Roboquest News

Hey everyone!

We’re finalizing our work on the incoming Spring update, in the meantime, we need your help to make sure the version is stable.
For that, we’re opening up our playtest system to each and everyone willing to try out the game in its testing stage.

In order to keep things neat and organized, we’ll ask you to post your feedback and anything related to the playtest in the associated channels on Steam and Discord, or to simply use the F10 report system in game (the latter being the easiest way for us to parse the different issues).
On Steam, a new forum category “Playtest Feedback” has been created specifically for that and dedicated text channels have been made public on the Discord.
Please make sure to post all your feedback about the playtest on these sections, it will make sure we can properly follow and fix the potential issues, thanks in advance!

The playtest will last until the official Spring update lands and you may stream it or create video content about it. Though, remember that there will be bugs, crashes and other issues.
Note that your progress will be completely blank on the playtest branch (regardless if you accessed it before or not) and will not be ported onto the full Spring release.

If you’re interested in helping us, all you have to do is to join the alternative branch called “Playtest” in your Steam launch settings. Please note that other languages than English are currently work in progress.
You can find the instruction below to access it:

- Restart Steam
- Right-click on Roboquest in your Steam Library
- Go over to the "Beta" tab
- Select the beta you'd like to opt for
- Choose "RQ Test Build - Play Tester"
- Close the window, it will start downloading the playtest branch
- Play as usual

The playtest is available from now on, feel free to hop in to start helping us at making this update as great as it can be!

Happy robot testing everyone, we wish you’ll be numerous to help us out :)

Howdy Guardians!
It’s been a month since our Spring Update Spotlight and we wanted to keep you in the loop about where we’re at.

As you might guess, we’re hard at work to deliver it. We’re aiming at the end of March but we’re keeping the possibility to delay it a bit to make sure it’s as entertaining as we want it to be.

As we’ve said in our previous news, we’re reworking many aspects of the classes and we’re spending a lot of time playtesting and iterating to make sure the new classes are as unique as they can be.

In the same time, we’re working hard on balancing the game and we're adding some new weapons and enemies!

But we’ve already discussed this a bit more thoroughly in the previous update, so what else?

[h2]Basecamp Upgrade Reset[/h2]
We’ve been adding several new basecamp upgrades and reworked others. It’s not a full basecamp update yet, but it’s different enough that we have to reset the upgrades you’ve purchased and the artifacts you’ve unlocked.
We’d like to give you compensation for that, but unfortunately, we have no way to track the Wrenches you spent for now and therefore we can’t refund them. We’re sorry about this and we’ll obviously be adding a tracking system so we can refund you the next times we need to reset such progression.
We won’t reset the amount of Wrenches you currently have in stock, the difficulty levels and the classes you’ve unlocked (so you get to keep all of that!).

[h2]Playtest Branch[/h2]
Now, on to the fun stuff: we’ll be conducting an open playtest branch accessible to each and everyone. The date at which we’ll be opening this playtest is yet to be defined but it will last between one and two weeks. We’ll be back with more information about this!

[h2]VFX Update[/h2]
A few months back, Dmitry joined our crew at RyseUp as our only VFX artist. And today we're glad to say that with his help, we're finally coming up online with VFX adapted to our artistic direction. For now, this mainly means adding more juicy effects to everything related to the player, whether it'd be perks or class visuals. Of course these neat additions will spread to the all the other aspects of the game over time. You can expect constant upgrades on that side from now on.
Here's a sneak peek of one of the new effect:



And that’s going to do it for this news!
As usual, we remind you that you can step on our Discord server or Steam forums if you want to participate in the conversation, we would be glad to have you on board!

We wish you a good start of the week and a happy robot bashing!

Illustration by Igor

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• You will no longer be stuck in an infinite black screen on the first initial loading (the issue was coming from a corrupted save game)
• You will no longer be locked in the pause menu when it’s open on top of the “upgrade weapon” UI
• Players will no longer be stuck in front of boss rooms when their brobot has left the game
• Speculative Fix: Client players should no longer be stuck on riding splines
• Speculative Fix: You should no longer be stuck in battle rooms without any enemy spawning to complete it
• Speculative Fix: You should no longer find “ghost” weapons in chests

Hey everyone :)

We’re sure many of you are wondering… when is the next update? What are we working on? What can you expect?

So here we are, to walk you through some of our design intentions for the next update and to talk about some of the fancy things you can expect.

The next update will land in March. We usually like to release an update every month or so, but this time around we needed more time to deploy the changes we’re aiming for.

The main goal of our next update is to settle many of the game systems in order to be able to serenely inject new content in the future. We’re basically setting the stage for all the incoming updates in terms of content.

But before we dive in, we wanted to say a few words for the overwhelmingly positive reviews you posted. Few days ago we reached over a thousand reviews, this is a huge milestone for the game and our studio in general. We’re humbled by your support and it gives us even more motivation to make Roboquest the best it can be. We can literally boost our morale by simply going on Steam and reading all the positive things you have to say about Roboquest… Big thanks to everyone, thank you!

