Apr 29, 2022

Roboquest - Elliot Yun

Howdy oh Guardians.

We’re finally here. Or rather, the Rogue’n’Roll Steam public playtest is finally here.

The update will officially land on all platforms in one or two weeks from now.

But here are the highlights of this version and the complete patch-notes.

Before diving into it though, we just wanted to say a few things about the changes.

The Rogue’n’Roll update brings changes to some of the systems you’ve been accustomed to such as cells, weapon categories and perks. We haven’t talked about it in our devblogs because they were still WIP and we were intensively testing those to make sure they were improving the Roboquest experience.

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 following your feedback on that, but please note that the new systems are in their first iteration phase and that we will keep improving them.

That being said, let's move on to the real deal, the good stuff, the big guns.

Note: Anyone may access the public playtest by going into its Steam Library, right-clicking Roboquest then going intro properties, hop over the 'Beta' tab and select the 'rqtestbuild' branch. It will start downloading the playtest version (note that your progress is separated between the normal and the playtest branch, you start the playtest with enough Wrenches to purchases every basecamp upgrades and you have everything unlocked, if the playtest branch doesn't appear in your Roboquest properties, please restart Steam).

Cross-Platform

You may now invite brobots from other platforms to your game 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.

Public Matchmaking

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.

Weapons Update

We have removed the weapon categories from the game (and relocated the increase of power coming from category bonuses to level-ups).

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?

Perk & Item Merging

And that would be a good question.

With the removal of weapon categories, items no longer make any sense in their previous format, as they were made to increase your stats in different categories.

So we removed them as well. Or rather, we merged the item and the perk systems.

But in order to explain that, we had to talk about a few of the issues we were facing with the previous perk system.

We identified two issues within the perk system, the first one (and primary one) was that each run felt the same as you were able to follow the exact same build almost every run (to a degree where not being able to was feeling unfair and frustrating). This was going against the replayability of the game and fixing this issue will increase run diversity and make trying out a new run more compelling.

Another issue was that the build diversity was pretty low despite the fact that creating and designing new perks on our side was pretty hard. This was a very limiting factor for us in case we wanted to add new classes to the game.

Looping back to items, what does it have to do with perks?

You now get to loot perks whenever you would previously get to find items and you get to stack up to 15+ perks in the same run to make up your build. You no longer get perks when you level-up.

But we needed far more perks than before for a system like this to work. So we created a lot of perks by extracting every bit of interesting content we had, from perks to perk upgrades and we splitted them into two categories: class-specific perks and ‘neutral’ perks that any class is able to loot. And we increased the diversity to up to 50+ different perks.

This new system makes it easier to create new classes for multiple reasons, the main one being that a class is far less static and constrained than before due to the removal of the categories and the simplification of perks as a system.

However, we’ve already identified one issue with this new system: classes feel less unique than before. Don’t worry though, we’re on it and we’re looking to improve it in the short and mid-term.

Health Flow Rework

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 where 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, half is stored into the ‘scratch damage’ bar and half is taken off your health.

The scratch damage no longer fades over time (like described above) and gathering pick-ups from enemies ‘repairs your scratch damage’ (restores health contained within the scratch damage bar).

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.

Experience System

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.

The idea of forcing players to gather cells was initially to encourage going forward.

But after our internal analysis, we spotted a few issues:
• Gathering the cells felt more like a zigzag movement than a forward movement
• We can encourage player to go forward through other game mechanics such as weapons, perks, affixes and health flow
• It wasn’t letting you play the way you want
• A lot of players did not gather the cells and that was slowly making them underpowered, consequently increasing the time-to-kill enemies (which feels really awful in Roboquest)

So we changed it: destroying enemies will now automatically grant you experience.

Max’s Crew

Max just added a group of friendly robots to help you through your runs.

These friendbots can craft weapons, reroll affixes, sell you special types of items among other things.

Though they need ‘Powercells’ for that. ‘Powercells’ is a new in-run currency that can be found in challenge rooms and is 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 friendbot in your runs. You can also trade ‘Wrenches’ for ‘Powercells’ once your Basecamp is fully upgraded.

The main idea behind the removal of the ‘consoles’ was to allow us to add a ‘shop’ system right at the beginning of the game (which we couldn’t previously since they were costing ‘Wrenches’). In addition, the simplification of the perk, weapon and item systems makes it easier to implement such shops.

And that’s it for the highlights of the Rogue’n’Roll 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.

