Summer Playtest is live!
Hey Guardians!
After so much time without an update, we’re finally back!
And since it’s Summer, it seems appropriate to release the Summer update public playtest.
Before talking about it, we just wanted to sum up what happened with the Rogue’n’Roll update (if you haven’t followed this topic in the first place, you may want to skip the next section).
The Rogue’n’Roll update was canceled and most of the changes it was featuring have been incorporated to the Summer update. We took the time we needed to modify the systems you’ve been pinpointing during our previous playtest and we think they’re ready to be tried out. If you wish to read more details about the development process behind them and the issues we’ve been tackling you may want to read the devblog here.
The game will move on from the 0.8.9 version to the 0.10.0 version with the Summer update (effectively skipping the 0.9.0).
The playtest starts now (on Steam only) and will last for one to two weeks based on your feedback and the issues being reported. Once finished, the Summer update will land on all platforms at once (sometimes with a few days delay based on each platform’s validation process).
Now, let’s touch a few words about the localization of the game:
So far, we’ve been relying solely on kind and devoted members of the community to translate the game. While we are thankful to them, we’re also sorry. It demanded a lot of effort on their end to maintain the translation up-to-date (because we are modifying many texts every time we update the perks). This resulted in the game not having completed translation for many languages, despite some of them being marked as completed on the Steam page. We will make sure to keep the store page up-to-date in that regard to avoid misinformation. If your language is currently not supported, please rest assured that the closer we are to the final release, the more languages will be supported and fully finalized.
Finally and before diving into the highlights of this Summer update, we wanted to say a few things about the incoming update:
The Summer update brings changes to some of the systems you’ve been accustomed to such as cells and weapon categories. You may have read about it in our previous devblogs.
We think those changes were necessary to the game in its current state but also to continue healthily expanding it. We’ll talk in detail about the reasons and consequences in the ‘highlights’ section below.
We hope you’ll give those changes a chance and test them before making up your mind about whether you like them or not.
We’ll be actively following your feedback on that.
Now, onto the highlights.
[h2]Cross-Platform[/h2]
You may now invite brobots from other platforms to your party by sending them your session ID (found in the multiplayer menu, use the ‘copy’ button). Your brobot will then have to enter this ID in the multiplayer menu to join your game. This will work regardless of what region you’re playing in.
The friend list currently does not support displaying friends from other platforms, but that’s something we’re working on.
Please note that this is the first iteration of this system and that you may encounter problems, we’ll be monitoring that and working on it. Implementing such a feature was a hard task for our studio and we aren’t unable to extensively try things out. We will especially keep an eye on it during the public playtest, so please send us F10 feedback whenever you’re encountering issues.
[h2]Public Matchmaking[/h2]
You may now search for brobots directly in the multiplayer menu of the game using the ‘quick play’ button. The matchmaking will find another player looking for a brobot in your selected region and let you play with one another. For now the search criteria are completely wide and won’t take into account things such as basecamp progression (and you may be matched with players with a different progression level than yours), but that’s something we’ll be looking to improve.
Looking for brobots outside of your region will likely result in high-latency games. The available regions are as follows: North America, South America, Asia, Oceania, Africa and Europe and you can change directly in the multiplayer menu.
Like the previous system, this was something that was hard to implement for us and that will likely require updates to be fully operational and pleasing to use. Please, report us any issue using the F10 in-game report system if you were to come across any.
Note: You might currently be stuck in a state where the game does not manage to generate a session ID for you (infinite session loading displayed in the multiplayer menu), making you unable to either host or use the public matchmaking system. Restarting your game will fix that issue.
[h2]Weapons Update[/h2]
We have removed the weapon categories from the game (and relocated the damage increase coming from category bonuses to several other systems in the game).
This was one of our most ancient systems (if not the most) and it was primarily used to help create a sense of build and to distinguish classes from one another (one would be using precision when another would be using demolition in most builds for example).
But with the evolution of other systems and time passing, it started to grow as an obsolete and limiting system. The perk system was also becoming the real factor of build-orientation and class distinction and the category system started to feel like a burden for the game and for the run diversity: playing one class meant playing the same weapons over and over.
In addition, the item selection process (choosing a category to buff) was never a compelling choice to make for you, regardless of how we implemented it (and some of you might remember, we tried many things).
As a result, the category system was no longer useful or bringing anything to the table and we simply removed it.
Doing so makes us able to more easily implement new weapons, new classes and makes sure a greater amount of loot is viable for your current run (effectively increasing run diversity). This also made us able to make you loot a bit less weapons considering more weapons than before are viable for your current build and consequently remove the weapon drops on enemies (which was a system breaking the combat flow).
But then you might be wondering, what about the items?
