Hello Robocrafters!

The BIG physics update will go live tomorrow! But this evening Chris and Josh are going to be streaming a new build of Robocraft today and tomorrow! Today they’ll be building new robots in preparation for the big agility update. And tomorrow they’ll be using the robots they built to play online against other players!

Make sure to check out the streams at 17:00 UTC directly on the front page of Steam

https://store.steampowered.com/app/301520/Robocraft/

Tomorrow marks the release of our overhauled agility system! Along with it will come various bug fixes and weapon balance adjustments based on feedback from the community. We’re very much looking forward to seeing exactly what you think of our new F=ma system and would love to hear your feedback once you experience it.

Tomorrow the update will include the following features:

• Weapon Balance changes based on survey feedback
  
• Rebalancing Tier brackets
  
• Updated Steam starter robots
  
• Updated Steam Body Builder robots to all be under 750CPU
  
• Convert Cosmetic Credits into Cosmic Credits
  
• Sprinter & Mech Legs Agility Movement
  
• Thrusters & Propellers Agility Movement
  
• Hovers Agility Movement
  
• Rotors Agility Movement
  
• Upgrading bays via Robits
  
• Robits now purchasable from the item shop
  
• AI can now use Aerofoil movement parts in BA and TDM

We ran a year of the pig artbot competition to line up with the Lunar New Year! There have been some truly awesome entries and we’d like to thank everyone who has taken the time to build some incredible robots.

The grand winner of 500CC is

Manana81 with his robot ‘THE GENEROUS PIG 2019’



This incredible pig & Dragon combo is not only visually beautiful to look at but is also combat ready. The tesla’s provide this robot with a dangerous bite and the pig is wielding a bowl filled with healing goodness!

We also have four runner ups

BR4Y4NGAM3R with his robot ‘Pig Lunar’


This blue piggy bot is an elegant answer to the question “what if pigs had wheels?”. Charming and was one of the favorites of a few members from the Freejam team

Kronoswm’s ‘Okkoto’ was inspired by the film ‘Princess Mononoke’ (if you haven't seen it, you should!). This bot does an incredible job of creating a spiky fur and an incredible level of detail in comparison to its film counterpart.



Kura3000 entered three robots into this competition. For fairness we included just one of his piggy bots into the draw. That Pig was aptly named “Year of the pig” which uses neon cubes to create a great vibrant background and platform for one of the happiest pigs you ever did saw!



Hoelderlin’s ‘Festival Pig’ encapsulates the Lunar New year perfectly! Bright red chinese lanterns and adorable little hoofed feet complete this pigs red attire.



Blue_Diamond_2017 created a Megapig called “laser pig”. We are particularly fond of it’s giant curly tail!




The first honorable mention is from Pun_Shinamon, unfortunately they were just one day late to enter the Artbot competition so their entry didn't count. But as a result of this, in the future all Artbot competitions will run for two weeks so that we can give players much more time to enter.




InsaneLiving shared his pig based version of Ghidora, an iconic villain from the Godzilla films



Thank you to everyone who entered this art bot competition, If you want to see all of the entries, You can still view the entries by clicking this hashtag #RCLunarNewYear

See you tomorrow when the BIG physics update launches!

Build, Drive, Fight
ReelBigKris

Hello Robocrafters!

Welcome to February the 6th’s Dev Jam! This week we share details on movement physics overhauls, CPU progression system and remind you about this weeks Artbot Challenge

A major physics overhaul factoring in F=MA (and inertia!) will launch next week. Robots which are large and bulky will not be as nimble as a much smaller and lighter robot. While it is very difficult to describe how this feels in words, we know that you will feel the difference once these changes are live. We can't wait to see what you think of this major update as robots should feel much more satisfying to control.