Apr 8, 2022

Roboquest Devblog #9 - What you do not see

Roboquest - Elliot Yun

Howdy everyone!

Welcome to this new Roboquest devblog.

Today we’re going to talk about some of the things we’re working on, but that are not going to be included in the Rogue’n’Roll update. Please note that those are not the only things we’re working on, only those we’re ready to give details about.

We’re also going to touch a word about when the Rogue'n'Roll update is going to land and publish the long overdue updated roadmap for Roboquest.

We have no ETA for the features detailed below, but we know these are important things for you so we thought we’d give you a heads up about them. These features are all subject to change and while we’ll try to stick to the details we’re currently certain about, there might be changes nonetheless.

That being said, let’s (double, heck even triple) jump right in.

Elite Enemies & Elite System

Elite enemies are powerful enemies with several dangerous attack patterns who can randomly spawn in the levels.

At the beginning of the game there will be very few elite enemies (or even none at all). The more progress you’ll make in the game, the more elite enemies you’ll encounter.

At first sight it might be counter-intuitive, why would I want the difficulty of my run to be increased if I'm making progress? The idea behind this is to progressively infuse more ‘mutators’ in the enemy encounters but not only. Elite enemies will also grant you a specific type of currency to use during your runs to further upgrade your character.

This means encountering more elites does mean increasing the difficulty, but also having more differences between runs and getting more upgrades for your character. We expect this balance to be enough to justify (and make compelling the fact of) encountering more elites as you progress into the game.

The elite system will also be tied up with the end of the game in a certain way which we won’t cover here.

Please note that the ‘Goliath’ enemies encountered in ‘Haven City’ aren’t considered ‘Elite Enemies’ (despite them being quite challenging and... well yeah big).

New Levels

New levels? What? When? Please, now!

Unfortunately you’ll have to be a little more patient. Like we’ve said in a previous update, we’re not releasing new levels for now because our plan requires us to release a complete batch of them at once.

The new levels will be tied up with several other systems, noticeably the elite systems, the end of the game and with the ‘different viable paths’ approach we’re trying to take.

We’re planning to make the new levels an ‘alternate path’ harder than other levels. You might have some kind of objective to accomplish in those levels in order to ‘clear’ them.

Then this will have an impact on the elite enemy system, effectively increasing the difficulty of the overall game but decreasing the difficulty of the end of the game. It will also increase the amount of rewards you get each run.

The main goals of these new levels are to provide objectives within a run (aside from ‘going the furthest possible’), to progressively push more enemy mutators (elite enemies) in your runs (without overwhelming new players) and to form a link with the end of the game.

That’s pretty much what we can say about it right now if we don’t want to spoil or talk about things that are still being iterated upon, but we hope it peaked your interest.

Basecamp

The Basecamp is something we've been working on for quite a long time.

We’re not happy with how it works now, mainly because of its usability: it’s not convenient to navigate, unlocking new things doesn’t provide much reward feeling, the visual progression is not on par with the level of polish we’re aiming for and many other smaller issues.

All-in-all it works, but it isn’t great. And this is something we will be changing.

This goes through making sure unlocking upgrades doesn’t require you to click a million different buttons back and forth between interfaces, improving the visual representation of the ‘leveling up’ as you unlock upgrades, reworking most of the Basecamp visuals (the workshops, benches etc. but not only), staging Max as the hardworking engineer she is, highlighting the interactive elements and carefully choosing the position of each of them to avoid having to walk to so many different locations before starting a run.

We want the basecamp to be a compelling experience for the player, and not a chore to go through.

Here’s one of the concept arts we’ve been working on. Please note that the exact location of each element is to be determined, this is just research for the visual side of things.

Cinematics

Cinematics is a huge work for a small studio like us, and we’re working on it for a very long time as well. It’s been through several different iterations and you can see above a sneak peek at the final style we’re going for.

The cinematics you can watch in the game right now are more oriented towards a comic-styled architecture. While we’re still going for that comic-feel, we went a bit aside from the comic architecture to create something more vibrant and dynamic.

This means we’re reworking all of the cinematics you can currently experience in the game (those were a past iteration and were still a work-in-progress anyway).

So... you’ll get to watch brand new cinematics of Roboquest at some point!

We want the cinematics to be the main tool we use to tell the story. They are the only thing we are certain you’ll come across as a player (regardless if you skip it or not). This means that they have to tell what we call ‘the main story’ answering those questions: ‘who am I playing as, what am I doing in the world, what’s the problem and why am I solving it’.

Aside from the cinematics, we’ll be delivering information on the world of Roboquest using other means.

