Roboquest News

Hey Guardians.

It is finally time to reveal the Endless Update release date.

And it's coming real soon.

[h2]This November 27th at 3pm CET we will be releasing the Endless Update.[/h2]

We prepared a video summing up the addition coming into this update, view it here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

You can also read about the different additions in details in our previous devblogs (if you haven't already) here:

[h3]That Which Has No End (Endless Mode)[/h3]
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/692890/view/4444583635753894158

[h3]Saving the Day (Save & Resume)[/h3]
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/692890/view/4452465569899216933

[h3]Over Nine Thousand (Progression)[/h3]
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/692890/view/6904675658203398265

[h3]Make it Double (Bosses)[/h3]
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/692890/view/4444584904812920864




The Endless Update is coming, to be released across all platforms the 27th of November, 3pm CET.






[h2]Join the community on Discord.[/h2]
[h2]Follow us on X.[/h2]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/692890/Roboquest/

Hey again Guardians.

This is the final devblog for the incoming Endless Update. And it's going to be a short one.

Let's talk about bosses.


We contemplated for a while what to do with Bosses in the Endless Mode.

Are they even there?

Yes, obviously, not adding them would make the game quite different from the normal mode, and probably hinder the build diversity in the process. Not only that, that would also be quite sad not to find your favourite Mole to whack.

But, do we just add those as they are right now?

Since you probably already fought them a lot and know their attack patterns and behaviour by heart, that might be lacking some kind of… novelty? And we’re adding a “new mode”. That meant we needed something “new” to go along with.

And at some point we were like “you know Diggy Mole, we like him, and players seem to like him as well”, “so what if there were TWO Diggy Moles?”.


And that was the beginning of the addition of “Duo-Bosses”.

We crafted several new encounters featuring combos of Bosses. We tweaked their arenas, their attack patterns and their nameplate.

In the Endless Mode, you will face a Duo-Boss every two levels.

There are quite a few variations and we hope they’ll provide an interesting challenge for you!





So yeah, that was the final quickblog.

The Endless Update release is nigh and we hope you're pumped to try it out!



[h2]The Endless Update lands end of November.[/h2]

Hello Guardians.

Here's the third out of four quick devblog about the Endless Update.

Today we'll be discussing the progression systems that support the Endless Mode.


When we were designing the new mode, we realized we needed something that would make Endless Mode more complete in its intent to be a replayable experience.

And we felt like a "mutator" system would be a great solution to that.

We called those "Singularities and Glitches".


There are "main mutators" (Singularity) and "secondary mutators" (Glitch).

Whenever you defeat a boss, it adds a random Singularity to your run, up to a certain maximum. And every other level completed, it adds a random Glitch to your run, endlessly.

Singularity have a greater impact on your run whereas Glitch tend to modify metric values from the base game or from the Singularities that were added to the run. Pretty much like "enemy perks and upgrades".

Here are a few example of Singularities:
Bunny Shield - Some enemies have a shield that can only be broken by headbonking them
Safety Goggles - Enemies have a chance to have an eye patch protecting their weak spot
Kaboom Protocol - Enemies have a chance to explode when destroyed

[h2]Enemies[/h2]
In addition to that, every level comes with an updated roster of enemies and the difficulty will ramp up endlessly. Enemies get beefier and deadlier, more elites come into play and mechanically weaker enemies are replaced with stronger ones.

Every few levels, you'll have a perk choice, up to a maximum of 5.
Every levels aside from those, you'll have an upgrade choice, up to a certain maximum (resulting in much more upgrades than regular runs).
In terms of items, you won't be limited (that is, until you have them all).
Once you reached the maximum number of perks and upgrades, you continue to level up and get to pick one of three "Boosters".

The main reason we're limiting perks is that going above a certain thresholds removes the idea of "having a build", you just "have everything" and that didn't sit right with us.

Hopefully this will still make you reach high highs and let you experience an "end-game build" for much longer compared to the regular runs. But we will be monitoring this closely.





That's the end of the third quickblog, there's a final one planned later this week (a very short one) and then we'll be in "soon to be released" territory.

[h3]Stay tuned![/h3]


[h2]The Endless Update lands end of November.[/h2]

Guardians, it's us again.

We're back with more information on the Endless Update.


The "Save & Resume" feature is coming in the Endless Update.

"Finally, this should have been there day one". You'd probably be correct to think that. But it wasn't and there isn't much more we can say about it other than "our bad, sorry".