[h2]Items & Shopkeepers[/h2]
Items as you knew them have been removed (those buffing category stats).
Instead, items are now granting various bonuses and effects that help you specialize your build in different ways.
And you will be able to purchase them from newly added shopkeepers.
Or rather from the Max’s Crew.
Max just crafted a bunch of new friendly robots to help you through your runs.
These new friendbots can craft weapons, reroll affixes and sell you items (among other things).
Though they need ‘Powercells’ for that. ‘Powercells’ is a new in-run currency that can be found in challenge rooms, can drop from enemies or be granted as a reward at the end of each level. Later down the road, it will also be tied to the Elite enemy system.
This group of friendbots replaces the old ‘console’ system.
You can upgrade your basecamp to encounter more friendbots in your runs. You can also trade ‘Wrenches’ for ‘Powercells’ once your Basecamp is fully upgraded.
Note: We’re still finalizing the visuals of the different shopkeepers.
[h2]Health Flow Rework[/h2]
We’ve reworked health flow yet again.
The previous system had several issues:
• Taking damage from the last enemy in an encounter made it impossible to regenerate your health (as there weren’t any more enemy left to pick-up cells from)
• You were recovering health at a too high rate with every other healing effects
• The high healing possibilities made it so the only way to ‘lose’ was to take a very high amount of damage at once. This forced us to increase enemy damage, but that’s not really pleasing for a roguelite: it’s more interesting to slowly but regularly lose health when making mistakes, up to the point where any damage would kill you
• It was pretty hard to create interesting yet not overpowered healing effect
• In multiplayer, receiving heals from your brobot picking up cells kinda felt weird when you weren’t even around
We tackled those issues by preventing the damage bar from fading and by splitting the damage between permanent and temporary damage.
Basically, when taking damage, a part is stored into the ‘scratch damage’ bar and the rest is taken off your health.
The scratch damage no longer fades over time (like described above) and gathering pick-ups from enemies restores both a part of your scratch damage and a smaller part of your health.
This allows us to create many ‘repair scratch damage’ effects which effectively heal you without being overpowered while still slowly grinding your health when making mistakes (the Repair-o-Bot still restores a part of your missing health). This also makes us able to better control enemy damage to avoid ‘unfair’ spikes of damage.
[h2]Experience System[/h2]
This was one of the most debated features in Roboquest and many of you request us to change it. That made us think long and hard about it.
And after our internal analysis, we isolated several issues:
• Becoming ‘underpowered’ and not getting any perk because you’re not leveling-up is boring, especially if you are actually doing the right thing (smashing the badbots!)
• It’s not letting you play the way you want
• Becoming ‘underpowered’ means increasing the time-to-kill enemies (which feels really awful in Roboquest)
• We can encourage player to go forward through other game mechanics such as weapons, perks, affixes and health flow
The idea of making the XP cell disappear was initially there to force the player to move forward into the combat. But we initially expected that there would be a tactical choice of whether or not to go in based on the current combat situation (for example, taking down a remote threat to reduce the danger of the situation while deciding not to pick up the cells it drops). But it didn’t work like that, you eventually had to pick-up every single cell (since they are XP points).
So we decided to change the XP cells into Health cells. That creates the risk/reward decision of whether or not to pick them up more viable than before while still incentivizing the fact of going fast and forward. But going slower and taking your time is also possible, even if other systems in the game promote fast-clearing tactics.
Shifting the XP gain to simply killing the enemies ensures that you still need to destroy the badbots (which is what the game should be about) while still getting all the benefits of leveling-up.
So we changed it: destroying enemies will now automatically grant you experience.
[h2]Rail Momentum[/h2]
We modified the way rails and riding work regarding the speed at which you can ride them and hop off them.
This was feedback we received numerous times and we wanted to do something about it, we just didn’t have the time. This long ‘break’ gave us some room on that side so we went for it.
When starting to ride, it will conserve your current movement speed and quickly lerp that speed towards the regular ride speed. Hopping off the rail will also conserve the momentum you had while riding and quickly lerp towards your regular movement speed.
Overall this should make the experience of riding feel way better than before.
And that’s it for the highlights of the Summer update.
There were a lot of changes and we would love your help regarding balancing (whether it’d be about weapons, perks or anything else) during this playtest. We thank you in advance for everyone involved.
In addition, we might have missed a few changes in the patch-note. If you happen to find one of them, please let us know and we’ll add it before the update officially lands.
On a final note, we’d like to warn you that all languages in the game aside from English aren’t translated yet (and maybe for an extended duration).
See you in the public playtest Guardians!
Find the complete list of changes here.
After so much time without an update, we’re finally back!
And since it’s Summer, it seems appropriate to release the Summer update public playtest.
