Orb of Creation news & patch notes

Hey Ponderers.

The time has come. The orb beckons.

Play 1.0 on Steam now!

Hey Ponderers!

Orb of Creation 1.0 will launch on June 23rd, 2026.

It features:

• \ The game has a start... and an end! I've taken all the Dev Time I've need, thanks :)

• \ Once you've completed the restoration of the world, you can start anew, but this time with randomized challenges and prestige upgrades that will make every run feel different.

• \ Spells, glyphs, concepts, artifacts, alchemy and rituals are all randomized. Each time you go to create a new spell or tool, you will be presented with a unique selection of 2 or 3 of them to choose from. With hundreds of total collectables in the game, everyone's run will be different... including yours on subsequent playthroughs.

• \ Druidry, Alchemy and Rituals have received some major love, and have been repurposed to focus on their respective strengths and theming. Druidry is about growing and harvesting plants; Alchemy is about converting materials from one to another; Rituals are gigantic, powerful spells. In addition, the decisions in these sections have been made far more interesting. Are you someone who wants to grow a bunch of powerful fruit? Or would you rather set up a delayed resource chain and endlessly harvest Ironwood?

• \ All restrictions in the game have been changed to soft requirements. Discovered Brainstorm but don't have Expert Storm 9 yet? That's fine! You can still use it, but it'll just cost more and take longer to recharge.

• \ The game has been cleaned up! Build choice is more interesting. Every expert research has a unique payoff that will entice you, and each of them intertwined with one other in someway. Most spells and tools have been updated to be more consistent and less conditional.

• \ Every tooltip can be paused and inspected, giving you clarity on every minute detail the game has to offer. Its as simple as mousing over +1 Effect Level to be informed on what that means, or hovering over a spell type to see all its related spells!

And lots more.

The orb awaits you at the end of June!

-Marple

Hey Ponderers!

This is where we are at:

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--The Final Release Content Pass--

- The Beginning (Magic + Scholar) -- (100% done)

- The World / New Druidry -- (100% done)

- The Workshop -- (100% done)

- Alchemy, Part 1 -- (100% done)

- Alchemy, Part 2 -- (100% done)

- Rituals, Part 1 -- (60% -> 80% done)

- Rituals, Part 2 + The End -- (0% -> 40% done)

- New Game+ and Achievements -- (0% -> 80% done)

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Last month was incredibly productive. It feels similar to when you are on the last little bit of jigsaw puzzle: you've lined up most of the other pieces and then this sort of this cascade effect occurs. Every piece fills in quicker than the last. That's what orb has been feeling like to me.

And you can see above I went a little off the rails! I moved off of rituals to work on the New Game+ section because I was struck with how I wanted to handle the new prestige upgrades.

I've was brainstorming for a long time how I wanted to handle them, and I was always running into one small issue. "In a game about creating personalized builds, how do I fit prestige upgrades into that in a meaningful choice-based way?" If prestige upgrades simply upgraded each of your disciplines, wouldn't the player just simply choose the one that fits their current build? If you are a in a Wizardry focused build, wouldn't the player just choose the prestige upgrades that boosts Wizardry?

I want there to be meaningful choices in which prestige upgrades you choose to invest in.

And that's when this idea came to me: "Prestige upgrades will be drafted in a similar way to how Spells, Glyphs, Artifacts, etc. are drafted." And that got me so excited. Feels like I found the missing puzzle piece and all the other pieces clicked into place.

So New Game+ works like this:

- You earn Time Advancements for how far you get into each run (calculated by the number of attributes you've purchased)

- You are given a set of random challenges you can choose to complete on your next run. Each challenge completed gives you more Time Advancements.

- Achievements act as permanent upgrades. Completing an achievement on one run will give you a permanent upgrade for the rest of your runs.

- As you progress through a run, you will be able to draft your prestige upgrades, called Time Runes. This means you will choose 1 of 3 Time Runes, an average about 5 times a run. There are currently 30 different Time Runes.

- Once a Time Rune is drafted/selected, you can then invest Time Advancements into them.

- Once the run is complete and a new run is started, all Time Advancements are refunded, and you will again get a new set of Time Runes and challenges.

This design perfectly fits how the game wants to be played and the spirit of New Game+, which is "how do I complete the game with these challenges and tools I am given?", encouraging you to adjust your build to handle what cards you've been dealt.

