nubby hiatus is probably going to suck for some people who love nubby and really look forward to seeing what else I decide to add to the game. If that describes you, I totally know how that feels first hand. I'll be the first to say that it doesn't feel good to have something you enjoy a lot be put on pause indefinitely. Some of you might feel betrayed and frustrated after reading that, so I hope that some day you can forgive me and understand why this is the path I'm choosing.
I know that not all of you feel that way, and some of you are probably just happy that I've decided to take a break to stop my obsessive work habits from permanently extinguishing my love for all of game development. If you had an initial reaction of relief or empathy or anything generally positive, I really appreciate the support! Personally, I'm feeling quite optimistic about the whole ordeal, even though I've been dreading saying anything about my planned hiatus for a while. On the topic of optimism and new beginings, I've been filling my time while I'm on break by continuing the early development of my next official video game title which will release on steam (though it's way too soon to make up a release date). My next title has actually been in development for about a month now, and I'm having a great time working on it! I'm always looking forward to chipping away at it when I have the time. Of course now with 80% less nubby dev in my schedule, finding the spare time shouldn't be nearly as challenging. If you're a game dev or artist in general, you'll know what I mean when I say that starting something new can feel very cathartic. After focusing 100% of my energy on nubby for the past two years, it makes sense why a fresh slate feels right. A change in pace has been in store for me for a while and I don't doubt my decision to go on break and switch things up for a while at all.
To wrap this section up, that was not an easy announcement to make but it's been bouncing around in my head for a while and I think now is as good of a time as ever to bring it up. Moving on, I'm going to be rolling out necessary changes in small patches over the next couple months (adding translations, bug fixes, yada yada yada). I'm restating this plan to clarify that these are not the kinds of additions I'm going to be taking a break from working on and adding to the game. The content additions I'm referring to are the new items, new perks, new nubby skins, new challenges, new supervisors.... - you get the point. Alright we're almost done. From here on out, this post is a bit more light hearted.
Thank you for reading!:
==========
At last, for the final moments of my monologue for the 13th edition of nubby news, I figured I'd take a second to reflect the past two years of my life and get a little sappy on ya for a minute, if you don't mind.
Over the first couple months of nubby's development in Fall 2023, I began warming up to the fact that nubby could be my first attempt at a commerical video game. Never ever in a gazillion nubbillion years did I expect to see it praised as one of the most successful solo indie games of 2025 and one of the highest rated roguelikes to come out of 2025. With the end of the year approaching, I have no idea if nubby will be nominated for, or win any awards or anything - I think it would be cool if it did. It's pretty clear that 2025 was an incredible year for indie game releases (I personally think 2025 was even better than 2024, which is nuts). If you put nubby on your list for your favorite games of 2025, I feel so proud to have made something that earned a spot in your heart amongst the other masterpieces that released this year.
Now that we're nearing the end of 2025, I can't begin to describe how much gratitude I hold for all of the amazing memories I've made, for the incredible people I've met, and for the experiences that have helped me grow as a craftsman in my newly formed career as an indie dev. All of this was a direct result of nubby's success. I can't believe that my goal for nubby's success (which I came up with the night before I released nubby on steam) was to sell at most 2,000 copies across its entire lifespan.
Fast forward 3 months later to the end of May and the game surpasses 200,000 copies sold. I am equally happy and surprised that my best-case-scenario estimate was comedically incorrect. ...And now that number is only half of the total copies sold at the time of writing this. Above the raw numbers, the bit of data that I feel the most proud of is the solid positivity rating on steam for nubby. I'm still in shock from how much changed last March when nubby really started picking up steam. I'm just blown away and I wasn't expecting any of this. I don't know if I'll ever be able to comprehend the true scale of the total impact that nubby has had on the roughly half a million people who have played it this year. I say this at the end of every Nubby News post, but I am so grateful to have your support. Thank you for allowing me to find purpose in the development journey of NNF! <3 I'm done being sappy now. The next time you'll hear from me in any sort of news post format will be when I announce the release date of the mobile port, and then you'll hear from me again when the mobile port actually releases. Same thing goes for the console / mac & linux(?) ports whenever those happen. I'll make sure you know about everything that comes out. Also, about 100,000 words ago I briefly mentioned that I'm working on my next game. I think for now I'm going to keep things vague, but somewhere down the line I'll make a cross-promotion announcement to this steam page so you can learn about it. Between now and then I'll be posting teasers for the graphics of the upcoming mystery game on my tiktok (@mogdogblog) and youtube (which is also @mogdogblog). All of those teasers/announcements/whatnot will be well off in the future though. For now, as your reward for reading this way too large nubby news post to the end I will grant you 3 hints that are meant to poke your imagination about what to expect from my next title. The following hints basically sum up the direction in which taking my upcoming mystery title.
Your first hint is about the game's primary genre... your hint is: "Fast paced microgames. You could even get away with calling them nanogames, but that's up how pretentious you wanna be about it. "
Your second hint is about the art game's art direction... and it is: "4 cups of claymation, 1 teaspoon of MS paint, and a sprinkle of nubby's y2k groove."
Your third hint is a big maybe. Regardless, I am going to do everything in my power to make this come true. This hint is about the game's secondary genre: "Possibly, hopefully, rhythm based with a killer soundtrack."
Alright, I've been sitting at my keyboard for over 3 hours and I'm going to call it good. Oh! and don't forget to eat your tartlards before they go cold. Class dismissed! Until next time,
~Mog
TL;DR Below!!!
