GUBBINS

ASTRONOMY UPDATE
14 MAR 2024


GUBBINS 1.1.0

The Astronomy Gubbins are live folks! Get stuck into some more Gubbins action with your intergalactic pals, The Planet, UFO, Constellation, Meteor and Black Hole. Pick up the Planet for FREE right now in the Kiosk and consider buying the rest of the crew.

We’ve also got some other funky new purchasables, like a punctuation sticker pack and some fresh menu updates where we’ll be announcing more cool things in the coming weeks.

Hope you love it! Excited to see your astronomy postcards!
NEW ASTRONOMY GUBBINS!

Planet (4) Good — Attracts all Bad Gubbins,pulling them to nearby spaces.
Perfect to save your board from being messed with by most of the bad Gubs! The anti-bad-gub gub.

UFO (2) Good — Removes 3 adjacent letters, on expiry replaces them with Pencils.
Abducts letters, replacing them with a stronger more versatile race. How long have pencils seemlessly walked amongst our letter brethren?

Constellation (4) Good — Moves randomly, leaving moveable letters behind.
Detect patterns across the board and make some more words. Try moving the constellation in other ways to increase value.

Black Hole (2) Bad — Rotates the board to the right, and reverse it on expiration.
This Gubbin’s largest impact is the psychic damage it inflicts when it lands.

Meteor (3) Bad — Shuffles all adjacent tiles, and reverse it on expiration.
Wait, where were those tiles again?
OTHER COOL THINGS!

Our new and improved dictionary will now generate cute easter egg responses to hundreds more words (thanks Nerdfighters), celebrated with a shiny new animation. Your responses we’re overwhelming and we’ve still got about a third to go through!

The main menu has been updated! We’ve got a little newsfeed so you can see the shiny new things we get up to.

New packs! The Punctuation Pack has loads of punc stickers to really express yourself; and the Chonkiest Bundle, Space Punc and Space Travel pack are great value ways to grab all the Gub fun you could want. Basically you’ll see different deals based on what you don’t have yet.

Fixed issue with the Sock Gubbin not copying other Gubbins correctly and breaking the game.





HOT FIX

26 FEB 2024


Gubbins V1.0.8

Great news, a patch just dropped with a few bug fixes and something very important— a major dictionary improvement. Firstly the peripherals.

- Fixed a bug that caused the game to get stuck on launch if you're offline or have patchy internet
- Various other bug fixes and under the hood improvements.

MAJOR DICTIONARY IMPROVEMENTS

  • If you’ve been playing Gubbins for a while and your vocab is tip top, you may have encountered situations where you make a valid word (as recognised by Google, the official dictionaries etc.) and Gubbins doesn’t recognise it as a “real” word. We know that committing to a totally 9-letter word and having the game not accept it can essentially ruin games so we’ve been doing a deep dive into this in hopes of solving it.

    Basically our dictionary is an amalgamation of a few free resources and a paid service. We’ve intentionally avoided incorporating dictionaries that are SO expansive, as they tend to include insane acronyms and garbage words. Including these would mean the game would accept almost any string of letters as a valid word, and is already its own issue (that people justifiably hate).

    It’s worth noting that this issue is deceivingly complex. We have multiple word lists for different situations, including blocked words, preferred “common” words for the game to generate for mechanics like the Pencil and more. Additionally, a single recent word someone submitted to us is “TRANCHING”. This word is listed in Google’s dictionary, along with dictionary dot com and Wiktionary, but not on Collins and Merriam Webster. I can personally verify that there is an insanely common case, and an unfathomable number of words appear in some dictionaries and not others. As a four person team making games and running a business, I’m sorry, but I don’t expect we will ever do *better* than Merriam of house Webster BUT we can certainly do better than what we’re doing now.