Gif quality not representative of the final quality we’re aiming for

Story & Worldbuilding

But there is more to Roboquest than what you can watch in the cinematics.

Roboquest features a world where many things happened and led to where you start and finish as the Guardian. These things might only be details but they’re still things we can tell you about (may you be curious about them).

This is what we call the ‘side story’ or ‘worldbuilding details’. This encompasses details such as: ‘who are the badbots, what are they doing here, where does the guardian come from, who’s Max and is she doing in the desert, what happened to the world’ and other things at this level of details.

And we’re aiming to tell such details through the ‘Data-Logs’ you can find in the levels.

For now, nothing happens when you find them (except granting you a few Wrenches), in the future they will contain a small article, a piece of text, a report, or anything like this that you can ‘read’ to gather information on the world of Roboquest.

Achievements

While we don’t have that many details to give you about the achievements, we do know this is something many of you are looking forward to.

This is definitely something we will be adding in the game, we like the “collection” and “challenge” aspect of them. But we’re holding out for now.

This is due to two main reasons: we wish to wait for the game to be in a much more stable state to start implementing them and we need to synchronize the addition of achievements on all platforms Roboquest is going to be available on (and the process might differ from one platform to another).

We know this is not what you’d like to hear, but we’d rather be completely transparent about that. We started working on achievements in terms of “what challenges can be interesting to complete” but we’re not ready to deploy them yet.

Thanks a lot for your patience on that side.

Noisecream Tracks

The frantic, energy infused, BANGER soundtrack from Noisecream is not done with Roboquest yet.

We already have several new and unique tracks for the incoming levels.

There’s not much to say about it, you’ll discover the tracks as the new levels are being added to the game.

But here’s a sneak peek at one of the new tracks, just for the delight of our ears:

The Rogue’n’Roll Update and the Roadmap

Yeah well, that’s all good and all but… I want the next update now, or at least tell me when it lands!!!

And you shall be served Guardians.

We’re planning the release of the Rogue’n’Roll update around mid of May.

We know it’s a long delay to wait for the next update, we also know this makes for a huge gap between our previous update and the new one. But the amount of changes we’re cooking require us to take that kind of time to ensure everything is smooth.

Though, like we’ve said in the previous devblog, there will be a public playtest available on Steam that will make you able to try out the new changes before mid-May.

Speaking of the next update, we’ve finally updated the roadmap (which stood still and obsolete for quite a long time, apologize for that).

Here it is:

The roadmap will soon be available both on the store page of Roboquest and in our Discord.

Thanks a lot

On a final note to this ninth devblog, we wanted to thank you once more.

Roboquest has reached over 100.000 sales in Early Access. This is no small feat, at least for a studio like us. And we literally couldn’t have done it without you.

So thank you. Thanks for your involvement, for the kind words you’re sending us, for the constructive criticism we’re reading, the game design debates, the funky troll posts and your engagement in general.

This is the fuel that drives us forward.

It was a long and hard road up to this point and we’ll continue to work hard to hopefully provide you with the best version of Roboquest.

We’re not done yet, but we’re getting close.

See you in the next news Guardians.

And in the meantime, HAPPY ROBOT SMASHING!

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Roboquest Social Links

Roboquest Discord - https://discord.gg/roboquest
Roboquest Website - http://www.roboquest.com/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/RoboquestGame
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/RoboquestGame/
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiusIjcrkm3HrAESaKZALYQ
Get Roboquest on Steam - https://store.steampowered.com/app/692890/Roboquest/
If you have a question about the game, you can find the FAQ here on the Steam forums. And if your question is not answered there, make sure to ask us in the community forums or on our Discord server (where you can interact directly with us!).

Mar 3, 2022

Roboquest Devblog #8 - About the Rogue’n’Roll Update

Roboquest - Elliot Yun

Howdy guardians!

It is due time for our new devblog. We’re going to talk about what you can expect from the next update (and when you can expect it) as well as give details about how we perceive the ‘roguelite’ elements of the game and how we can improve them.

And these subjects are pretty much tied up together since we want our next update to offer more ‘rogueliteness’, what we mean by that is more replayability, more differences between two runs and hopefully a more compelling gaming experience.

Before diving into the fray, we just wanted to point out that what we’re discussing here is just a part of what we’re currently working on. Roboquest is now available on multiple platforms, the community is getting bigger and the addition of cross-platform and public matchmaking is a huge process. That means that a small studio like ours is all hands on deck at getting everything ready and as polished as we’d like and we’re working on a wide array of things at once. Don’t worry though, we got our priorities sorted and the core experience remains our top priority.