VVVVVVVVVV TL;DR:
==========
You are too lazy; didn't read.
Here's the summary of what you were too lazy; didn't read:
Reddit AMA:
I'm doin a reddit AMA on r/nubbygame, here's the link to the thread if you want to throw your hat in the ring otherwise it's chill. I promised I'd respond to everyone but can't guarantee it will be within 24 hours. The post will be locked or archived or whatever in about 2 weeks, or whenever I remember to lock it if I forget to do it in 2 weeks.
Short term and long term future of nubby:
The v1.4.2 bug fix patch with just a few balance changes coming tomorrow. (Sunday, Nov 23, specific release time unknown, it won't be released at 9pm CST time zone like v1.4 was)
Localization efforts for nubby will begin shortly. (if you have volunteered to help localize the game to a specific language, I urge you to actually read the long text associated with this bullet point. To find important info about this, look around the 4th paragraph under the "Now, on to the meat of this post - discussing upcoming plans for NNF:" section)
Nubby is going on sale for the Steam Winter Sale '25 - '26 (Dec 18 - Jan 5). I'm feeling quite generous, and you should save the date. Consider sharing the spirit of nubby and spreading the joy of numbers to your number-less friends.
Mobile port slightly delayed but still coming out after v1.4 content is ported to ios and android. Regardless, your patience will be rewarded with pocket sized nubbies very soon.
Decided that after the mobile port I'll probably port nubby to consoles next. Hopefully that will be xbox, playstation, and switch/switch2
Decided that after the future console port releases, I'd at least attempt to add Mac and Linux(maybe linux, still waiting on linux user nubby enthusiasts to get back to me about my inquiries). Mac port would come first, before linux port. The time slot for mac hopefully around late spring / early summer 2026. Linux would be sometime in summer 2026. Those are both extremely tentative and I have no idea if I'm even in the ballpark on those guesses.
Ending on a bittersweet note:
While I will not stop adding patches that add localizations and bug fixes / balance changes over the next couple months, I have decided that I am going to take a break from coming up with new ideas and adding new content to nubby. Though I am entering a hiatus for adding new content, I am not abandoning nubby and I am certain that at some point I will return to keep putting together updates for the game that add more stuff for you to enjoy. I have no idea when I will get back into working on nubby. The hiatus could last a couple months, or it could last a year or two. I hope it won't be that long, but I just want to prepare big nubby fans for that just in case, so at least you can rest easy knowing that I didn't forget about the game and that I will someday return. I'm really sorry if you're someone who really looks forward to new content updates for nubby. It's for the best that I take a step back from active development for a while, and I hope my reasoning in the bulletpoint below helps you understand where I'm coming from.
To ensure that you aren't left wondering why I'm taking a break, I will list my main reasons for taking a break from active nubby development for an unknown amount of time. The first reason is that I'm simply not interested in nubby right now. I've been working on it for about 6 hours everyday for over 2 years now and it gets old to say the least. If I'm not feeling inspired by working on the game, nothing good will come out of any updates I make. I think taking time to reset my passion for working on nubby is a healthy thing to do. The second reason for my hiatus is that I've recently been finding it really difficult to come up with ideas for things to add to the game that I truly feel would compliment and/or improve upon the nubby experience. I've just been in an idea drought for a while and this is another one of those things that taking a break and coming back with a fresh set of perspectives can help with in my experience. Even though this might all seem a little counter-intuitive, there's a method to my madness and it's all done with the player's best interest in mind. Even if this is frustrating news to you or makes you feel betrayed, I totally understand why you'd feel that way at first. If that was your reaction, I hope that one day it makes sense to you why I made the decision to go on hiatus.
Conclusion:
Ended the newspost by getting all sappy and thanking everyone for such an amazing year and for making the past 2 years of my journey in nubby's development feel like it was worthwhile. [Side note - yikes! that was a really crude and basic way of summing up my sentimental reflection... and now my soul feels dirtier for writing this paragraph. Oh well, I spent a long time trying to fit the essence of my sappy ending into a couple sentences and sometimes it's just not meant to be. If you want to read my big fat thank you to the community, read the final section in the full news post above. Otherwise, on to final exciting news so we can end on a high point.]
I didn't mention this in the TL;DR, but when I was discussing taking a break from nubby, I briefly mentioned that I was currently feeling a lot more motivated to move on for a while and work on other create game dev projects. I have actually already begun working on my next official indie title. I will announce / showcase this new mystery game when it's ready to be announced, and I will release it's free, playable demo version (probably on steam first) when it's ready to be played. It's way too early to think about my upcoming title's official release date. It's only been in development for a month, but now that I have more time to devote to it I have barely any idea of how fast things will progress now.
Oh, you want to know what my upcoming title is even about? That's too bad, I guess you'll never know. What a sad ending to the lazy bones version of this nubby news post.
I'm just being mean... I gave the non TL;DR full text enjoyers 3 hints that describe the general direction I'm going to take this game. On second though, calling them "hints" feels like I'm taking credit for more than I actually did there. The so-called "hints" are basically direct answers to questions regarding the most basic aspects of the game. The game currently has an established primary genre, an established art style (which I've been having a blast working with), and a hopeful but less solidified secondary genre. You can find the 3 hints at the bottom of the full text post, right above my signature line if you scroll up a little. Bye bye, you pile of lazy bones!
If my hints don't intrigue you, that's fine. Thanks for reading the TL;DR version of the news post anyway, lazy bones. Bye!