    (To our credit, I bet our word list is already much better than most of these at recent slang and colloquialisms)

TLDR (AND TO WRAP UP)

  • We’ve incorporated another massive dictionary into Gubbins, increasing our valid word pool by well over 20%, and we’ve done our best to remove the “junk words” from it (some would have slipped through, no doubt). On average, your valid words should be FAR MORE LIKELY to be accepted as valid but our dictionary will likely never be perfect, and will always be a work in progress. Thank you for your feedback on this front, we’re here, we’re listening, we’re workin’.

    As always please feel free to hit me with any Qs, if you find junk words you’d like to see REMOVED from the word list you can also submit those!

THOUGHTS / FEELINGS / FEEDBACK / BUGS / COMPLIMENTS / REQUESTS

We got you at: hello@folly.studio






PATCH NOTES

1 FEB 2024


Gubbins 1.0.7

Hello folks, HNY! just a littlish one here today, a more “back end” focused patch with a few quality of life features and some funky fresh Gubbintine content <3 Basically we’re in for the long haul and we’re trying to set ourselves up with systems to make supporting this game easy! We won’t rest until our dictionary is truly seamless and every little bug is thwarted.

We’re hard at work with a bigger, more content-oriented update (Gubs, perhaps??). We’ll keep you in the loop with what that’ll entail. As always please hit us with your questions and feature requests!

VALENTINE’S DAY STICKERS!

  • Send your loved one a cute little Gubbins postcard with our free, seasonal Valentines day stickers and backgrounds. These will be active in-game from the 4th to the 18th of February!

DICTIONARY

  • Over 1000 words have been added to the dictionary! Thank you kindly for using our word submission form.

    Dictionary is now streamed from cloud hosting on startup. This will allow us to update the dictionary on the fly instead of relying on a new build. BETTER DICTIONARY HUZZAH!

  • GUBBINS RELATED ERRORS

    Game will now attempt to catch gubbins related errors and show an alert to the user, ask them to report the bug, and then continue the game with the culprit tile removed. Hopefully you don’t see this, but if you do you have the opportunity to send us critical info required to solve the bug!

    POSTCARD MAKER!

    Added an “are you sure” prompt when leaving the postcard maker due to popular demand, making it harder to lose postcards + score screens you aren’t done with yet! FYI we’re considering more robust longer term solutions like a “previous game” catalogue or something similar too.

  • PUSH NOTIFS

    We want to send you helpful and deranged notifications about Gubbins! You should get a popup about this when you start the game up, obvy feel free to deny our request.

  • MISC + FIXES

    - Improved memory usage for Gubs and Stickers
    - Turning off the “gatecrasher” anims now correctly works in the Accessibility Options
    - Fixed the Car and Lightbulb Gubbins from getting confused and failing to solve longer words.
    - Updated and improved our anagram tech generally, ensuring the game can more accurately detect and create valid words
    - Filtered all words that include a Q without a following U from our “common words” list, preventing this letter sequence from appearing in tile generation.
    - Removed SPICE from Chilli's generated word list.


    GUB ON!



PATCH NOTES

18 DEC 2023


Gubbins v1.0.6

Merry Christmas and happy holidays folks. I just wanted to say thank you for the overwhelming support this year. It’s been a month since launch, and we’ve still been working really hard on rad stuff for you and we have a cool patch live RIGHT NOW.

Make sure you’re on the latest build and get stuck into it!

GUBSMAS SEASONAL POSTCARD THINGS!

  • ‘Tis the season! Limited time postcard stickers and backgrounds are available (and automatically unlocked) until the 7th of January, when they will disappear. Get stuck into Gubbins during the festive season and make delightfully seasonal postcards. Send them to us and everyone else you love.

  • 9 x Stickers
    3 x Backgrounds (with a bunch of different colour variants)

ACCESSIBILITY / SENSORY OPTIONS

  • Since launch we’ve had a lot of folks give us feedback around the visually “loud” nature of the game. Whilst we love where we’ve landed visually, we wanted to provide more options for folks who find some of the visual noise distracting or annoying. Here are the new options in the settings menu!