Its also very bold. I'm using rogue-lite mechanics in a game that will probably take the average player 20hrs to complete on their first run. Variance will oscillate between "god-runs" to "okay/standard-runs", and truthfully that may have a negative impact on player experience if they have to play with a sucky build for too long. But this is where its bold: I believe if I've designed the game well enough, no runs should feel negatively bad, and with enough discovery rerolls and other mechanics, bad RNG ideally would be non-issue.

We'll see where we land.

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I also wanted to talk about challenges a bit, since I've implemented the majority of them. There are 4 different types:

- Weakening challenges that reduce your strength in some way.

- Specialization challenges that force the player to invest into a specific Expert Research.

- Speed challenges that check if the player can get to a section fast enough.

- And then the one I am most excited about: Focus challenges, that force a player to over-invest into a specific Technology research. All requirements of that tech research are removed for the duration of the challenge so its easy to do.

This is so fun to me because these focus challenges will add a ton of run variance into the game. When you have 5 levels in Improved Auras before anything else, that is really going to shape your run. Or when its its 10 levels in Improved Casting, that's going to feel very different than a run with 10 levels in Improved Artifacts. Its going to be a "fun" challenge rather than being truly "challenging".

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In terms of content size so far, I've implemented 60 different challenges (each with 3+ levels), 30+ different time runes and around 20 achievements. I've also got one more spoiler free mechanic that will add even more fun run variance into the game. So I do believe I've constructed an end-game that'll remain fresh for those that want to keep playing.

For the final section of the game, I've also made the scaffolding for around 30-40 different rituals, and 6 new resources. So there will be a fair bit of content to go through to complete the game. I sometimes just stare at the game for a long time, contemplating the complete size of it. And if I'm being frank, its easy to fear that I've made this thing too big or too complicated.

But the truest answer I've landed on is that the orb demands it. And so I choose to be its humble servant.

-Marple

Hey Ponderers!

Another dev status update coming your way! I had some insight that perhaps the best way to communicate where I am in this release sprint is to write out the content roadmap that will lead to release.

--The Final Release Content Pass--

• The Beginning (Magic + Scholar) <-- Started this phase in October 2025

• The World / New Druidry

• The Workshop

• Alchemy, Part 1

• Alchemy, Part 2

• Rituals, Part 1 <-- We are here, more than 60% done

• Rituals, Part 2 + The End

• New Game+ and Achievements

Each section on this map is not the same size. Rituals, Part 1, for example, is likely the longest section. The map also doesn't include everything, like the large amounts of Quality of Life I'm injecting into the game. But I believe this is the best way to communicate where we are and what to expect.

I want to reiterate that when this final content pass is complete is when I'll announce the release date. (ie. after New Game+ and Achievements) There'll still be some small todos to get this release fully complete, including things like controller support, mac support, and some branding stuff like trailers.

I also want to reiterate that I have no intention of gathering public feedback before the all the remaining major pieces are in place. Once the game is released, however, I will most certainly be parsing and implementing any feedback to continue to grow and polish the game.

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The beginning of rituals has been challenging, as it has been in its previous iterations. Historically, its been the point where the game starts to buckle under its own complexity and becomes very hard to develop. Keeping things like attributes and upgrades fresh becomes time consuming. This is also why v0.6 didn't include it.

However, my approach has been very different this time. Mentally, I'm far more prepped. When scaling a mountain, I've found meditating at the bottom incredibly useful. Letting the solutions come to me rather than trying to force it and create unsatisfying results.

The game's foundation is also far more robust this time around. The new mechanics and tweaks to the old mechanics has built the scaffolding required to hold this section's complexity. There is a ton of design space for creating interesting ritual effects and creating meaningful upgrades for the player to invest their new-found resources into.

The other major challenge here is finding out that the formulas you used to get here don't serve this part of the game.

For example, I found out when I hit rituals, that treating Mana as a unique resource that doesn't scale as well as other resources creates a massive disparity when reaching the new set of spells that rely on Blaze. If Blaze eventually out-scales Mana, dragon-spell costs will eventually become a non-issue. And so I had to tweak the formulas that I've used and bring Mana up to the scaling of the other resources, which messes with EVERYTHING. And it is so hard to tell how this impacts the earlier sections of the game without replaying it. Not to mention that a player's build can have a massive impact on how fast they scale at certain parts.

