Nestables — A Gameplay Overview
We asked, you decided! You wanted to learn more about the gameplay in Nestables so here is an entire Medium post dedicated to the three main gameplay aspects that will be in the beta version. So let’s dive into it…
Collecting Resources
Tasking your Cube with collecting resources is one of the main aspects of the game. These resources will be used in everything, from building homes and personalising your nest to expanding your nest and feeding your Cubes. For the beta version, we are going to keep it simple. You will be able to task your Cube with collecting wood, ore and corn. The intention of this is to be able to implement a system that we can expand on overtime, adding extra layers of gameplay, customisation and fun.
Both wood and ore will be used for building homes, decorations and buildings for your Nest. Players will either be able to build their own creations using the building editor (to be detailed in greater depth at another time), use pre-designed creations or browse the marketplace to explore free and paid creations made by the community. Building anything ingame will require resources and the amount of resources is determined by the size and complexity of the creation.
Researching
Collecting resources takes time and energy from the Cubes and this leads us nicely into another central aspect of gameplay. While some Cubes might be more suited to performing one task over another, you can help your Cube become more efficient by tasking them with ‘researching’ a particular area. Researching will allow your Cube to improve their skill in different areas. For example, a Cube will chop wood at a rate of say 60 per hour. You can task your Cube with researching “wood chopping” and improve that rate to 100 per hour. This will allow for you to specialise your Cube in certain areas of the game.
Researching will take time and each time you research one particular aspect, the length of time taken to research the next task will be longer. It is important therefore to prioritise what your Cube is researching. You will be able to research a whole pile of different areas including ore mining, farming, the rate at which your Cube recovers fatigue from sleeping etc. Researching “Exploration” will also allow you to unlock new areas of your Nest for the Cubes to use. Each Nest will be unique in the generation of it and you will be able to choose in which direction you expand your nest to uncover different biomes and resources.
Cube Happiness
Finally, the third major aspect of gameplay that we are preparing for the beta is the ‘Happiness Rating’ of your Cube.
Keeping your Cube happy is essential to their productivity ingame and being able to breed.
Keeping your Cube happy won’t be super easy! They can be demanding little creatures. Each activity that the Cube does will positively or negatively influence the Happiness Rating of that Cube. A ‘rating impact’ is applied for each activity and will impact on the rating at a repeated time interval if the Cube continues with the task. For example, if you have tasked the Cube with playing with a ball, this will increase the happiness rating by +1 for every 10 minutes. So 60 minutes of play time will result in +6 overall happiness. Whereas, mining for excessive periods of time will make the Cube bored and will negatively impact the Cube’s happiness rating.
There are many different factors that will impact the Happiness Rating including:
- Boredom — Long period of time spent doing the same task
- Fatigue — Time between sleeping for the Cube
- Hunger — Quality and quantity of the diet that the Cube is on
- Nest Size — Size of the Nest compared to the number of Cubes living in it
- Cleanliness — Cleanliness of the Nest and the Cube
- Social — Amount of interaction with other Cubes or play time
You will need to assign your Cube with different tasks to keep them happy, such as bathing, eating, sleeping or playing while maintaining a balance with collecting resources and researching to expand and improve the nest.