  • - Particles (Toggle the confetti off/on)
  • - Combo effects (Toggle the board colour shift during combo off/on)
  • - Screen wipes (Toggle the Gubbin avalanche screen wipes off/on)
  • - Gatecrashers (Toggle the random Gubbins that just pop up randomly when you’re thinking / playing off/on)

DAILY STREAK COUNTER

  • Added to the main menu. Streaks are continued EASILY by starting or finishing any game.

    Don’t you dare let it drop back to zero, and don’t you dare email us asking to fix it if it does (we have no control here, we can’t help you).

  • END GAME ‘TABLE FLIP’

    Now, Gubbins will expire after you’ve placed all valid tiles in the draw pile, even if they have charge left. So, if a lock jumps out on the last row and attempts to ruin a good combo, place every tile (before the FIN tile) and the lock will be dismissed.

  • OTHER COOL STUFF!

    - HEAPS of dictionary additions. Please keep sending us words!
  • - Massive UI feedback updates across many areas of the game, as prompted by our tech overlords.
  • - Added Android back button support
  • - Added warning for placing FIN tile when there are words remaining on the board
  • - Update score display UI
  • - Updated tutorial cloud line weight
  • - Removed outline from gubbins screen
  • - Shop UI Updates
  • - Achievement banner now visible during unlock sequence
  • - Hateful word filter has been updated
  • BUG FIXES

    - Fixes for Google Pixel Fold resolution
    - Fix for grammar in Rollerskate description
    - Fix for slight lag in animations
    - Fix for "Saved to Photos" being captured in postcards
    - Fix for clash between Rainbow and Sunshine Gubbins
    - Fix for remaining sessions not updating at 3am
    - Fix for hard lock caused by profanity detection on board
    - Fix for Daily Game Mode panel and Score Postcard not reflecting archived daily game dates
    - Fix for multitouch causing tiles to get dropped unintentionally
    - Fix for localised months in Daily Archive menu
    - Fix for full screen shop items creeping up the screen
    - Fix for never ending Giant animations


HOTFIX

1 NOV 2023


v0.227.9

In case you missed it, a few important bug fixes are LIVE! Just navigate to your respective store pages and make sure you've downloaded the latest build (v0.227.9). Thank you for all the bug reports! We appreciate you early testers more than you know. You are the realest of real.

Navigate to your respective stores to ensure you're on the latest build, v0.227.9. This version number is now visible in the pause / settings menu as of this build too!

Happy gubbing.

THE FIXES

  • - Fixed a bug that blocked purchases on iOS (Came with an "invalid Receipt" error message)
  • - Fixed a mean bug that would cause a complete loss of save data, and a progress reset
  • - Added version number to settings and pause menus
  • - Fix for the daily archive being off by one day
  • - Fixed a soft lock which could occur when unlocking an achievement and placing the FIN tile simultaneously
  • - Fixed a soft lock in the tutorial flow that could occur by rotating an unintended tile
  • - The reset data button is generally more robust
  • - Fixed touch detection on the in-game Gubbins Selection screen



PATCH NOTES

OCT 2023


V0.224.3

Hello good people!

We have HEAPS of rad changes landing in the live build in a few days (or by now depending when you’re reading this) UNDO BUTTON, SCORE REWORK, COMBO SYSTEM, COOL BACKGROUNDS, PLAY STREAK and so. much. more. Additionally, the time is nigh and MONETISATION will be landing in the next early access Gubbins build, in the next few days. Here’s how it will all go down!

First things first, Gubbins is a Free to Play (F2P) game that can and in many cases should be played completely for free. Everyone who downloads Gubbins can play a single game once a day, every day after the several-game introduction-y tutorial-y flow (please note that games can last 15-20 minutes so it’s a fair whack of play time). Some Gubbins will be premium only (behind a paywall) and we’ll have some cute postcard related cosmetics too. If all goes according to plan, ads will not be included in Gubbins at any point. That said, this is early access and we will continue to evaluate in the leadup to release and afterwards.

Four purchasable options will go live. Here’s what they look like…

          • 1. Unlimited Play! Break the game-a-day limit and play as much as you like. The core Gubbins purchase let’s fricken go!