The first selection of movement parts that will benefit from the agility and physics overhaul will be:

• Rotors
  
• Thrusters/ Propellers
  
• Hovers
  
• Mech legs/ Sprinter Legs

Other movement types will be be adjusted to factor in the F=MA system over the next few updates. Each movement part is being adjusted individually to improve the overall feel of movement in Robocraft and make building matter more!

To provide a refined building experience and to help new players settle into Robocraft we have reduced the initial CPU limit for garage bays. We have chosen to do this for the following reasons:

Reduce the size and complexity of robots for new players.
Give players a sense of incremental progression.
Provide a long term use for Robits.

In addition we are going to be changing the robot ranking scores and limits so lower tiers effectively have lower CPU limits.

This ensures a robot at the CPU limit for a new bay will still be effective in Tier 1 and gradually raises the size and complexity of robots that players can build as they progress.

Each garage bay will have its own CPU limit and will start at 750CPU. However, each bay can be upgraded individually up to a maximum of 2,000 CPU. In order to increase the CPU it will cost a number of Robits. Each upgrade will increase the CPU limit of each bay by a small amount



The Robits cost per upgrade from this gif are not representative of the final values and may be subject to change

Once a bay reaches the normal CPU limit of 2,000, you can upgrade it once more to turn it into a “Max CPU” bay. Once you have done this, the bay can not be upgraded any further and you’ll be able to build robots in it to a CPU limit of 10,000. Please note, that even if you upgrade a bay to “Max CPU” it doesn’t mean that everything you build in that bay needs to be a Megabot.

We will be updating the factory to provide more information on the amount of CPU you will be expected to have in a bay before you download a robot from the factory. If you have a bay that only has 1,000 CPU, you’ll be unable to download a 1,500 CPU robot until you upgrade your bay to fit the 1,500 CPU requirement of the bot that you’d like to download.

We have adjusted the starter bots and the modularized body builder so that they fall below the 750CPU limit for new players.

We will be converting all current T1 - T5 active bays into a 2000 CPU bay. However if you have a Megabot in a garage bay, that bay will be converted into a Max CPU bay.

The CPU progression is just one upgradeable feature that players will be able to spend their Robits on. Over the coming weeks we’ll be sharing more details on new types of uses for Robits.

During the next update we will be renaming cosmetic credits for all accounts into Cosmic Credits. While players will still be able to purchase cosmetic items with this form of currency, we’re also going to be allowing players to purchase Robits with Cosmetic Credits.


To celebrate the Lunar New Year, Robocraft Premium For Life is on sale at 30% off!

We are also running an Artbot competition To celebrate the dawning of the year of the pig which will end on the 12th of February. Five robocrafters will receive 100 CC each and one lucky Robocrafter will win 500CC!

For more details on how to enter, please visit the competition announcement below:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/301520/announcements/detail/1756870026710119858

The competition closes on february 12th, winners will be chosen at random on the 14th of February

Build, Drive, Fight!
ReelBigKris

Hello Robocrafters!

To celebrate the Lunar New Year and the Year of the Pig! We wanted to run a fun art bot competition for players. We've been focusing a lot of our time over the last several weeks to balance the game to make combat more fun but this week we want to see your incredible robotic creations.

The prizes for this competition include:

• 1 grand prize of 500 CC
  
• 5 runner up prizes of 100 CC

In order to enter this competition you must create an amazing piggy based robot and share a screenshot of it on Twitter. There are a few rules that you must follow to validate your entry.

• Create an awe inspiring pig robot
  
• Take a screenshot of your pig robot
  
• Post the screenshot on twitter and include your display name, the robot name and the following Hashtag # RCLunarNewYear
  
• The tweet must also include the following Bitly link: (http://bit.ly/RCLunarNewYear)

Competition ends on the 11th of February and winners will be announced on the 13th of February. So you have all of this weekend to create a pig themed robot. We'll be looking for creativity, originality and even battle readiness! If you can create a great pig that can prove itself in battle we'd even love to see a video of that!