This is also why I've needed to do a full content pass from the beginning, because part of the major changes I made in this pass were massive tweaks to the capacity formulas. I've wanted capacities to be way less of a constraint in this version so now all capacity attributes scale at x1.08/level. (Instead of v0.6's x1.02/level, I believe.) This is a massive change. The math works out to: 100 attribute levels create x300 more capacity. For more context, this means when you hit Alchemy for the first time, your knowledge should already be in the trillions. When hitting Rituals your knowledge will be in the septillions. This has required me to tweak the cost of almost everything in the game, post-world.

But again, these formulas tweaks are where community help and feedback will kick in hard. Once the game is in your hands there will be a lot of polishing to do.

'Til next month!

-Marple

Hey Ponderers!

Happy New Year!!

As we enter the new year, the orb continues to grow. I don't have an exact maturation date for you, ...yet. But I do have a progress report with how things have been going since the start of December!

On my content creation journey I have just started dipping into rituals. With lots of the new mechanics I've been adding into the game, I'm hungry to start actually building the ritual content. I've got so many cool stats that can be ritual-exclusive that it makes it very exciting to get into it. I've also been working with some artists to give this portion of the game, and some other portions, a bit more polish than my limited artistic abilities can pull off on my own.

The big thing I wanna talk about in this development update though is the current iteration of researches. Be prepared as I'm about to ramble on some game design technicals:

Researches got another slight overhaul. I've been tweaking their advancement costs a lot since v0.6 finding the version that feels the most polished. Originally, the big change was making Technology cost from \ advancement -> \, and making the power impact of technology much higher. This worked for awhile but ended up creating a advancement imbalance that leaned too hard into the \ advancements, creating a deficit where the other advancements felt much weaker.

There was another problem that I've been solving for awhile in which stats like "Spell Weight Capacity" became less and less valuable as you went on. Investments into Expert Augments where cheap and solved spell capacity issues too easily. Something that playing Silksong taught me is that being more reserved with the upgrades that you dish out can be a good thing, and can actually enhance the experience of actually obtaining those upgrades when they are more rare.

This realization created a philosophy change in orb's researches. Almost all unique stats where removed off of expert researches and moved onto technology researches. "Improved Casting", for example, is now one of the only sources of "Spell Weight Capacity" in the game, and its gated by a scaling requirement in "Expert Augments". This effectively creates a diminishing-returns on spell weight increases, as to get more capacity requires more and more investment into "Expert Augments". This keeps spell weight capacity a valuable statistic throughout the game, especially when the more powerful spells cost a significant amount.

But just a few days ago I found even more changes that even further increased the polish of this section:

- Technology researches now cost \ advancements. Their power has been significantly increased to compensate.

- Capstones now cost from \ advancements -> \ advancements, making them very cheap and easy to purchase, their biggest restriction just being your expert levels. (This is double dipping on good design because capstones costing \ makes them feel special)

- Lots of really cheap researches were added to the game that only cost 1 advancement. They are mini power spikes that are extremely valuable, but also act as doors to other stronger, more costly researches. This also to gives the player cheap options in the early game where advancements are much more valuable.

These changes ended up with the current design philosophy for them being as follows:

- Expert Researches are your classic RPG attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence). You invest in these to reach attribute requirements and get minor statistically bonuses.

- Technology Researches are your power spikes and your RPG class definition. Investing into Expert Augments is like raising your intelligence, but getting a point of Improved Casting is what defines you as a spell-caster.

- Capstones are still your expert research payoffs. If you invest 4 into Expert Wizardry, you get an extra spell slot. Their cheaper cost makes them feel even more like payoffs rather than expensive upgrades that you might purchase.

- The rest of the innovation researches are the little trinkets you find along the way.

The final thing I'll say here is that I've been spending lots of time making sure every Expert-path feels like it has a strong payoff. Expert Storm and Expert Arcane, for example, now both have their own associated technology research with unique stats you can't get elsewhere.

In addition, I've been designing every expert path with interlocking side benefits. If you want to improve your spell casting, you can invest in Expert Augments, Wizardry, but also Storm or Arcane. If you want to improve your mastery over plants, you can invest in Druidry of course, but you'll also find a ton of synergy in Expert Items, Arcane, Storm, Augments and Expansion.

Oh and each expert research now has an associated infinitely scaling "ascendency" research that starts at level 32.

Til next month

-Marple

PS. This might be a little hard to decipher without the context that I have, but here are some of the juicy new researches:

Hey Ponderers!

