Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure News

Friends and Soon-to-be-Friends,

We love to watch folks play our game, since everyone plays so differently and we figured you might too! Every few weeks, we showcase a lovely streamer or content creator that's showcased us and show off all the ways to approach the game and how different people build!

Today, we wanted to show off SneakyBadgerUK, a variety streamer who's been keeping an eye out on us for a while. They're a great streamer that's super atentive to chat and their community, and they play with a sense of curiosity that makes them a fun watch. Take a look at their playthrough of the demo!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Badger found us a little while ago and have been supporting and believing in us when all we could show was just office life tiktoks and pictures of our pets! They're one of our first active Discord members and we wanted to say thanks for their support.

That's it for now! Wishlist us, tell your friends, come hang out and tell us who we should watch next at our Discord!

If you're interested in streaming or creating a video of Oddsparks, check out the Oddsparks presskit for logos, transparent promotional images for all your banner needs, and more.

Friends and Soon-to-be-Friends,

Thank you so so much. Thank you for showing off our game to your friends and followers, for making fan art, for making graphs and charts. Thank you for running out of bounds, for your weird and wild bases, for hanging out with us and each other at our Discord. Thank you for streaming and making videos, for letting us take part in your excitement, for your wonder, your joy, your surprise and your support.

Thank you for making us one of the most-played demo of the February 2024 Steam Next Fest!

Thank you for playing our demo.

[h2]The Demo[/h2]
The demo will stay up on Steam for a while.

You don't have to worry about it disappearing within this week. The demo will remain available for at least, until we release into Early Access. So for now, feel free to take your time and stay in the world of Oddsparks for as long as you'd like.

[h2]A Celebration of... You![/h2]
We're so happy to see you love our game and our work and wanted to celebrate that by showing off the various fan art, graphs and charts and bases that we've seen.

Click the thumbnails to see the image in full!

[h3]Fan Art[/h3]
Stumpy Spark in the Rain by Gronstef

Our first ever fan art (Twitter Link) was this beautiful rendering of Stumpy Spark carrying a piece of Aether Shard in the rain. If you're interested, there's actually a timelapse video showing the process!

Choppy Spark by Evi
This one is a fan art from the daughter of our Gameplay Engineer, Lukas. She's almost six years old and surprised her dad with the art, asking him if he recognized what it was! We think it's pretty recognizable.

Stumpy and Player Character by Derek
We've shown this one on Twitter before, Derek sent us via Instagram this adorable drawing of Stumpy looking very happy to be in the arms of the player character!

Self Portrait with Stumpy by Exilecast/Pedro Almeida
Exilecast (Twitter Link) created this self portrait for the thumbnail of his Let's Play! He explores the start of the demo and has a second video coming up where he's really working on the automation puzzles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwp7bsHTxhE

Leading Stumpy Spark by cuh_riss/Christopher Cantin
Chris (Twitter Link) created this super fun art for the thumbnail of a YouTube video by InterndotGif (Twitter Link)! The video is a cut and edited showcase of Intern's playthrough. We enjoyed watching it a lot!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OBPv8_q1bk

Pixel Self Portrait with Stumpies by Pix'n'Cafey

Pix'n'Cafey created a very moody portrait of our game for his Let's Play! He plays in French, but if you don't speak it, with auto-caption & auto-translate, you can get a glimpse into his commentary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ilJOA5zm7o

And in general, a quick shout out to everyone who's been making videos in their own language! While we might not understand what is being said (although collectively, we do speak about 15 different languages!), we can definitely see the joy and fun that you're all having with our game. As we said in a previous steam news post, we're actually in the process of picking which languages to translate Oddsparks to for our Early Access release. That's based on where the wishlists and demo downloads are coming from, so the more you tell your friends to play Oddsparks and wishlist us, the more likely we prioritize your language! So please tell more people about us, so we know which language to translate to!

[h3]Graphs and Charts[/h3]
Spark Item Delivery Speed Per Tile Calculations by Jurjen909
Wondering how long it takes for items to walk in a straight line? Jurjen909 has built a spreadsheet, with graphs to help you figure out how to build your base. You can find the thread on our Discord here!

Setup to Maximize Choppy Spark Production by *&
*& graphed out a theoretically optimum setup to get those Choppy Sparks. This base uses small circles to move items quickly! There's some theory talk about it over at our #tips-and-tricks Discord channel.

[h3]Base Showcase[/h3]
Maze Base by Feline
Feline dropped this WILD base that we just had to share. We had to compress it, so you can look at the full glory at our #base-showcase channel in discord! We'll leave you with Feline's original comments:

Originally posted by Feline

I know most people have optimization/automation goals, but I ended up with different goals in mind and instead made a maze to punish my right-turn-preferring minions. I couldn't force them to make arbitrary decisions, so instead I used path splitters to force them to have a 1:2 or 1:3 chance of picking correctly on any given choice. There are 7 total splitters/junctions, but a correct path requires only 5 total decisions, only one of which has turning right as the correct choice. If I've mathed right, it should be a 1:72 chance of picking the correct path. Answer key/adventure text in the top left.