          • 2. The Travel Gubbins Pack! Five premium Gubbins that can only be earned through the use of your wallet. Immediately unlock the Hot Air Balloon, Car, Boat, Skateboard and Rollerskate. These Gubbins will still appear in daily games occasionally regardless of payment.

          • 3. The Giant Postcard Pack! A premium selection of Giant related stickers and backgrounds to spruce up your postcard game.

          • 4. The Launch Bundle! All of the above, with a radical discount.

Thanks to a very cool new partnership with internet’s best man Hank Green 10% of all Gubbins’ proceeds will go directly to a not-for-profit charity organisation focused on reducing maternal and child mortality. A chunk of every single purchase made within Gubbins will be directed to doing important, life saving work. We don’t have the words to describe how overjoyed we are about this partnership and the incredible response to the announcement. So we’ll just say, we love Hank and we love you all.

This version of the game is similar to how we intend to launch the game globally, so please hit us with your last minute feedback. We’re monitoring the data, along with your thoughts and feelings to ensure we can survive and thrive as a business, but also to ensure we’re behaving with fairness and transparency in mind.

THE KIOSK IS LIVE ALONG WITH THE FOLLOWING IN APP PURCHASES

  • - Unlimited Play
  • - The Travel Gubbins Pack
  • - The Giant Postcard Pack
  • - The Launch Bundle (includes all of the above)

  • (Price varies based on region and currency)

GAME UPDATES TO ACCOMODATE PURCHASES

  • - Post-introductory flow, players can play one game per day.
    - Daily Level Backlog available for folks who purchase Unlimited Play.
    - The Travel Gubbins have been removed from the free pool, are now unlocked from purchase only.

UNDO BUTTON

  • - Our white whale, the fabled Undo Button is in and werkin. Any single action within the game can be undone with the undo button, along with the chain reaction of events that tail that action. Eg. if you place a letter, a Roller Skate pushes a letter into a Lightning Gub— that whole action can be undone to before your tile placement.
  • - Many random outcomes are seeded, eg. undoing a Gubbin choice and taking the same course of action will present the same Gubbin choice.
  • - Undo limited to 3 uses per game, we are monitoring this limit closely. It’s intended to be a neat accessibility feature, and generally helpful for misplays, but we don’t want “draw pile scouting” and RNG manipulation to become a mainstay for power gamers.

SCORE UPDATE!
  • - Whole score rework. Scores on average will be much higher, and will feature a larger disparity based on performance. Specifically, larger words are worth exponentially more.
  • - COMBO SYSTEM BABY! Enter words consecutively to start a Combo, increasing the score of subsequent word entries based on the length of words entered. It’s weighted, so longer words have a larger impact on Combo multiplier.
  • - Combo multiplier is capped at 200%.
  • - Placing any tile on the board will END your combo. You can naturally start another at any time.
  • - It is now “score optimal” to attempt to stack up many words on the board and knock them all down at once. Please know you don’t have to be “optimal”, play however you like.

UPDATED TUTORIAL/FIRST PLAY THROUGH

  • - A tutorial rework, replacing the Lemon as the bad Gubbin with the Lock, and the ‘PANCAKE’ word with ‘BREAD’
    - Removed “choose your Gubbin” sequence.
    - On first play, The Daily + Pencil game modes will remain hidden until players complete a Classic Game.

BACKGROUNDS!

  • - Within the pause / settings menu, you will find the option to change your game background (behind the board).
  • - Worth noting that some of these look a little “crunchy” at tho mo, bare with us whilst we smooth them out.

COMBINED SCORE AND SHARE SCREEN INTO SOME KIND OF SCARE / SHORE SCREEN

  • - At the end of the game, you are now put into the Share screen that now by default features a little game summary postcard with your score and your best words.
  • - Select this postcard background within the share screen to repopulate all this rad info!