Happy December! Letting you all know where the Orb and I are at.

For those looking for a release date or release info, I'll be upfront and let you know I don't have any more details at the moment.

I spent a lot of development time in both Alchemy and just general quality of life this month. The game is continuing to feel more and more polished every day I work on it. There is a lot of micro details I won't share here but will be immediately noticeable to anyone who has played OoC for any significant portion of time. The game is feeling really good.

Alchemy had a lot more cleanup than I gave it credit for. In my last post I mentioned how Alchemy feels less important now that there are lots of different forms of passive generation, so I spent some time with the content and really leaned into the passive generation for alchemy and I feel like I've changed my mind. Alchemy feels really useful so far, and I'm glad I could find its niche in a space that is pretty crowded. I ended up adding a lot more potions and alchemic recipes that offer more unique bonuses that you can't get elsewhere. The new input/output system I alluded to in the November dev log also feels fun to play with. There is a lot of openness and variety in how you can optimize your alchemic setups and try to squeeze out as much value as you can.

I finally implemented a use case for Alchemic Upgrades! ( now called "Material Upgrades" :O )

Druidry is almost certainly in its final form as well. Its a simple system that in my friends + family playtesting seems to be pretty intuitive, but shows a lot of depth once you get going with it. There is a fair bit of simple micromanaging and creativity you can implement here, which is what I love, all while feeling unique and "gardening" like.

I'm also dipping back into the length of this section. On this version and in this playthrough I'm implementing a lot of designer patience, and making sure the pace of the game slows down as you progress. Alchemy should be longer than the workshop, which should be longer than the world, which should be longer than scholarism, etc.. As the game expands, it needs to give the player more room to experiment and just be in sandbox mode. And as such, Alchemy is always a much larger section than I remember, and if I apply this same thinking, rituals should be even longer.

Talking about content breadth, holy moley, with the way I've reworked how the player discovers spells and tools, whenever I have a fun idea I can just throw it in so easily now. If I come up with a cool new augment glyph idea, I don't have to figure out where it'll exist on the player's progression path or how it will be unlocked, I just throw it into the pool of available augment glyphs and the discovery system handles dishing it out at a reasonable and meaningful pace.

To give you an idea: in this version I am currently up to 19 different augment glyphs. At least 7 totally new ones, 5 completely revamped ones, and with tons of design space for even more. (AND I was able to make them all feel unique)

This ease and quantity is the same for all the other systems. I've added roughly 50% more concepts, TWICE the number of items, 40% more alchemic recipes, 40% more equipment. The bonus is that it has not been (too) overwhelming as a player, because again, the game unlocks new things at a consistent, reasonable, and easily adjustable pace.

And its great, because the breadth offers a lot of variety in each playthrough. I've played a few times, and just due to what choices I was offered, gave me totally different combos and synergies to explore each section of the game. It gives me very high hopes for the game's replayability in New Game+.

Anyways, enough of my excitement for today. I'll be posting another update next month!

-Marple

PS. Here are some of the fun new augment glyph designs I've been playing with

Hey Ponderers!

Since we are so close to getting Orb fully released, I'm going to drop a monthly update until the magic is back in your hands, letting you folks know where this project and I are at!

Lots of time went into Alchemy and various quality of life things this month. Like I said in the last dev log, the content portion is always the weirdest to estimate because there is just so many content holes to fill and you don't see them until you are actually working on it.

Additionally, its really nice that I'm giving myself the time and space to work on these sections. Its pretty clear combing back through alchemy adjustments I made for v0.6 just felt uninspired for me. From my current perspective it feels like I was focused on finding whatever solution to game design problems I had so that I could push it out the door. That may sound a little harsh or perfectionistic, and there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that approach either, but there is a certain charm that I want every pillar of the game to have. (Wizardry, Druidry, Artificer, etc) My goal is for players to WANT to try different builds; to see a cool research or upgrade and be like "holy moley, what if I went for that first on my next playthrough?" or "What happens if i invest in that tree first?"

I've achieved this with the new version of Druidry. (I actually think Druidry might even be too cool now, and it might be even stronger than current Scholarism >.>, we'll see.) I've also made Expert Potions (now renamed Expert Items) far more interesting and given it some really cool combos with more than just Alchemy. Storm and Arcane have a lot more fun tools and unique stats upgrades that only they have access to.