To be fair, that was a lot of work and we wanted to make sure the main game architecture was final before starting it. But it's finally coming.


When finishing a level, you'll be given the choice to "Save and Quit" the game.

This will bring you back to the title screen.


From there, clicking "Continue" will launch your saved run while clicking "Basecamp" will erase your saved run and... bring you back to the Basecamp for a fresh start (after a confirmation window, obviously).

Please note that this feature is not available in multiplayer, only in single player.

This feature is available for both Normal and Endless Run.

[h2]Was it necessary?[/h2]
Let's discuss if that feature was required for the game since it was a growing debate within the community.

Lots of people were asking for it and lots of people were against it (mostly because it would take us time away from developing other features).

Let's get this straight: it doesn't deter us from doing anything else. Despite this feature being a lot of work, the person in charge wouldn't be able to implement other things like weapons and classes anyway (we would need to game-design those, but we were busy game-designing the Endless Update).

And then, the main point defending the idea of having this feature was that not everybody has 45+ minutes to allocate to a full run. That's completely fair and we do understand that everybody has different lives and different spare time for their hobbies.

We apologize if anyone felt like "we weren't respecting their time". It was always one of the pillar of our philosophy (to respect your time), that's why we tried to limit as much as possible the feeling of "grind" in our game (among other things).

In any case, the question became broader with the incoming Endless Mode. A run virtually has no end in this game mode. So regardless of the previous debate about "Save & Resume", we knew we needed that feature for this new mode.

So yeah, that's it. You'll be able to save and resume your runs at a later time!



Apparently, we weren't clear enough in our previous devblog regarding power ceiling and player progression.

To be a little bit more accurate, we quickly setup this graph so that you can have an idea of the character growth over time in both Endless and Normal modes.



Approaching the 30/40 minute mark is when players usually complete the normal mode according to our data. Reaching about level 16.

In Endless Mode, by that time you will be around level 22 and you will have reached level 16 about 25% to 30% sooner than normal mode.

So what will happen in the Endless Mode in terms of character growth?
You will reach highest highs
You will progress faster
You will spend more time in the "superpower" state that late game builds bring

Keeping the progression from Normal Mode would be boring in terms of reward distribution after the first time you beat The Moon. It doesnt fit that "quickest" progression and "highest" peak we were looking for in the Endless Mode.

We hope we clarified the situation about character growth and power ceiling.





That's it! But we will be back soon once again :)

[h3]Stay tuned![/h3]


[h2]The Endless Update lands end of November.[/h2]

Hello Guardians!

Today we're back with a (short) devblog to talk about the elephant in the room. The "Endless" thingy.

Let's hero cape right down :)


Like many of you have guessed, the "Endless Update" is about adding an Endless Mode to the game.

But there are many ways to implement such a system, so which direction did we go?

[h2]To Loop or not to Loop[/h2]
The first major question we had to answer was "would the endless mode be based on playing another run while keeping all your perks from the previous one?". Basically "looping" through the game.

And the simple answer we came up with was "no".

Looping wasn't the best choice for the experience (in our opinion), a few examples of what bothered us:

• After your first run, there would not be much more to give you without breaking the power ceiling in either way (you or the enemies)
  
• The base path of the levels of the game and the quest (and other interactable) within are tailored to be encountered once per run, it doesn't make much sense to cross them several times in a row
  
• The repetitiveness of seeing the same stages in the same order over and over would quickly become boring

That means we needed to come up with something different than just looping through the base game.

[h2]Then What?[/h2]
It was weird to start by telling you what the Endless Mode isn't instead of telling you what it is, so let's correct this.

So… the Endless Mode is an alternate game mode, separate from the regular runs.

You unlock it after beating the final Boss for the first time (in Guardian 1 or above) or by crafting it directly with Wrenches at the Basecamp.

Starting an Endless Run works exactly like the regular ones: you choose a difficulty, a class and interact with the Endless Portal to start the run.



Then, you play through a endless series of levels, with some unique twists on them.



Those levels are shorts and enemy-packed, some have battle and challenge rooms while others don't.


Note that you can't complete quests or progress the story in this mode.



And that's it for this devblog.

We will be back shortly to talk more about what we have in store for the Endless Update.

[h3]Stay tuned![/h3]

In the meantime, happy robot smashing time.


[h2]The Endless Update lands end of November.[/h2]