GENERIC GAMEPLAY UPDATES

  • - Lowered total number of letter rows in Classic and Daily games to 8 (from 9).
  • - Whole score rework. Scores on average will be much higher, and will feature a larger disparity based on performance. Specifically, larger words are worth exponentially more.
  • - Gubbins now unlock once per day, upon completing your first game for that day (regardless of whether you’ve purchased infinite play or not).

UI UPDATES
  • New main menu with further refinements to come (Including Kiosk!)
  • The Play / Game mode panels are all cool now.

ACHIVEMENTS UPDATED
  • - Achievements now reward rad little postcard cosmetics, including backgrounds and stickers.
  • - Cute af visual updates.

DAILY MODE ARCHIVE
  • - We’ve now got a funky little calendar that lets you play the backlog of daily games as often as you like
  • - Check them off as you go!
  • BUG FIXES
    - At some stage our funky “Gubbin Wipe” animation fell out of the build, now when you add a Gub to your draw pile you will once again see the Gub Wipe.
  • - Scaled up stickers should be slightly easier to manage / move around.
  • - Fixed an annoying and elusive bug where the Sunshine would make letters appear as different letters, causing seemingly valid words to be invalid.
  • - Fixed Sharing on Android. When sharing a postcard directly to social media, the post should already have “#gubbins” populated. Many other little bugs.

THOUGHTS / FEELINGS / FEEDBACK / BUGS / COMPLIMENTS / REQUESTS

We got you at: hello@folly.studio



PATCH NOTES

MAY 24TH, 2023


v0.216.3

Hello folks, hope you're well. No monetisation again for this update so you’re free for the next month or so again, or I guess more accurately WE’RE free. Some rad exciting changes here, as always please let us know what you think.

GENERAL GUBBINS ADJUSTMENTS — FLIP ‘EM

- Full Gubbin Descriptions rewrite. Every Gubbin had its text revamped to be simpler and easier to consume by your brain meat, hopefully without losing much specificity.
- Rotating Gubbins! A handful of good Gubbins have had their “row” or “column” target replaced with the rotate-able “in a line” target. These Gubbins are; Cherry, Chili, Trumpet, Cassette and Car.
- Gubbin tiles can now float / be moved by Gubbin effects.
- Gubbin tiles can now be locked by the Padlock, etc.

SPECIFIC GUBBINS ADJUSTMENTS — Boat, Drum and SUNSHINE, baby

- Boat reworked. Effect now reads “Allows tiles in the line to be picked up and moved.” (Charge 5) Similar to its compatriot, the Hot Air Balloon, the Boat allows you to move tiles but the effect is applied in a line.
- Drum reworked. Effect now reads “Adds moveable ‘S’ tiles to adjacent spaces.” (Charge 3) Now the Drum won’t gum up your draw pile, which I think everyone found annoying. The S tiles generated will remain floating indefinitely until moved once, regardless of whether or not the Drum is still on the board.
- Sunshine reworked. Effect now reads “Splits all face-up tiles in the draw pile into singles.” (Charge 4). Now every face up tile, and any that flip face-up whilst a Sun is out are split into singles. So sleek, so seamless.
- Reduced Magnet tiles targeted and moved to 1 (was 2, but why was it ever 2, that’s the question).

DAILIES EVOLVE — HELL YEAH

- I feel like we’re learning a lot about what feels good and what doesn’t. We really welcome your feedback here, but be gentle with us okay.
- We’re striving to hit the following cadence, it’s subject to change but hope you like it;
- Tuesday: Letter day, the next letter of the alphabet, weekly.
- Saturday: Unjumble, this day will feature a 7+ letter word and an infinite Boat / Hot Air Balloon to accommodate the unjumble and is a pretty helpful tool generally.
- Sunday: SUN DAY, this day will always feature an infinite Sun on the board, effectively making the whole game single-tiles only. NEAT.