Good luck Robocrafters, we can't wait to see what you create!

Additionally Lifetime premium is now 30% off in Steam's Lunar new Year Sale. Click the link below to purchase.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/570960/Robocraft__Premium_for_Life_Pack/

Tomorrow we will release a new Dev Jam! So until then; Build, Drive, Fight

ReelBigKris

Hi everyone!

We have completed our planned maintenance and Robocraft is now up and running. We have been updating our database infrastructure. Players may experience some issues over the next few days. Do let us know if you see anything odd!

Build, Drive, Fight!
ReelBigKris

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the January monthly recap! A special announcement post which details the last month of happenings in bitesize chunks! If a particular topic interests you further you can read more about it by clicking the relevant links.

We issued a new balance update based upon early player feedback which contains changes to various weapons. At the same time, a community feedback thread had been pinned to the top of Steam forums and website forums to gain valuable data direct from players.

We revealed the first work in progress gifs showing the new F=ma changes we’re looking to release in an upcoming update. The first movement part we had shown which had these changes implemented were rotors.




Of course, more parts will receive these agility changes so stay tuned for further updates!

Based on a couple of community feedback threads we had created several weeks ago, we began to roll out our findings in a brand new update! The data we had received was very valuable and allowed us to release the first Community Balance Update. We are hoping to continue to create interesting polls and feedback forms to allow us to greatly refine the core game experience.

Alongside this community balances update we included a variety of quality of life improvements and bug fixes.

Our current community balance feedback survey has over 300 players sharing their thoughts on Robocraft

While not an official announcement, It is still worth mentioning! The Premium For Life membership for Robocraft is now on sale at 30% off. It contains the following benefits:

• Grants all paint colours for use in the Editor
  
• Doubles the amount of experience and robits earned from matches
  
• Upload your own personal avatar picture
  
• Additional Cosmetic CPU

https://store.steampowered.com/app/570960/Robocraft__Premium_for_Life_Pack/

In addition, Premium For Life also grants a 50% discount to RoboPass Season 1, which will be ending on February 18th.



While not directly linked to January, we are announcing the winners for the Protonium challenge competition today!

We’ll be crediting the following players 5,000 CC each for successfully completing Protonium Difficulty and sharing their video on Twitter

• Rafyfou
  
• -Lumen-
  
• Dued
  
• Coob2003
  
• BONEs_BROKER
  
• The-Alien
  
• Nefilm
  
• Venturinblue
  
• Vectron2
  
• Nakkaryo-n
  
• LordForce
  
• Serg_04
  
• JJson400
  
• Chan Tzi
  
• Iwaken225
  
• Dustybin
  
• Hosi
  
• Drake1001
  
• Sharkaporyum
  
• TheReD40
  
• VintageGriffin
  
• Gabriel317
  
• Ben-Skywalker
  
• PathForger
  
• DehSpy

RoboPass ends on the 18th of February, so make sure that you have unlocked all of the grades by then to unlock awesome cosmetic items. To purchase these items individually will cost over $100 but of course playing through RoboPass to unlock these items will cost just $9.99 (Or $4.99 for Premium For life owners).

Additionally below is just a tease of our workload for the month of February:

• Physics adjustments to movement parts.
  
• Provide more value to Robits for new players and veterans.
  
• Flying AI bots and other AI changes
  
• Work towards RoboPass Season 2

Additionally, the Lunar New Year is next week. It’ll be the year of the pig. If you’re looking for a cool new artbot to build this weekend, maybe consider building a pig!

Build, Drive, Fight
ReelBigKris


On February 4th at 10:00AM UTC we will be entering planned maintenance. This will last approximately two hours. Stay tuned for further info via our official social media channels.

Hello everyone!

Yesterday we released an update to Robocraft which contained several changes to weapon balancing. Do try out the latest build and experience the changes for yourself. There were a variety of buffs to several weapons, and a nerf to the Plasma.