Before talking about it, we just wanted to sum up what happened with the Rogue’n’Roll update (if you haven’t followed this topic in the first place, you may want to skip the next section).
The Rogue’n’Roll update was canceled and most of the changes it was featuring have been incorporated to the Summer update. We took the time we needed to modify the systems you’ve been pinpointing during our previous playtest and we think they’re ready to be tried out. If you wish to read more details about the development process behind them and the issues we’ve been tackling you may want to read the devblog here.
The game will move on from the 0.8.9 version to the 0.10.0 version with the Summer update (effectively skipping the 0.9.0).
The playtest starts now (on Steam only) and will last for one to two weeks based on your feedback and the issues being reported. Once finished, the Summer update will land on all platforms at once (sometimes with a few days delay based on each platform’s validation process).
You can access the playtest by going into your game library, right-clicking Roboquest, going into ‘Properties’, heading over to the ‘Beta’ tab and opting for the ‘Roboquest Playtest’ branch.
It should download the playtest version of Roboquest (note that your progress is separated from the standard branch).
The playtest version comes with enough Wrenches to purchase all basecamp upgrades so you don’t have to grind to try out changes that would potentially be gated behind them.
Now, let’s touch a few words about the localization of the game:
So far, we’ve been relying solely on kind and devoted members of the community to translate the game. While we are thankful to them, we’re also sorry. It demanded a lot of effort on their end to maintain the translation up-to-date (because we are modifying many texts every time we update the perks). This resulted in the game not having completed translation for many languages, despite some of them being marked as completed on the Steam page. We will make sure to keep the store page up-to-date in that regard to avoid misinformation. If your language is currently not supported, please rest assured that the closer we are to the final release, the more languages will be supported and fully finalized.
Finally and before diving into the highlights of this Summer update, we wanted to say a few things about the incoming update:
The Summer update brings changes to some of the systems you’ve been accustomed to such as cells and weapon categories. You may have read about it in our previous devblogs.
We think those changes were necessary to the game in its current state but also to continue healthily expanding it. We’ll talk in detail about the reasons and consequences in the ‘highlights’ section below.
We hope you’ll give those changes a chance and test them before making up your mind about whether you like them or not.
We’ll be actively following your feedback on that.
Now, onto the highlights.
[h2]Cross-Platform[/h2]
You may now invite brobots from other platforms to your party by sending them your session ID (found in the multiplayer menu, use the ‘copy’ button). Your brobot will then have to enter this ID in the multiplayer menu to join your game. This will work regardless of what region you’re playing in.
The friend list currently does not support displaying friends from other platforms, but that’s something we’re working on.
Please note that this is the first iteration of this system and that you may encounter problems, we’ll be monitoring that and working on it. Implementing such a feature was a hard task for our studio and we aren’t unable to extensively try things out. We will especially keep an eye on it during the public playtest, so please send us F10 feedback whenever you’re encountering issues.
[h2]Public Matchmaking[/h2]
You may now search for brobots directly in the multiplayer menu of the game using the ‘quick play’ button. The matchmaking will find another player looking for a brobot in your selected region and let you play with one another. For now the search criteria are completely wide and won’t take into account things such as basecamp progression (and you may be matched with players with a different progression level than yours), but that’s something we’ll be looking to improve.
Looking for brobots outside of your region will likely result in high-latency games. The available regions are as follows: North America, South America, Asia, Oceania, Africa and Europe and you can change directly in the multiplayer menu.
Like the previous system, this was something that was hard to implement for us and that will likely require updates to be fully operational and pleasing to use. Please, report us any issue using the F10 in-game report system if you were to come across any.
Note: You might currently be stuck in a state where the game does not manage to generate a session ID for you (infinite session loading displayed in the multiplayer menu), making you unable to either host or use the public matchmaking system. Restarting your game will fix that issue.
[h2]Weapons Update[/h2]
We have removed the weapon categories from the game (and relocated the damage increase coming from category bonuses to several other systems in the game).
This was one of our most ancient systems (if not the most) and it was primarily used to help create a sense of build and to distinguish classes from one another (one would be using precision when another would be using demolition in most builds for example).
But with the evolution of other systems and time passing, it started to grow as an obsolete and limiting system. The perk system was also becoming the real factor of build-orientation and class distinction and the category system started to feel like a burden for the game and for the run diversity: playing one class meant playing the same weapons over and over.
In addition, the item selection process (choosing a category to buff) was never a compelling choice to make for you, regardless of how we implemented it (and some of you might remember, we tried many things).
As a result, the category system was no longer useful or bringing anything to the table and we simply removed it.
Doing so makes us able to more easily implement new weapons, new classes and makes sure a greater amount of loot is viable for your current run (effectively increasing run diversity). This also made us able to make you loot a bit less weapons considering more weapons than before are viable for your current build and consequently remove the weapon drops on enemies (which was a system breaking the combat flow).
