Roboquest Devblog #5 - About the Autumn Update
Hello everyone!
We’re back for our new developer news!
Today, we’re going to talk about the Autumn update, our current work for the incoming update and a few other things.
Once more, we’re still figuring out the right format for these updates, so don’t hesitate to let us know what you think about them. That being said, let’s dive right in!
[h2]The Autumn Update[/h2]
The first thing we learned about the Autumn update is that… There was too much time between this one and the previous. Many of you were wondering where the heck we’ve been. And the answer is simple, we took a break after the Summer update and then we worked hard on bringing the Autumn update, which was one of our meatiest updates (at least on our side) so far.
In the absence of communication on our side, we understand that you might have this kind of question. But rest assured that we won’t be ‘leaving’ anytime soon, we’re hard at work on the game for several years now and we’ll keep on going.
Another thing we learned is that system reworks such as the Core rework and the Perk rework can be a bit scary, both for us and you players. It might feel as if we’re ‘removing’ a part of what people consider “fun” about the game. When doing such reworks, we always try to keep what was composing the ‘fun’ of the systems and to re-inject it into the reworked system. We received a vast majority of positive feedback regarding both the perks and the items and that’s a relief.
Some of you are wondering if we know what we’re doing with our game, and the truth is we are to some extent. To some others, there are many things that require tinkering and figuring out the right amount of Roguelite, Fast FPS, replayability, random, progression and such to inject. And that’s why we’re often modifying or reworking the systems linked to those subjects. Though in reality, the backbone of the game does not differ that much, regardless of our reworks. We have a clear direction in mind and we’re looking at ways to make it as good and fun as we can. Even if that means breaking things to recreate them afterwards.
But we feel like we’re reaching a point where the different parts of the game are starting to piece together. Of course, the game’s still in Early Access and we’ll be closely monitoring our data and following your feedback to continue to improve the game.
[h2]Billy Boom[/h2]
While this section could totally be contained within the previous, we thought it would be a good idea to highlight it a bit more.
We received numerous feedback regarding Billy Boom and its… explosion mechanic, and we wanted to talk a bit about it and bosses in general.
First off, regarding Billy Boom, we’re working towards giving its unique mechanic more feedback so that players can get a hint, understand and react to it in advance. Though, we think it will still be something that surprises players at least the first time they encounter it.
Now, regarding Bosses in general, we often start and finish the development of a single boss in the lifespan of a single update. This means they are far from being perfect at the moment we release them, especially when they contain some weird or unique mechanics. Brainstorming and developing bosses is a huge piece of work and we definitely need to see them in action with you to improve them. They are like risky gambles, we don’t really know in advance how you’ll be reacting to them (even if we obviously try hard to predict and give them as much feedback as possible).
In that sense, we’re sorry that you may feel like our new bosses are sometimes a bit weird or frustrating, but we’re continuously trying to improve them as we receive your feedback. We have good hopes that Billy Boom (and other new Bosses) will find their place in the game as legitimate ‘good’ Bosses after a few iterations.
Thank you for your patience!
[h2]Localization Issues[/h2]
All languages are missing their translation in this update.
As you might know, the translation of Roboquest is made by kind members of our community willing to help us. They usually have 2+ weeks to translate the incoming update and we’re testing the translation during playtest.
This time around, they only had one week, we reworked 70% of the texts of the game and nobody had the chance to try out the translation during playtest. This was all our fault, but since there was so much delay in between the Summer and the Autumn update, we didn’t want to delay the Autumn update as many of you were already waiting.
There was clearly an organization issue on our side, we overlooked that aspect and we’re sorry for all players who are not playing in English. Translators are working hard right now to localize the new update and we’ll be injecting those as soon as they’re ready.
Once again, we’re sorry for the inconvenience!
[h2]Technical Issues[/h2]
Among the many reports and feedback we’ve had, numerous were about the issues we’re going to discuss here. And these seem to be recurring problems we have to deal with.
[h3]Crashing[/h3]
Obviously, the game still has many bugs and crashes. This is something we need to work on continuously as new bugs and crashes appear as we develop the game and add things to it. To help us fix those issues, please remember to always send a F10 feedback when you’re facing a bug in the game, this will send us the logs of the game and make us able to track what happened which lead to the situation you’re in. When it comes to crashes, we need a little more from you to be able to fix them. As mentioned in the ‘how to report a bug’ section, we need your ‘crash dump’. There are two places you can send them to us: on Steam and on Discord. In both cases, it’s the fastest way for us to fix these issues so we thank you in advance for spending a little time helping us.