Read the full announcement by clicking here

We feel that we got some really valuable information from players when we asked for feedback and we’d like to continue to have this sort of interaction with our community when approaching certain topics such as balancing.

A new survey has been created which allows us to collate the data much more easily than our last feedback survey thread. It contains a selection of multiple choice questions as well as a few areas where you can submit feedback not linked directly to Weapon balancing. Based on overall consensus and our own internal analytics we’ll be able to make some good decisions that will help improve the overall quality of Robocrafts weapon balancing and core game experiences.

A google account is required to fill out the form below:

Feedback Form

We thank everyone in advance for taking the time to fill out this form, it will be very useful and we can’t wait to get some really amazing feedback from you all.

Build, Drive, Fight!
ReelBigKris

Hello Robocrafters!

We have a pretty substantial update today which includes weapon balance changes based upon data we have received from our latest community feedback thread. There are also a ton of bug fixes and quality of life improvements.

A community group known as Robocrew have created an incredible brand new trailer for Robocraft. This trailer will appear in game when you launch Robocraft

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYCwFvUuOh8

A couple of weeks ago we asked you all to provide us with some information which would allow us to help with weapon balancing. Thank you to everyone who provided us feedback, we’ve acted upon them and are happy with the new balance changes but would love to hear your feedback. We’ll be running another community balance survey in the future. But first, lets detail the core changes we made to weapons

Lasers
There were no solid agreements on changes that need to be made to the Laser in regards to nerfs/buffs and due to this, no balance changes will be made to the Lasers at this time.

Plasma
Overall consensus was that plasma should receive a damage nerf. We have decided to reduce the damage output of the Plasma by 5%.

Rails
This weapon seemed to be in a relatively good place at this current moment in time. The least contested change was related to accuracy whilst moving. Players wanted the time to regain accuracy after coming to a stand-still to regain faster. So instead of 1.5 seconds to regain accuracy after moving, it has been reduced to 0.75 seconds.

Nanos
One of the most debated topics from our weapon balance thread was that Nanos needed a significant buff. We have chosen to give nanos a 10% buff in healing rate and a 5% reduction in energy cost.

Flak
After looking into the flak damage values we discovered that there was a bug which was causing the in-air damage from the flak to be registered incorrectly. This bug is now fixed and means that the Flak will now deal greater damage to in-air targets.

Seekers
We didn't want to make any drastic changes to seekers as we’re still receiving feedback on the range changes we made since our last update. We are hoping to gather more feedback for this weapon again in combination to the other changes made during todays update.

Ion
After discussing this weapon internally, we believed that the Ion would feel more balanced once Plasma has received a nerf. The nerf to the Plasma in this update should address this.

Chaingun
Feedback had shown that players wanted an increase in damage and an increased fire rate. Based on this, we are increasing the shots per second from 10 to 12 and increasing damage per shot by 5%.

Mortar
Players reported that the Mortar consumed far too much energy. We have chosen to reduce energy consumption by 10%, this will increase the shots launched in 1 energy bar from 5 to 6

Tesla
The tesla will have three major adjustments in this balance pass. Firstly, they have increased damage by 5%, reduced energy cost by 5% and finally an increase in hits per second from 4 to 5.

We felt that the community feedback that we received a few weeks ago really was incredibly useful and we are planning to do it again very soon… In fact, we’ll be posting a new feedback balance thread in time for the weekend.

We have made a ton of changes in this update to weapons, so please do spend some time playing the latest update so you can get a good understanding of the core changes and how they affect the gameplay.

Tomorrow we’ll be creating another feedback thread post in the form of a survey to make compiling the data even easier.

As an extra little bit of polish we’ve added some visual particle effects to the voting screen. Clicking the Best Played and Best Looking buttons will activate them.



Based on the number of votes for Best Played and Best Looking, another particle effect will appear behind the card.