But then you might be wondering, what about the items?
[h2]Items & Shopkeepers[/h2]
Items as you knew them have been removed (those buffing category stats).
Instead, items are now granting various bonuses and effects that help you specialize your build in different ways.
And you will be able to purchase them from newly added shopkeepers.
Or rather from the Max’s Crew.
Max just crafted a bunch of new friendly robots to help you through your runs.
These new friendbots can craft weapons, reroll affixes and sell you items (among other things).
Though they need ‘Powercells’ for that. ‘Powercells’ is a new in-run currency that can be found in challenge rooms, can drop from enemies or be granted as a reward at the end of each level. Later down the road, it will also be tied to the Elite enemy system.
This group of friendbots replaces the old ‘console’ system.
You can upgrade your basecamp to encounter more friendbots in your runs. You can also trade ‘Wrenches’ for ‘Powercells’ once your Basecamp is fully upgraded.
Note: We’re still finalizing the visuals of the different shopkeepers.
[h2]Health Flow Rework[/h2]
We’ve reworked health flow yet again.
The previous system had several issues:
• Taking damage from the last enemy in an encounter made it impossible to regenerate your health (as there weren’t any more enemy left to pick-up cells from)
• You were recovering health at a too high rate with every other healing effects
• The high healing possibilities made it so the only way to ‘lose’ was to take a very high amount of damage at once. This forced us to increase enemy damage, but that’s not really pleasing for a roguelite: it’s more interesting to slowly but regularly lose health when making mistakes, up to the point where any damage would kill you
• It was pretty hard to create interesting yet not overpowered healing effect
• In multiplayer, receiving heals from your brobot picking up cells kinda felt weird when you weren’t even around
We tackled those issues by preventing the damage bar from fading and by splitting the damage between permanent and temporary damage.
Basically, when taking damage, a part is stored into the ‘scratch damage’ bar and the rest is taken off your health.
The scratch damage no longer fades over time (like described above) and gathering pick-ups from enemies restores both a part of your scratch damage and a smaller part of your health.
This allows us to create many ‘repair scratch damage’ effects which effectively heal you without being overpowered while still slowly grinding your health when making mistakes (the Repair-o-Bot still restores a part of your missing health). This also makes us able to better control enemy damage to avoid ‘unfair’ spikes of damage.
[h2]Experience System[/h2]
This was one of the most debated features in Roboquest and many of you request us to change it. That made us think long and hard about it.
And after our internal analysis, we isolated several issues:
• Becoming ‘underpowered’ and not getting any perk because you’re not leveling-up is boring, especially if you are actually doing the right thing (smashing the badbots!)
• It’s not letting you play the way you want
• Becoming ‘underpowered’ means increasing the time-to-kill enemies (which feels really awful in Roboquest)
• We can encourage player to go forward through other game mechanics such as weapons, perks, affixes and health flow
The idea of making the XP cell disappear was initially there to force the player to move forward into the combat. But we initially expected that there would be a tactical choice of whether or not to go in based on the current combat situation (for example, taking down a remote threat to reduce the danger of the situation while deciding not to pick up the cells it drops). But it didn’t work like that, you eventually had to pick-up every single cell (since they are XP points).
So we decided to change the XP cells into Health cells. That creates the risk/reward decision of whether or not to pick them up more viable than before while still incentivizing the fact of going fast and forward. But going slower and taking your time is also possible, even if other systems in the game promote fast-clearing tactics.
Shifting the XP gain to simply killing the enemies ensures that you still need to destroy the badbots (which is what the game should be about) while still getting all the benefits of leveling-up.
So we changed it: destroying enemies will now automatically grant you experience.
[h2]Rail Momentum[/h2]
We modified the way rails and riding work regarding the speed at which you can ride them and hop off them.
This was feedback we received numerous times and we wanted to do something about it, we just didn’t have the time. This long ‘break’ gave us some room on that side so we went for it.
When starting to ride, it will conserve your current movement speed and quickly lerp that speed towards the regular ride speed. Hopping off the rail will also conserve the momentum you had while riding and quickly lerp towards your regular movement speed.
Overall this should make the experience of riding feel way better than before.
And that’s it for the highlights of the Summer update.
There were a lot of changes and we would love your help regarding balancing (whether it’d be about weapons, perks or anything else) during this playtest. We thank you in advance for everyone involved.
In addition, we might have missed a few changes in the patch-note. If you happen to find one of them, please let us know and we’ll add it before the update officially lands.
On a final note, we’d like to warn you that all languages in the game aside from English aren’t translated yet (and maybe for an extended duration).
See you in the public playtest Guardians!
Find the complete list of changes here.