Video Game / Nubby's Number Factory

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Nubby's Number Factory is a plinko-roguelike hybrid developed by MogDogBlog and released on March 8th 2025.

The plot of the game is that you are working at a number factory under your supervisor Tony and you need to make bigger and bigger numbers or else the sun will explode.

The gameplay consists of launching Nubby onto a board of numbered pegs. When Nubby hits a peg, the peg "pops," scoring its value in points, and reduces its value in half (or disappears if its value is 1). The objective is to score a set amount of points needed to pass the round. If you fail to do so, you lose a life, your score resets to 0 and you have to try again. If you succeed, you move to the next round, the quota increases and the board is restocked, which restores a life, earns you a coin, adds more pegs to the board and merges same-numbered pegs into higher-value pegs. If you overshoot the score (by scoring double, triple, etc.), the board will be restocked an extra time for each time the score was achieved over, up to a maximum of 9999 times.

Every 5 rounds, you are able to visit the Nubby Mart, where you can spend your coins on items to help you on your run. All items have a trigger condition (such as a certain number of pegs popped) and some beneficial effects like doubling pegs, popping pegs or giving more points. Duplicate items can be combined to create more powerful upgraded versions. At the start, you only have 4 item slots, but you can unlock more slots in the store up to 7. When you unlock all 7 slots, you get access to the Cafe Nubby, where you can buy food items that give some immediate benefit.

You can also gain perks that, unlike items don't have a limit on how many you can have but also can not be sold or removed. Usually they help to force-trigger items in certain slots or ones that have specific triggers.

Nubby's Number Factory provides examples of the following tropes:

