Macklebee talks about Origins roadmap and more

Macklebee, the developer responsible for recently launched Habbo Hotel: Origins, says they don’t want to follow exactly same path Habbo did.

The following quotes are from the Habbo Collectibles Discord server.

The future of Habbo

Macklebee confirms Habbo and the Collectibes project/Habbo X are here to stay.

This is important, the game is totally different. Habbo isn’t going to go anywhere, the innovation there (especially with the latest Wired changes), and the right nit web3 integration are core. Habbo Origins is going to cater to a slightly different player base. They’re not the same game.

Furniture

Habbos have noticed a lot of regular furniture, e.g. the Lodge gate, is missing from the Catalogue.

Those were originally just mistakes in terms of not putting them on the catalogue page. We took the page from the original game server, which did not have them on, those gates were not part of the original line, and were not in the original development catalogue because of it.

Adding new furniture to Origins isn't trivial as it doesn't support dynamic furniture yet. Currently, a room loads all furniture at once.

One of the biggest difficulties we have is that this version of Habbo actually had very few pieces of furniture, and versions post this one had dynamic furniture implement, this version doesn't. So adding furniture is currently a chore. If we do the dynamic furniture, that means implementation of the loading boxes when you enter rooms.

It's possible some rares will be reserved for competitions but details which furni will be released as rares and which will be given as prices are still unclear.

Just to set the record, we haven't got any solid plans for how we'll release the Throne. We do plan on keeping certain rares back for regularly run competitions, but we're still working on exactly those details.

A game ticket bundle accidentally appeared as a placeholder box in addition to tickets and is widely considered a "super rare". Macklebee confirms the PH box will stay even though scripted PH boxes will be fixed.

Small ticket PH boxes will last. [PH boxes in colours] will die, they have been scripted to have invalid rotations. Don't trade for these, you'll end up with a pod (probably).

V7 rares, e.g. the recently released pillow, come in different colours. Macklebee says they know they are popular.

I love the Dragons, and Petal Patches, but transparently we didn't want our first rare sale to immediately be a V7 rare. We know those sell well. We want to make sure we're exploring all of the other furniture that exists too.

There will be new furniture, such as the recent recoloured Funky Friday releases.

There are around 300 items available in this version of the game. That is not a large pool.

We’re trying our best to be tasteful here, we want to be careful when adding new furniture because we do not want to take away from the feeling of Origins, but we do want to provide you with new content.

I can promise there’ll be nothing [...] gnarly. We’re trying our best to ensure the furniture we pick, and the colours used do match the aesthetic.

We want your opinions much of the game direction, and are going to poll a tonne of content, including your thoughts on Funky Friday.

Macklebee says introducing new content benefits the longevity of the game.

New content [...] could be added to the game, that's the entire point of Origins. We have a lot of content available, but we will not limit ourselves to only content that existed in Habbo in the past, otherwise we'd eventually run out and have no path forward.

As Origins doesn't have Exchange/Credit furni, he expected Cola Machines to be priced in Club Sofas and not the other way around. When asked, he says Credit furni will be potentially added later on and it depends on what the community thinks.

We don’t want to follow exactly same path Habbo did, so we’ll have votes on content like this, and content you’ve never seen before that either didn’t make it into Habbo because the team decided against it, or didn’t make it because of the move to during project development.

Macklebee also says there's an internal roadmap for releasing new furniture lines and the team is willing to share it.

Tech

The Origins server is built on top of Habbo's current server but runs in containers on Kubernetes.

Origins server is built on top of Habbo’s current server. We are not running a code base from 2005, instead, we used the original code base and mapped business logic.

There are bugs occurring because of dissimilarities between how the game client and server communicate.

Scripts were occurring not because of old code, but because the current code base/game client protocol is so different, that many of the fixes for those were removed in the past 20 years. Those fixes only exist in intermediary versions of the code base (somewhere between 2005, and now), and we missed a couple.

Origins uses the discontinued Adobe Shockwave platform which has raised concerns. However, Macklebee doesn't see a reason to worry.

The Shockwave platform itself is not vulnerable – it’s old, but we believe it to be safe.

There are some visual glitches with fonts on Mac but they will be fixed.

[A]s a developer working on the client, who uses a Mac, believe me that fixing the font / text issues is important to me. It's just prioritized below game breakings bugs.

New features

Lumisota, which means snow war in Finnish and is the predecessor of Snowstorm, has been revived with the help of Aapo Kyrölä, one of the founders of Habbo.

Johno revived [Lumisota] during the same wishday I revived origins. He reached out to Aapo for the original server code, and he still had it!

Macklebee says they've given the return of Battleball and Snowstorm a lot of thought. He also mentions the group that built Battleball now mostly work at and built Supercell, a Finnish game development company. 

Battleball exists in the client but the server side implementation is needed. Snowstorm was introduced using a newer architecture which works better with the current server.

It's unlikely there's going to be a roadmap of features coming to Origins, at least not soon.

Part of this is also thinking about how we present the roadmap, many of the items in there will be polled, so many not ever make it (if the community voted against them).

For example, one thing I've suggested internally and want to poll is changing Battleball to include seasons, similar to other popular games at the minute. That would be on the roadmap, but might not make it, if you all vote against it.

And trying to get that onto paper/graphically presented to you all is a new challenge for us.

One of the recently released new features is banning users from private rooms. There will be the unban functionality, but it wasn't ready yet and including partial changes in new releases is hard.

Macklebee also confirms chat history is a highly requested feature but he can't commit to implementing it, and the biggest challenge will be how to do the user interface.