Patch notes of the changes and fixes are included below:

Changes

• New Robocraft Trailer added to intro
  
• Balance Pass based on community feedback
  
• Added a new label under the crosshair to better indicate how/when to flip your robot"
  
• Provided better information to show players how to use the picker tool.
  
• Voting cards become interact-able faster
  
• Neon cube has updated saturation
  
• The camera now has a zoom out to better display the new spawn effects
  
• Visual update to rail projectiles

Fixes

• After an error during the infinitisation update we noticed that speed boosts were not reduced after stating that they were. We’ve now reduced Speed Boost across the board by 20%
  
• Flak explosion damage is now correctly calculated for air based robots
  
• T5 Flak now contains the correct ‘damage per stack’ info in the tooltip
  
• Purchasing Robopass Plus during the battle summary flow will update the RoboPass screen correctly
  
• Fairy lights now highlight invalid placements of cubes if the lights were placed first.
  
• Fairy lights now keep their hitbox after leaving test mode
  
• All Plasma tiers now trigger robot shake
  
• Effects now play during the voting screen once a robot reaches 3/6 votes for “best looking robot”
  
• No longer able to move during the first spawn animation in Test/ Play vs AI, while the camera is moving
  
• Party widget now displays correctly when queuing for battle and while in build mode
  
• Average queue time while in lobby is now more accurate
  
• Voting buttons on the end-of-battle screen now have the correct icons displayed
  
• T5 Laser muzzle flash locations are now correct
  
• Neon cubes that are disconnected will now display in the correct shade of red
  
• T4/T5 seekers now award the correct credit for the ‘I’ve Got Tone’. The Seeker/LOML are now merged into this achievement. Also removed "Not the Bees" achievement and added "Lob it" achievement for Mortar kills
  
• AI robots equipped with rails will no longer attempt to shoot at other robots through walls
  
• Player list HUD in Battle Arena now correctly shows respawn times next to players rather than kill count
  
• Sorting by CPU in the Robot Factory will now display search results across all tiers
  
• AI kills are now appearing in the kill feed during Play vs AI matches
  
• Pausing during the campaign countdown will no longer cause the UI to be stuck for the rest of the round
  
• AI will no longer shoot at the last place a robot was destroyed until it respawns
  
• Fixed an issue where labels that show the queue status of your party were not working correctly.
  
• Mortar explosions on the boundary shields no longer create an odd square effect
  
• Player lists in the top corners now sort by highest kills in TDM
  
• Fixed an issue where Nano and LOML will lose lock on functionality if you have placed multiple tiers of the same type of weapon, and one of them is shot off
  
• Fixed an issue that could sometimes leave users stuck after battle"
  
• Fixed overflowing texts on some dialogue windows
  
• Fixed an issue where users that created their account during Early Access but did not receive their pilot seat rewards
  
• Fixed an issue where the PLAY button in the top bar will not highlight when looking at the custom game screen
  
• Fixed an issue where player lists would have too much spacing in lower resolutions until the list is refreshed
  
• Rail and Laser projectiles are no longer invisible when firing over certain distances

There may be a chance that some players will experience an issue with their Steam Achievements. If you see anything odd happen, do contact Steam support.

Thank you everyone for your feedback and continued support. We hope you enjoy this update.

Build, Drive, Fight
ReelBigKris

Hello Robocrafters!

Tomorrow we’ll be pushing out a new update to Robocraft which features balancing changes suggested by YOU! Yes, YOU! Providing your responded to one of our community feedback threads on the official forum or within the Steam forums.

These feedback threads were very useful and I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to send over comments on each weapon type with details on energy usage, fire rate, damage output and varying other factors. The changes we’ve made in response to this feedback will go live tomorrow at around midday UTC.

We’ll also have a new trailer, a plethora of bug fixes and some quality of life improvements coming in tomorrows update.


To prepare Robocraft for these new changes we will need to enter maintenance at 10:00am UTC. The maintenance period will last approximately two hours.