• Art-Style Clash: There is very little rhyme or reason behind the game's visual style. It's a strange mishmash of vector drawings, pixel art, 3D renders and digitized live action footage. Yet somehow, it works.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Defying this trope is an important tactic. Some items have powerful effects, but limited activation conditions like popping the first peg in a round or Nubby dying, but perks have their own conditions that can force those items to activate more times. Except for Black Market items, which cannot be force-activated.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: Sparkplug was initially hired to remove asbestos from the Warehouse. Everyone just assumed he was the new manager and that's how he became the manager.
• Black Market: If you get a Suspicious Key from a Grab-A-Tron you can go there instead of Nubby Mart. There you can choose one of three Items from a special pool to get for free. They are usually more powerful than the items from the regular store but have a Corrupted trait that makes them unable to be force-triggered.
• Broke the Rating Scale:
  • The highest rating for a restock combo is, fittingly, “You broke the game.”
  • The ultimate highest score is googol, and it doesn't even use digits in its presentation: once you reach it, the counter just says "Googol".
• Cap:
  • Usually, you can only have up to 99 coins. This changes to 200 when playing as Goblony or C.E.O. Tony, and 10 while playing the Short on Change challenge.
  • Googol is the highest achievable score in the game: the game doesn't update the counter beyond that.
• Butterfly of Death and Rebirth: Squirmy has a 1 in 50 chance to metamorphose into Flutty when triggered, becoming more powerful when it does so.
• Crutch Character: Items that give flat points such as Cheese House or Two Headed Turtle tend to be very powerful in the early game, especially if combined with Void Perk or any other perk that can retrigger them consistently, but they quickly lose steam as the target score gets higher and higher eventually becoming completely worthless. However the early momentum they give can be used to adapt your build into something more suited to late game.
• End-Game Results Screen: After winning or losing, the game shows a list of various statistics, such as total shots, item triggers, and board clears.
• Equipment Upgrade: Merging two of the same item results in an upgraded item that improves on the base ability.
• Excuse Plot: The game has a very minimal and nonsensical story that only serves as a justification for what you are doing: make numbers go up so the sun doesn't explode. Make Tony proud!
• Face–Heel Turn: One of the possible final bosses is your supervisor Tony who gets glowing red eyes and an ability to shoot Eye Beams at pegs that set their value to 1.
• Foul Waterfowl: Implied with the name of the Evil Goose, though it ironically can be useful depending on your strategy with its ability to give all of the pegs points that are doubled (quadrupled if upgraded) from the lowest-number peg on the board.
• Our Homunculi Are Different: Nubby Trials Level 3 features an Evil Item called the Homunculus.
• Idiosyncratic Combo Levels: The levels for restocks are, in order, "O.K!" "Cool!" "Nice!" "Wow!" "CRAZY!" "MEGA!!" "Nub-tastic!" "PEGMANIA!" "WHAT?!" and "You broke the game".
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • Balogna Tony randomizes the trigger conditions of every item in the game. The results of this can range from game-exploding to making an item completely useless.
  • Glass Tony had extra rerolls, cheaper items, and a ruinous downside of making all items have a 5% chance of destroying itself when triggered. This not only makes a bunch of items that rely on triggering many times unviable, it's completely up to RNG whether your items stay safe for a couple or rounds or half your inventory wiped in a single round. Version 1.3.1 reworked Glass Tony into a completely different character.
  • Builds that rely on hitting the highest number peg first can turn into this, as there's no telling when a player gets multiple bad jumbles in a row.
• Medium Blending: While anything else in this game is rendered in 3D, Tony is portrayed with a compressed animation of the developers face that is photoshopped or drawn over in MS Paint for different variants.
• Mr. Exposition: Sparkplug, who runs the Warehouse, offers various bits of trivia about the factory, himself and Tony when you click on him.
• Nepotism: Tony Jr., presumed son of Tony, gets a starting allowance and double drop rate for rare items.
• Non-Indicative Name: The Evil Goose, despite its name, is not an Evil Item.
• Pinball Scoring: In line with the game's premise of working in a "number factory", the achievable scores and required quotas become more ridiculous further down the road, quickly escalating from hundreds to millions, and then from billions to quadrillions, and so on.
  • The scores given out by pegs start out as proper powers of two. As they cross into billions, all digits below the peg's base get floored into zeroes – they are just that big, so why bother with the details?
• Planet of Steves: Every supervisor is some kind of "Tony", like Glass Tony or C.E.O. Tony.
• Power at a Price: Black Market items have incredibly useful abilities — but they're also "corrupted" and can't be force-triggered, making them unable to interact with one of the game's key mechanics.
• Power Copying: The squid's ability is to mimic the item to the left of the squid, with the upgraded variant instead copying its upgraded version. This can be used to "cheat out" the upgraded version of items which are incredibly hard to get twice, such as Black Market Ultra-Rares.
• Power-Up Food: The food items at Cafe Nubby have various beneficial effects, from granting shop rerolls to money to perks.
• Propeller Hat of Whimsy: Worn by Tony Jr.
• Rain of Blood: The "Apocalypse!" final boss event causes blood to rain down onto the board. The droplets halve the first peg they fall onto.
• Retraux: The game emulates the aesthetic of an Edutainment Game from the 90s and early 2000s.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Happy music plays when the sun explodes.
• Status Line: On top of the board are the containers for your items, what perks you've collected, and your current round in the session.
• Stop Poking Me!: Clicking on your chosen Tony in the supervisor selection menu will cause him to say something. The normal Tony can directly drop the trope name.
• Stuff Blowing Up:
  • If the player loses all of Nubby's lives, the sun will explode, resulting in a Game Over.
  • Certain items can produce explosions that can pop multiple pegs at once, such as the Flaming Skull, the Rubber Chicken, and the Flame Thrower.
  • The Times Up! Challenge has Nubby armed with C-4 that will blow him up while popping lots of pegs in the process.
• Stylistic Suck: The game's graphics are intentionally made to look cheap and ugly, with primitive 3D models, Tony being the face of the developer that was drawn over in MS Paint and the main font being Comic Sans.
• Synchronization: When Nubby runs out of lives, the sun explodes. Sparkplug says that it's because without the factory's numbers, the laws of physics stop working.
• Teratoma Monster: The Monstrosity, a non-descript "meat-orb" with a bunch of bumps, tentacles, and a growth resembling lips on its surface, is evocative of this. During the "Time's Up!" challenge, the Monstrosity is replaced with the Rabid Monstrosity, which is much the same but with added spikes. The 1.4 Update also adds the aptly-named "Teratoma Nubby" as a cosmetic option, which gives him the same bumps as the Monstrosity and the spikes of the Rabid Monstrosity.
• Toilet Humour:
  • One of the items you can obtain is a walking head with human feet called "Poop Butt".
  • Sometimes, a large fart noise is played when you press the quit button on the main menu and when you miss somehow on the Grab-A-Tron.
• Video-Game Lives: Every time you launch Nubby, he loses one life, but he gains one back every time the board restocks. Recovering from a series of bad shots requires pulling off a good enough shot to meet the round goal multiple times over.
• Video Game Randomizer: Balogna Tony randomizes the trigger conditions of every item in the game. This can allow for absolutely broken builds if you're lucky, up to and including going infinite with just one or two items — or it can saddle you with a bunch of completely useless items. The Moldy Sandwich was added to the café in 1.3.1.5 to help mitigate this, but it only rerolls what is in your inventory.
• Waddling Head: Poop Butt.
• Your Mom: To represent his childish nature, Tony Jr. can tell Your Mom jokes as a Stop Poking Me! line, though they aren't very good.
  Your mom is so hairy that people think she's Bigfoot.
  Your mom is so poor that she lives in a refrigerator.