MISC IMPROVEMENTS

- Many animations and effects that would block player input have been sped up, or have stopped blocking player input entirely.
- Added a loading spinner to the postcard maker, that thing is getting chonky.
- More sweet audio stuff, namely a cool effect over the Gubbins select screen, pause menu, etc. Love you ASITP.
- Various dictionary improvements including a massive reduction to garbage 2-3 letter words and hateful word filter improvements.
- Further refinements to the Gubbins Selection screen.

FIXES

- Solved a corrupted game data bug that would cause Classic Mode to become unresponsive.
- Raincloud tiles no longer generate artefacts and lines.
- Heaps of bits and pieces.

THOUGHTS / FEELINGS / FEEDBACK / BUGS / COMPLIMENTS / REQUESTS

We got you at: hello@folly.studio


PATCH NOTES

MAY 1ST, 2023


V0.214.0

Hello folks, thank you for playing Gubbins! The initial softlaunch was a huge success and we’re genuinely stoked that folks are enjoying the game, and triple stoked that you’re sharing postcards (never stop).

It’s worth mentioning that monetisation will likely be landing in the next major early access update we do in 1-2 months time. Don’t let it scare you, please embrace it warmly so we can continue to make Gub-related content and even future games.

NEW GAME MODE / Pencil Mode

No bad Gubbins, no Gub selection, only Pencils and big words. We almost called this “Mum Mode” because Darcy’s mum requested it.

BALANCE & GUBBIN ADJUSTMENTS

- Pencil Gubbin now has an unlimited charge (it will never expire on the board)
- Dragging across a Pencil Gubbin during word creation will now reroll the word it gives you, rather than staying as one particular letter. Eg. attempting to lock in  [G][R][PENCIL][V][E] will randomly give GROVE or GRAVE each time you drag across it, so you can fish for one of the other if you so choose.
- The Pencil Gubbin will always be scored as a common (low scoring) letter. Partially because it’s already super good, and mostly because we don’t want power gamers “fishing” for high scoring solutions.
- Skateboard Gubbin charge reduced to 1 (was 4?? Absolutely unhinged)
- Car Gubbin now attempts to make a word on the row you play it.
- New Lightbulb Gubbin effect, “Takes all of the single tiles on the board and attempts to make a word with them on this row.”
- Both the Car and the Lightbulb have seen an under-the-hood rework, and now will generate the longest word it can with the letters provided. Previously the Car could “fail” and produce jumbled garbage, but now it will settle for a word with a portion of the letters.
- 2-letter words are now always worth 5 points. Clearing difficult / high value letters with tiny, often garbage words was too rewarding, and we’d like 2-letter words to only be optimal as an editing tool or for end-game clean up.

MORE DAILIES / Dailies on the daily

Our first batch of dailies were quite unruly and we’re aware that some of them felt overwhelming and difficult. We used those to test the waters, and we’re guiding future levels with our takeaways from the first batch.

NEW STICKERS / show off your score

Score stickers have been implemented to the postcard maker, so you can now officially brag when you get an astronomical score.

NEW GUBBIN SELECT SCREEN / it’s hot

Some new players were confused about the Gubbin Selection screen (in that they didn’t know there was a choice to be made here). This new screen is clearer and looks better.

HEAPS OF SFX UPDATES / It’s sounding crisp af

- New Gubbin sounds
- New Giant sounds
- New UI and gameplay sounds
- Mixing adjustments

NEW SETTINGS AND PAUSE MENUS / let’s go!

Looks good feels good

FIXES

- Fixed a crash that occurred when playing the Rainbow Gubbin on the first turn of a game
- High score achievement will now correctly unlock
- The score header will now correctly update
- Various fixes for our overzealous profanity filter, which would result in randomly changing letters on the board
- Fixed an issue where the Padlock Gubbin was changing letters on the board and gaslighting our players
- Many minor tweaks, fixes and optimisations

KNOWN ISSUES

The postcard maker may take a few seconds to correctly load the assets in. We’ll find a solution to this in a future build.

THOUGHTS / FEELINGS / FEEDBACK / BUGS / COMPLIMENTS / REQUESTS

We got you at: hello@folly.studio