[h3]Mouse Inputs[/h3]
Considering ‘gamefeel’ is one of our primary priorities, we’re pretty concerned about that issue (mouse inputs failing to register). We know there are two main sources to that issue, the first one being the game not being in “Fullscreen” but instead in “Borderless”, leading to mouse inputs registering outside of the game screen. The second source is closely related to the Unreal Engine and we have yet to find out how to solve that in our game. We also have a lead about this issue being especially occurring for players on laptops, but we’re unsure if this is real data or just a coincidence.
[h3]Multiplayer Issues[/h3]
Whether that’d be failing to connect to your brobot or rubber banding in multiplayer. This is something we’re continuously trying to improve by reducing the amount of data travelling between the two players (among other things). To reduce that issue, you must preferably play with people of the same region and with a good connection. Though, even in the best of circumstances, you will likely still experience these issues.
[h3]PC Temperatures[/h3]
We received several reports about hardware heating more when playing our game than other games. This is partly coming from the fact that the game is not yet optimized but also mainly because setting the game in high graphic quality or playing with unlimited FPS will tell your computer to use every resource available to it. If that happens to you, consider reducing the graphics quality or the FPS cap.
These three latest technical issues are pretty advanced and hard to fix. We’re a small studio and we’re working hard to solve them. But we can’t invest all of our work-time in those, or else we’d be delaying the entirety of the game. So we’re slowly making progress, but it’s not something we can fix ‘right away’. We’re really sorry if that takes (too much) time, but we’re doing our best considering our situation and workforce. If you want to help on that side, please consider sharing your exact spec when communicating about these kinds of issues.
[h2]The Next Update[/h2]
Is planned to be released around mid-December.
We’re working hard on it and it will feature a new Boss, new enemies, new weapons, new mods, a little visual update of ‘Energy Center’ level and a fully reworked ‘Aqua Station’ level. On top of that, we’ll rework, improve and add a bunch of new perk upgrades following your feedback and our data.
We’ll probably be back around mid-November or end of November to give you more information on that side. The Roadmap on Discord and Steam will also be updated accordingly.
As usual, we’ll launch a public playtest version a few days / a week before the update for you to try out the new version and help us fix the issues it contains.
And that’s it for this dev update!
We hope you appreciated it and we wish you a happy robot smashing!
We’re back for our new developer news!
Today, we’re going to talk about the Autumn update, our current work for the incoming update and a few other things.
Once more, we’re still figuring out the right format for these updates, so don’t hesitate to let us know what you think about them. That being said, let’s dive right in!
[h2]The Autumn Update[/h2]
The first thing we learned about the Autumn update is that… There was too much time between this one and the previous. Many of you were wondering where the heck we’ve been. And the answer is simple, we took a break after the Summer update and then we worked hard on bringing the Autumn update, which was one of our meatiest updates (at least on our side) so far.
In the absence of communication on our side, we understand that you might have this kind of question. But rest assured that we won’t be ‘leaving’ anytime soon, we’re hard at work on the game for several years now and we’ll keep on going.
Another thing we learned is that system reworks such as the Core rework and the Perk rework can be a bit scary, both for us and you players. It might feel as if we’re ‘removing’ a part of what people consider “fun” about the game. When doing such reworks, we always try to keep what was composing the ‘fun’ of the systems and to re-inject it into the reworked system. We received a vast majority of positive feedback regarding both the perks and the items and that’s a relief.
Some of you are wondering if we know what we’re doing with our game, and the truth is we are to some extent. To some others, there are many things that require tinkering and figuring out the right amount of Roguelite, Fast FPS, replayability, random, progression and such to inject. And that’s why we’re often modifying or reworking the systems linked to those subjects. Though in reality, the backbone of the game does not differ that much, regardless of our reworks. We have a clear direction in mind and we’re looking at ways to make it as good and fun as we can. Even if that means breaking things to recreate them afterwards.
But we feel like we’re reaching a point where the different parts of the game are starting to piece together. Of course, the game’s still in Early Access and we’ll be closely monitoring our data and following your feedback to continue to improve the game.
[h2]Billy Boom[/h2]
While this section could totally be contained within the previous, we thought it would be a good idea to highlight it a bit more.
We received numerous feedback regarding Billy Boom and its… explosion mechanic, and we wanted to talk a bit about it and bosses in general.
First off, regarding Billy Boom, we’re working towards giving its unique mechanic more feedback so that players can get a hint, understand and react to it in advance. Though, we think it will still be something that surprises players at least the first time they encounter it.
