How we implemented gift giving in Ooblets

We're game developers, so we know how difficult social interactions can be. How to make friends is a problem we haven't quite figured out in real life, but we have come up with a solution in Ooblets!

Gift giving!

Okay, so giving gifts is not very unique to town-life and farming games, sure. It's also a little goofy... In real life, if you give gifts to people every day you're only going to weird them out. In games, gift giving often has the issue of forcing the player to memorize or look up what people like, keeping track of when you can give stuff, and giving the same things over and over again. We thought we'd take the concept of gift giving and shake it up a little:

WITH ROBOTS

More specifically, the Hankerbot! The Hankerbot is an AI sorta thingy that anticipates townsfolks' needs and lets you know a couple of them each day so you can give them those items, if you feel like it.

So far, it just sends a letter to your mailbox every day with 3 townsfolk hankers, but we may eventually try some other ideas. We’re not even 100% sure we’re gonna call it Hankerbot in the finished game (so don’t start writing Hankerbot fanfic just yet).

On the game design side, it sorta turns gift giving into a form of daily mini-quests. Besides giving more direction to the player, this also limits the number of gifts you can actually give out each day (because you can only give gifts to the people listed in the hanker report). On top of that, it lets us do some pacing to increase the difficulty of desired gifts as you progress through the game. So far, implementing Hankerbot has felt like a really big improvement that clarifies a lot of gameplay for us, so we hope you like it, too!