But Alchemy is still alluding me a bit. Back in original design I had for this game, Alchemy WAS passive resource generation. But since Auras + Generators exist now, passive generation is no longer a niche thing, so Alchemy is missing a lot of its uniqueness. In v0.6 I kind of went with "mechanical complexity" as its unique trait, but honestly, that doesn't work that well.

That all said, I have been dabbling a little bit and arrived at some fun ideas. First of all, I made Alchemy is far more consistent and far easier to understand. No more "overdriving" and free usage slots. Instead I've made the alchemic capacities (Alchemical, Mechanical) dynamic, and reorientated alchemy's design towards "equivalent exchange" ( 😉 ), pushing the idea forward that: "if you want to generate an x-type resource you need to deconstruct a different x-type resource first"

I've also added in a lot more slots again, and added some type-specific ones, like brewing, so that you never have to feel like brewing a potion means your missing out on a transmutation.

Finally, this section of the game where I start to really ramp up the resource complexity, and I'm leaning into that quite a bit in the release version. The resource chain lengths are longer and really powerful resources are going to take quite a bit more work to generate.

Alchemy's uniqueness not withstanding, it feels about 80% done which means I'll likely start combing through ritual content this month and then after that it'll the new game+ content and then this phase will be complete.

In other news, I've had the opportunity to consult with a friend who has successfully launched a few games and I've got a lot more understanding around the work that will be required in the final phase of this release. With that information my timeline goals have shifted a little bit. Instead of shooting for a end of year release, I'm just aiming to have Orb content complete by the new year, with its full release following 2-3 months later. Again this is not an official timeline, I'm just being transparent with my thoughts. Its far more important for me to take my time and release it when its ready than follow an deadline schedule, but I am darn excited. I've been working on OoC for nearly 5 years at this point--being this close has me wiggling in my chair quite bit.

Til next month!

-Marple

PS. There is a lot of space for different bandwidths here... 🤔

Hey Ponderers, Dropping a development update to let you all know where Orb of Creation is at!

I've been hard at work getting this release off the ground. I'm currently in the second-to-last stage of the process: the content phase. Most of the code that I need in the game has been written and I am fleshing out the content. My experience with the v0.6 beta release is that this portion of the dev process, whilst seemingly the smallest/easiest on paper, actually takes the most work. It is the process of constantly combing over sections to get as many wrinkles and knots out as I can. I gotta say though, this portion of the process is by far my favorite.

I am currently ironing out the content in the alchemy section, and hoping to start rituals next month. Then after that, the final remaining todo's in the content phase will be refining the achievements and new game+ content.

After that, the next and final phase will be getting most of the meta stuff out of the way. This will be playtesting and pre-launch bug fixing, making sure the game has proper branding/marketing materials, and other "out of game" stuff that will assist in its release being a success. This final phase will likely somewhat venn-diagram with the tail-end portions of the previous phase.

Once that final phase begins is likely when I'll announce a release date, and from there we will be off to the races! My goal and desire is to get this done by the end of the year, but I've been really bad at creating accurate timelines in the past, so take that with a grain of salt.

I also wanted to address some of the misinformation that starts to emerge around this part of the dev cycle for me: no the game is not abandoned. I'm here, and making this game is currently my full time job. My understanding is that most of the abandonware comments stem from a passion for the game, and desire for more communication from me. I'm really grateful you guys enjoy the game so much, and I'm incrementally (wink) getting better at this communication thing.

To close, I just wanted to say that my love for this game is in full effect right now. This version is probably some of the most fun I've had developing and playing this game. So many of little changes I've made have made such a strong impact on the overall feel of the game and I'm itching to share it with all of you. Its unfortunate its not that easy to share, since most of these little changes are really hard to nail down in a digestible dev log like this.

Though I'm confident. Once I get it in your hands I'm sure you'll understand. -Marple PS. Whilst I can't capture all of it, here are some nuggets haphazardly thrown into a single PNG:

Hard Restrictions into Soft Restrictions

Attribute Ranks

Druidry Actions

Quality of Life

And more!

Progress Report

v0.6.0 -- Scholarism, Druidry and Weights, continued

Druidry

Scholarism

Artifacts

A refined experience

Progress Report

v0.6 -- Scholarism, Druidry, and Weights!

1) Immense freedom

2) The Weight-ocalypse is here

3) Types, types, types!

And so much more...