Now, regarding Bosses in general, we often start and finish the development of a single boss in the lifespan of a single update. This means they are far from being perfect at the moment we release them, especially when they contain some weird or unique mechanics. Brainstorming and developing bosses is a huge piece of work and we definitely need to see them in action with you to improve them. They are like risky gambles, we don’t really know in advance how you’ll be reacting to them (even if we obviously try hard to predict and give them as much feedback as possible).
In that sense, we’re sorry that you may feel like our new bosses are sometimes a bit weird or frustrating, but we’re continuously trying to improve them as we receive your feedback. We have good hopes that Billy Boom (and other new Bosses) will find their place in the game as legitimate ‘good’ Bosses after a few iterations.
Thank you for your patience!
[h2]Localization Issues[/h2]
All languages are missing their translation in this update.
As you might know, the translation of Roboquest is made by kind members of our community willing to help us. They usually have 2+ weeks to translate the incoming update and we’re testing the translation during playtest.
This time around, they only had one week, we reworked 70% of the texts of the game and nobody had the chance to try out the translation during playtest. This was all our fault, but since there was so much delay in between the Summer and the Autumn update, we didn’t want to delay the Autumn update as many of you were already waiting.
There was clearly an organization issue on our side, we overlooked that aspect and we’re sorry for all players who are not playing in English. Translators are working hard right now to localize the new update and we’ll be injecting those as soon as they’re ready.
Once again, we’re sorry for the inconvenience!
[h2]Technical Issues[/h2]
Among the many reports and feedback we’ve had, numerous were about the issues we’re going to discuss here. And these seem to be recurring problems we have to deal with.
[h3]Crashing[/h3]
Obviously, the game still has many bugs and crashes. This is something we need to work on continuously as new bugs and crashes appear as we develop the game and add things to it. To help us fix those issues, please remember to always send a F10 feedback when you’re facing a bug in the game, this will send us the logs of the game and make us able to track what happened which lead to the situation you’re in. When it comes to crashes, we need a little more from you to be able to fix them. As mentioned in the ‘how to report a bug’ section, we need your ‘crash dump’. There are two places you can send them to us: on Steam and on Discord. In both cases, it’s the fastest way for us to fix these issues so we thank you in advance for spending a little time helping us.
[h3]Mouse Inputs[/h3]
Considering ‘gamefeel’ is one of our primary priorities, we’re pretty concerned about that issue (mouse inputs failing to register). We know there are two main sources to that issue, the first one being the game not being in “Fullscreen” but instead in “Borderless”, leading to mouse inputs registering outside of the game screen. The second source is closely related to the Unreal Engine and we have yet to find out how to solve that in our game. We also have a lead about this issue being especially occurring for players on laptops, but we’re unsure if this is real data or just a coincidence.
[h3]Multiplayer Issues[/h3]
Whether that’d be failing to connect to your brobot or rubber banding in multiplayer. This is something we’re continuously trying to improve by reducing the amount of data travelling between the two players (among other things). To reduce that issue, you must preferably play with people of the same region and with a good connection. Though, even in the best of circumstances, you will likely still experience these issues.
[h3]PC Temperatures[/h3]
We received several reports about hardware heating more when playing our game than other games. This is partly coming from the fact that the game is not yet optimized but also mainly because setting the game in high graphic quality or playing with unlimited FPS will tell your computer to use every resource available to it. If that happens to you, consider reducing the graphics quality or the FPS cap.
These three latest technical issues are pretty advanced and hard to fix. We’re a small studio and we’re working hard to solve them. But we can’t invest all of our work-time in those, or else we’d be delaying the entirety of the game. So we’re slowly making progress, but it’s not something we can fix ‘right away’. We’re really sorry if that takes (too much) time, but we’re doing our best considering our situation and workforce. If you want to help on that side, please consider sharing your exact spec when communicating about these kinds of issues.
[h2]The Next Update[/h2]
Is planned to be released around mid-December.
We’re working hard on it and it will feature a new Boss, new enemies, new weapons, new mods, a little visual update of ‘Energy Center’ level and a fully reworked ‘Aqua Station’ level. On top of that, we’ll rework, improve and add a bunch of new perk upgrades following your feedback and our data.
We’ll probably be back around mid-November or end of November to give you more information on that side. The Roadmap on Discord and Steam will also be updated accordingly.
As usual, we’ll launch a public playtest version a few days / a week before the update for you to try out the new version and help us fix the issues it contains.
And that’s it for this dev update!
We hope you appreciated it and we wish you a happy robot smashing!