With that being said, let’s move on to the interesting stuff, the next update, its content and the roguelite part of the game.

Where we stand right now in terms of Roguelite

Right now, we feel like Roboquest is much more of a fast FPS than it is a Roguelite. It features perma-death and persistent upgrades, but does not feature many ‘mutators’. Mutators are game systems providing random elements which modify the current run so that each run feels different from the previous one (to various degrees).

Of course, the ‘random’ part of them and the amplitude of modification they bring should be controlled in order not to distort the core run n’ gun experience of Roboquest. But it should be enough to make those runs feel different and exciting.

That being said, there are currently three (rather small) mutators in the game: weapon drops, weapon affixes and perk choice rolls. Weapons in general don’t bring enough differences between runs to feel like an important mutator and perk random is heavily mitigated by reroll tokens (to such a degree that you can almost always aim for the same perk build all runs).

To sum this up, we feel like we need some other elements modifying your runs in an unpredictable (but pleasing) manner. And that has a lot to do with replayability and how compelling it is to start a new run.

What do we want to achieve?

We like to oppose two principles when discussing character progression during one given run: adaptability vs planning. Adaptability is the skill of getting the best out of the random options given to you during a run, planning is the skill of getting the best out of the options that are always there (right now in the form of classes, gadgets and to some degree perk build). Roboquest is mainly packed with planning for now and we’d like to infuse more adaptability while retaining most of the agency you currently have.

The core experience of Roboquest is runnin’ and gunnin’ and we don’t want to lose that. But we feel like the game needs more adaptability to make two different runs more varied and modify the play experience (an experience which is currently kinda limited to challenging yourself at doing better at the same thing).

We want to achieve a formula where you have the agency but you’re still encountering random elements that make you branch out of your intended build in unexpected (and sometimes funny) ways.

How are we going to do this?

We have one major system on our radar right now: items. We think they are the first step to infuse more adaptability (and more replayability) into Roboquest. Not only are they kinda bland right now, they also seem like a missed opportunity.

Therefore, we’re reworking this system to include more variety, randomness and importance in terms of character progression and power level.

The idea we’re exploring and iterating upon is that there is a wide variety of items (50+) and they are consumables (picking one item will consume it and grants its bonus for the entirety of the current run). Their effects range from simple bonuses to mini-perk effects.

We’ve witnessed several outcomes when trying out those changes internally:

Your ‘build’ is somehow driven (or strongly influenced) by the item choices you encounter
It gives more opportunities for players to find ‘exciting combos’
Each run feels more unique

Obviously, the more item variety, the more impactful those outcomes are.

Hopefully, this system still allows for a lot of player agency since you get to choose which item to pick among several. We’ll be closely watching the potential loss of player agency to make sure it isn’t detrimental to the overall Roboquest experience, but so far we’re pretty excited about these changes.
Finally, and aside from items, we’re planning on modifying several other systems to make them more ‘roguelite’ or to simply make them fit the new formula. Though, we won’t be discussing them in detail now. This includes (but not limited to): health pickups, weapon categories and experience.

What is the next update going to bring?

All of the changes mentioned above are tied to each other, therefore the next update will include them all.

Aside from those changes / reworks, the update will include additional enemies, slight modifications of enemy behaviors, a perk selection rework, a few class modifications, a new weapon, a clean-up of the combat flow (to reduce the amount of interruption during combat), more performance optimization, the visual polish of several levels and many other smaller details.

But when is it landing?

Right now, we’re aiming for the end of April (though it may be later or sooner).

The changes we’re going for are kinda beefy and we need some time to deploy them correctly. We’ll continue to post this kind of devblog to keep you posted about our progress and the things we’re working on.

We will also be conducting our usual public playtest before the update lands.

And that’s it for this devblog! We hope you enjoyed it :)

See you in the next one, and in the meantime, happy robot bashing everyone!

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Roboquest Social Links

Roboquest Discord - https://discord.gg/roboquest
Roboquest Website - http://www.roboquest.com/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/RoboquestGame
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/RoboquestGame/
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiusIjcrkm3HrAESaKZALYQ
Get Roboquest on Steam - https://store.steampowered.com/app/692890/Roboquest/

If you have a question about the game, you can find the FAQ here on the Steam forums. And if your question is not answered there, make sure to ask us in the community forums or on our Discord server (where you can interact directly with us!).