Wooden Blade Factory by Xaendreth
For a more... normal base, we wanted to showcase this neat and tidy wooden blade Factory by Xaendreth! The bases uses loops and Sparks running in both directions to distribute items.

Storage Area by OpPointBaker
We've also shown this one off on Twitter with more images! It's always fun to see how people build and what they prioritize and clearly for OpPointBaker, that's their personal storage!

Car by Zhymet
And we want to end this post by showing you this fun design. Not every base needs to be optimised and perfect! We love seeing people draw with the Path tool and create fun doodles, take the long way around, and play the game at their own pace.

Thanks again for playing our demo. We hope you continue to enjoy your time with us, tell your friends about us and hang out with us at our Discord.

Talk again soon!

Hello everyone!

The Steam Next Fest is over and WOW – we are so grateful for your response! Thank you for playing the demo, giving feedback, building crazy bases, sharing your own content, and most of all, thank you for making us one of the Top 50 Most Played Demos during the Steam Next Fest!
We would also like to thank all the content creators that have been streaming Oddsparks, making videos about it, talked about it and supported us.

We will make another post with our community highlights later this week, showing off our favorite bases, fan art, and more.



[h3]Languages[/h3]
We are currently in the process of deciding which languages we will support in the Early Access release. That decision is based on where the most wishlists and demo downloads come from, so if it’s important to you to have Oddsparks in your language, play the demo, wishlist the game and tell your friends to do the same!

Once again, thank you for your support and we can’t wait for you to experience the Early Access version of Oddsparks!

Quartermasters, Merchants and Divine Researchers,

It's Steam Next Fest and our demo is here! Well, it's been out for a while now and it's wonderful to see everyone's reactions to our game. Of course, there's still a lot of things to make but I hope you can see the vision we have for the game and will support us as we go through the Early Access journey together!

Normally for these Devlogs, we give people a few options for the next topic and you can vote on our Discord but today, we wanted to talk about our Early Access. What we're planning, how we want to do things. You might have seen some information in the other Steam news posts, but let's take our time properly to chat.

[h2]Early Access Release[/h2]
So you should have seen that we have a date, we're going into Early Access on the 24th of April 2024! You'll be able to buy our game at a reduced price (compared to when we have our v1.0) and play through two biomes!

You can unlock the rest of The Woodlands and get the Carry and the Loamy Spark, and explore our new biome, The Mountains and play with the new mountain Sparks!

A little glimpse at three new friends to look forward to!

[h3]Continuing Demo Save Games[/h3]
You will not be able to continue the saves you've started in the demo.

The game has been changed too much and a lot of things have been added. Unfortunately, this will happen a few times during Early Access - when we change the world generation rules, it will break every save. Of course, we don't want to keep ruining everyone's saves, so we'll be careful to only break saves when necessary.

To alleviate this issue, we'll release updates in beta branches to make sure that any big updates that will require you to start afresh is as good as possible. Starting from Early Access, we'll also keep old branches so that if there was something you wanted to complete, you'll be able to continue your save in an old branch! You won't see any of the new stuff, but we'd like to let you play at your own pace.

You will also be able to skip some of the beginning tutorialization. When you skip the tutorial, you'll start where you can almost immediately leave the village and go straight to the Stumpy Spark Shrine to get your first Spark. We'll also tell you in the updates if we end up changing the beginning and whether we're recommending you to start the new save with the tutorial on, or if you can just dive in.

When you just want to go straight to that first Spark.

[h3]The Mountains[/h3]
We're currently finishing up our second biome: The Mountains! We're still doing some work on the gameplay and progression at the moment and finalizing how we spread out the fun toys that we're going to give you.

Now that you've played for a few hours, we want to ramp things up! You'll have to use ladders, ramps, ziplines and elevators to get yourself, your Sparks and your items up and down elevation levels. You'll have to explore a biome full of aggressive enemies to search for shrines and resources - even simple enemies are a lot harder to deal with when they're in combination with each other.

You'll even find a way to finally create an infinite source of Aether Shards! But making it run perfectly is going to be a little tricky.

What an unusual looking building! What does this one do?

[h2]Future Content & 1.0 Release Plans[/h2]
We're not quite ready to reveal our living roadmap just yet. Our initial plans are to do Early Access for one year, but of course, we want the game to be the best it can be. We'd love to support the game for as long as it needs before we give it the version number 1.0.

We'll have more biomes, more Sparks and more logistical challenges and tools. Including some really fun stuff that we want to already tell you about, but will restrain ourselves for now. You've already got the Early Access release to be excited for!

For now, we hope you enjoy our demo, tell your friends about us, and tell us your feedback and thoughts over at the Steam Discussions, our Discord, or even email us at [email protected].

Massive Miniteam is working hard on Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure to prepare for its Early Access release on the 24th of April this year.
But they have also been working on another game in cooperation with Octato that will release next Monday: Airhead.

In Airhead you help a small body save a head-like organism full of air, from a leak that threatens its life. You will explore their Metroidvania-style world and overcome challenging environmental puzzles to find the key to the head's survival.

Head over to Airhead and wishlist it now – in just a few days you will get to play it!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/771700/Airhead/