So… what are we working on?



[h2]Classes[/h2]
We’re looking to improve the classes for a long time now. We weren’t fully happy about them, mostly because they don’t feel unique enough right now. So in the next update, we’re looking at giving them more flavor, more personality and most important of all, give them a more distinct playstyle.

[h3]Quick Attack[/h3]
One of the first things we wanted to do was to open up more design rooms for melee attacks. We therefore decided to rename them “quick attack”. More than a simple name change, it allows us to make them more alike “secondary skill” and consequently makes us able to create more synergy between them and the rest of the character class kit.

[h3]Unique Mechanics[/h3]
To create those synergies, we thought we needed something more for classes, something unique. We decided to opt for unique class-mechanics, mechanics we can use in abilities, quick attacks or even in perks. This gives more depth to each class and helps make their gameplay feel unique.
As an example, let's talk a bit about the Recon. It still has the Stealth and the Slash abilities you’re used to, but we tied them together with a “combo points” system. These points are earned by using Stealth or by destroying enemies and Slash consumes them to deal increased damage. While it might seem simple on the surface, it makes us able to create perks and effects which trigger off of, regenerate, modify or play around with these combo points. This ultimately makes the recon feel different to play from the other classes and give more uniqueness to the build you’re going for.

[h2]Artifacts[/h2]
We think Artifacts play a large part in what makes trial and error and replaying fun and we’re working at improving the amount of content you can experience on that side.
We’re therefore currently testing and implementing a lot of different artifacts. Without spoiling or giving too much details, we can give you the example of a “Third Jump” and a “Glasscannon” artifact which we expect to spice up your runs.

[h2]Weapons[/h2]
Whether it’d be their balance, their progression, their names or the affix system, weapons are kinda “all over the place” right now. We’re looking at improving all of this to reach several goals: encourage picking up new weapons, obviously making more weapons viable, turning the act of leveling up weapons a positive and more logical experience (regardless of RNG) and finally make us able to drop a larger variety of weapon at each level (without breaking the balance).

[h3]Progression[/h3]
Currently weapon “stars” is a misleading concept, most players think it improves their weapons’ damage. So we’ve decided to do exactly that, each star now increases the damage your weapons deal. Each star corresponds to one “weapon level” and you’ll find higher level weapons the further you progress in the level.
Stars are now disconnected from the weapon affix system and any weapon has a chance to obtain random affixes. Not only does it make “leveling up” weapons a more positive experience (like mentioned before) it also makes people who wish to keep their weapon able to do so.

[h3]Quality of Life[/h3]
We’re cleaning up many of the weapon systems who weren’t quite “up to the level” compared to the rest, noticeably a better shotgun hit and damage system, a reworked warmup system (which instantly start shooting but increases its rate of fire as you hold the button) and other quality of life things such as being able to cancel your reload using your weapon ability.

[h2]Levels[/h2]
Not all levels are receiving the updates we’re talking about here, it will be an incremental implementation but we can already start talking about our intentions regarding them.

[h3]Verticality[/h3]
We’re adding another layer of verticality (the same one you can find in the Oasis or Haven-City right now) to some “flatter” levels (starting with the Canyons). It increases the number of angles you can negotiate the hostile encounter from and puts the lights on mobility artifacts such as the jetpack.

[h3]Randomness[/h3]
Several people have been asking us if the level design was actually randomized. The short answer is “yes it is” but we’re missing some parts to make it clearly varied. We’re hard at work to provide you more diversity on that side (starting with the Oasis).

[h3]Encounter Diversity[/h3]
We’re not directly talking about “enemy diversity” (in the sense of more enemies) but rather the way enemy encounters are built-up (what enemies they contain). We’re improving the systems and implementing new ones on top of it to generate more varied enemy encounters, which we internally call “bouquet of enemies”. This makes the tactical approach of each encounter more interesting and reduces the likelihood of fighting the exact same bouquet several times in a row.

[h3]Environment[/h3]
Finally, we’re applying some “polish” pass to several levels (starting with the Canyons, the Oasis and Haven-City) to finally give a more flavorful touch to each of them. We hope you’ll be enjoying your time more than ever there :)


And that covers some of the important things we've been and are still working on.
We also just released a hotfix to some of the more gamebreaking issues such as being unable to play the game :D. We're sorry for the inconvenience these issues have caused and we thank everyone involved in reporting and sharing their "crash dumps" and "corrupted save game" with us!

You can find the patch-note of the hotfix here:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/692890/announcements/detail/3034832842295249993

We wish you all a great week-end and happy robot bashing!

The Winter update for Roboquest is now live on Steam. Watch JAYRAW from the Roboquest community play and see for yourself the updates including new levels Haven-City, new weapons and tons of gameplay changes.

This stream is a replay and broadcasted in French,

Read the full list of changes in the patch notes.