Habbo Hotel: Origins – the future
Habbos,
What an awesome Christmas period! It was great to see some returning faces - I hope you are all enjoying the return of the Asian furniture line. I can’t wait to stop by some of your Tea Rooms!
We’ve enjoyed watching the Origins community find its feet over the last 6 months, and we’re happy to have delivered on many of the announcements we set out in our roadmap a little while ago. This post marks an update on where we are and the new direction for the year.
The gaming landscape is not the same as it was 20 years ago, so Origins needs to adapt to ensure it offers players, both new and old, something to keep them engaged. One of the main opportunities for Origins is improving its player retention, and a core way to do that is to provide players with a feeling of progression as they check in, with meaningful goals they can work towards. The features below will be polled, and we will be looking for your feedback to ensure that what we build keeps that core Origins feel.
However, because we want to start on this work immediately, we will be dropping the release of SnowStorm in favour of the gameplay updates described below. Instead, we will pick it up when we have a framework by which we can provide a reason to play.
💰 A new earnable currency!
Currently, rewarding players in Origins is difficult. Awarding credits in a way accessible to everybody results in huge numbers of alternate player accounts or bots aiming to abuse whatever mechanic is being used to reward players, and we know that this can be frustrating.
We want to be able to reward you for playing the game, and so to address that, we plan on adding an earnable currency. It will work in the following ways:
It will be given to players through daily tasks or rewarded through games like Battleball.- It will have no upper cap and will not be subject to tax (like Duckets in Habbo).
- As detailed below, it will be used only to purchase “account” unlockables.
We may add additional means of gaining this currency over time, in addition to the ones described in this post, as we want to ensure that those who’re not logging in every day to earn maximum currency, are able to purchase things like seasonal unlocks without having to wait for the next time that item becomes available.
☑️ Daily Tasks
We know that daily tasks are not everyone’s cup of tea, but we feel we can make these short & engaging in a fun way to help expose areas of the game that newer players may not be familiar with.
Our plan for daily tasks currently looks like this:
- 5 total daily tasks, with two being exclusive to HC members.
- Each task will reward the same fixed amount of earnable currency.
- One task will always be for simply logging in, whilst others may look like this:
- Win a game of Battle Ball.
- Play a game of Battleships.
- Visit a Public room.
- Visit a Gaming Room.
- Use a teleporter within the hotel.
These tasks will allow us to reward you with currency, so let’s talk briefly about what we’re thinking about letting you spend this on!
🏅 Habbo Info Stands
We’ve shared a little about our thoughts on this one before, but we want to offer players customisable info stands! See below for some work in progress shots to get an idea of what customisable info stands will look like:
Right now, info stands are a little bland and do not offer any means of customisation. We feel that there is an opportunity here to bring it to life and let players show off part of their personality using that little corner of the screen.
We plan to offer several customisation options, including:
- The ability to modify the nameplate.
- The ability to have your furniture interact with something (like sitting on a piece of furniture).
- The ability to have your Habbo pose (wave, sit, smile, dance)
- The ability to set facial expressions and directions for your avatar.
The editor will be available in-game and show you all of the info stand customisations you have unlocked, either through purchase with the earnable currency or gameplay. It offers a flexible approach to setting up your info stand, with a nice-looking preview of what other players will see! See below for another work in progress shot:
🎩 New clothing options!
We’ve wanted to add clothing to Origins for a little while, and now that we’ve had your thoughts on it, we’ll start moving forward with the implementation. Where is it, we hear you ask?
The above image is being used for illustrative purposes, and doesn't fully reflect the clothing items we intend to release.
For some insight, adding clothing from later versions of Habbo isn’t as simple as just copying the game assets - when the clothing shift occurred in Habbo, introducing accessories, and how your Habbo figures were rendered, controlled, and updated all changed.
We plan to:
- Introduce additional clothing types (belts, hair accessories, scarfs, etc)
- Introduce additional clothing for HC members.
- Introduce purchasable clothing (bought with earnable currency)
- Introduce a set of quality-of-life improvements to the figure editor so that it’s easier to use, for example:
- Adding a mechanism by which you can click to view all clothing in a category (e.g., tops) without having to move through available options one by one.
- Adding a mechanism by which you can click to view all colours for a clothing option without having to move through available options one by one.
- Update the in-game figure editor so you can modify all aspects of your figure using an already familiar editor.
We want to ensure that the clothes we add fit the look and feel of Origins, so we will maintain the colour palette used by Origins and not switch to the palette introduced in Habbo (version 18, for those tracking).
📓 Sticker Book
One request we’re hearing frequently is that we bring Habbo Homes back. We’re not prepared to commit to doing that, but we do think we have an alternative that will help scratch that itch: the sticker book!
The sticker book will allow you to earn or purchase stickers (with an earnable currency!) to show off around the Hotel. We will be bringing back several familiar assets, including those from Habbo Homes!
The plan for the stickerbook would involve:
- Stickers that are rewardable through gameplay or seasonal events.
- Stickers that are purchasable from the sticker book shop.
- The ability to control who (nobody, friends, everybody) can view your stickerbook.
- Track stickers within the sticker book to know which stickers are the rarest!
🔨 Room Layouts
Habbos are accustomed to being able to design their room layouts at will, but the rendering engine for Origins is not built to support that sort of behaviour. Instead, each room is created by hand by placing wall and floor tiles in the right places and placing a walkable floor map on top of that.
That said, we know that players have been asking for additional room layouts, so a nice way to meet in the middle would be to create more room models by hand and make those available for players to purchase with the new, earnable currency!
🏆 Game Seasons
It’s been a little while since we’ve spoken about Battle Ball, and transparently, it’s because we haven’t had the time to focus on improving the core mechanics that power it - we still want to do this.
Before we introduce additional games, like SnowStorm, we want to create a great foundation for automated, competitive gaming seasons so that there is an even and fair playing field when attempting to reach the top ranks. This will allow us to run automated, continuous seasons throughout the year.
As a reminder, this is our hit list to tackle some of the problems within Battle Ball right now.
- Improve our scoring system so that you lose points upon match loss.
- Modifying the behaviour and spawn mechanics of certain power-ups, for example:
- Changing spawn locations of power-ups so they appear in fixed areas at certain times.
- Changing the mechanics of power-ups, for example, making the Bomb stop when you bump into another player or updating the Harlequin so that everybody switches teams.
- Randomising the spawn locations of players so you do not always start in the exact locations.
- We are looking at lessening lobby restrictions so we do not have players joining late and unable to compete.
- Limiting the number of games a player can play during a season, to ensure an even playing field.
- Removal of the customisation mechanic in lobbies, ensuring players cannot fix games in a way that provides maximum points.
- A switch to a game queue system, ensuring players cannot simply play off against alternate accounts to climb in the rankings.
💬 Final Thoughts, and your Feedback
We feel like there is a lot of great content here, all within the keeping of the Origins look & feel. There’s always more around the corner, and we want to push a tonne to ensure the game is engaging, fun, and engaging for you all.
❗ We hope to hear your voice and opinions on the features in our Discord server, where we’ve opened a brand new Forum Channel in the "Suggested" Category with multiple feedback posts to capture your thoughts on the above features. InfoBus polls will be coming soon!