I’ll be around to read feedback once the update goes live tomorrow. But until then! Build, Drive, Fight!

ReelBigKris

Hello everyone!

We hope that you’ve been enjoying RoboPass over the winter holidays. We have just one more month until our first season ends on the 18th of February 2019. So there is still time to unlock the new cosmetic items!

Last week I asked for your feedback and thoughts to aid us in locating what weapons were in need of a nerf or a buff. While the post is currently locked you can read through the feedback in the post below:

Weapon balance Feedback Thread

The data we received from this post has shown some areas where the community have come to a general consensus regarding certain weapon types. We will work with this data to implement decisions based directly from player feedback.

I’d like to thank everyone who participated in providing feedback, it was very useful and I intend to create similar posts in the future to provide the team with better data which they can react to.

You may remember that a few months ago we discussed a plan to improve the physics within Robocraft to make building matter more. We mentioned Newton’s second law of motion F = ma to help provide some insight into the type of changes we wanted to make.

In summary, we want large, chunky robots to have some real weight to them and become a sturdy opponent with increased armour. While smaller robots can dart in and out of battle quickly at the cost of much lower armour.

As mentioned in one of our previous updates, this is going to take a lot of work to roll out across all movement parts. We are working on one movement type at a time, with the aim to release all of them together in our next major update.

The Rotors will have 4 variables that will adjust the agility of robot which are affected by the type of parts you place on your robot.

Light robots will see the following changes:

• Faster change in direction
  
• Faster strafing
  
• Faster turn speed (this also responds to turning on the spot to face your camera)
  
• Faster acceleration when moving forwards or backwards.

Switching directions quickly is better achieved with lighter robots. We anticipate that this will be a major update which will make robot building matter more.

We will need to make changes to the mass for various parts. Combined with weapon balancing we have our work cut out for ourselves as we balance weapon damage, movement and acceleration.

The current live build of Robocraft does not contain any of these adjustments.

To show you the sort of behaviour you could expect from heavy and light robots we’ve created a few gifs. Please note that in order to show these changes we’ve had to adjust the weight parameters of a single robot build. So while the two robots in these gifs look similar, their weight is the only thing that has been adjusted.

First up, here’s how the upcoming changes will affect turn speed



Here are the differences between a heavy and light robot accelerating forwards and backwards



Heavy Robots won’t be able to strafe as fast as lighter robots, but they’ll also be much slower in changing direction as seen from the strafing gif below



Giving lighter robots the ability to change direction very quickly also affects how fast they can switch between increasing and decreasing altitude too



We believe that the changes made will make each robot feel more unique in maneuverability and increase the quality of core game feel.

Thanks for reading, if you have any feedback on any of the info in this post, do let us know!

Build, Drive, Fight!
ReelBigKris

Hi everyone, I wanted to append some info which is based on early responses to this announcement.

Some players expressed concerns over inertia from the gifs that were shown, we do have a system that calculates inertia based on mass. The current work in progress gifs are the two extremes of light and heavy. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you all think of these new physics changes once they go live. Thank you everyone for the initial feedback, continue to share more comments and I'll do my best to respond where possible.

Hello everyone! We have just left maintenance and the latest weapon balance changes are now live.

Projectile Speed: 260 -> 500
Energy Cost: 1500 -> 1250
Cooldown between shots: 0.5 -> 0.25

range: 226 -> 150

energy cost: 4000 -> 3250
Range: 50 -> 75
Base inaccuracy: 7 -> 5

These changes are not directly linked to our weapon balance feedback thread. I have yet to collate the data input here so please make sure to continue posting feedback in this thread:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/301520/discussions/2/1744482869755567871/

it is likely this thread will be locked down at some point later today, so do provide any feedback when you can. A great deal of you have given us some awesome feedback and I'll be collating the info to send to the team very soon.

All the best,
ReelBigKris