Apr 29, 2022

Roboquest - Rogue'n'Roll Playtest Patch-Notes

Roboquest - Elliot Yun

Here’s the complete list of changes for the Rogue’n’Roll public playtest.

• You may now search for brobots directly in the multiplayer menu of the game using the ‘quick play’ button
• You may now invite brobots from other platforms to your game by sending them your session ID (which you can find in the multiplayer menu)
• ‘Headbonk’ damage increased from 25 to 45
• ‘Lucky Critical’ is now called ‘Auto-Critical’ (while less funky, it should be clearer)
• ‘Resistance’ is now called ‘Armor’
• ‘Cooling Weapons’ are now called ‘Energy Weapons’, ‘Heat Cost’ is called ‘Energy Cost’ and other subsequent name have been updated as well, ‘Overheating’ still refers to the action of reaching the maximum of your energy gauge
• Fully frozen enemies no longer automatically take critical damage

Developer's Note: That was making Cryo the best element right-on and was creating a must-have synergy between critical and Cryo which was limiting the viable builds as well as reducing the effectiveness and viability of the Auto-Critical stat.

• Some gameplay elements such as the Recon’s ‘Slash’, the Guardian’s ‘Bash’ or the ‘Chainsaw’ now deal ‘Melee’ damage (alike ‘Explosive’ or ‘Burn’ damage)
• Other gameplay elements such as Affixes, Perks or Gadgets directly reference ‘Melee’ damage (for example: Increases Melee damage)
• ‘Melee Attacks’ are now called and considered as ‘Secondary Abilities’, not all secondary abilities deal Melee damage
• When your guardian is deactivated in multiplayer, you now get to see what your brobot is doing in third person view
• ‘Mark’ damage amplification decreased from 70% to 60%

Health Flow Update

• 70% of the damage you take is stored into the ‘scratch damage bar’ (gray bar), the rest is taken as regular damage
• Only 50% of Bosses’ damage are stored into the scratch damage bar
• The scratch damage bar does not fade over time
• Enemies loot ‘repair’ pickups that lasts for a very, very short amount of time
• Those pickups ‘repair’ a part of your scratch damage
• Various elements in the game ‘repair’ a part or all of your scratch damage while others ‘restore’ a part of your health
• Pickups are independant for each player in multiplayer
• Scoping no longer gather pickups from afar
• Deployed minions (such as Drone and Sentries) do not gather pickups from afar

Developer's Note: We’re explaining this change in details in the patch highlights.

Experience Update

• Destroying enemies now automatically grants experience
• As a result, experience cells have been removed

Developer's Note: We’re explaining this change in details in the patch highlights.

• Leveling-up now also increases your weapon damage
• Experience gains have been smoothed across different runs, leading to less differences in terms of XP gain between each run

Commando

• Passive renamed to ‘Frenzy’ (instead of ‘Fury’), but still stacks points of Fury
• Frenzy no longer increases damage and resistance but instead firerate, reload speed and other speeds related to animation time
Rocket
• Damage increased from 70.0 to 75.0
• Radius increased from 1.9m to 2.0m
• Cooldown decreased from 12.0 to 9.0
• Rocket is homing again

Developer's Note: Haha. See you in the next update with a rollback of this change. Yo-yo design we call it.

Engineer

Drone
• ‘Drone’ base health increased from 50 to 60
Scrap Blaster
• Damage decreased from 65.0 to 55.0
• Projectile speed increased from 4200 to 7000
• Cooldown increased from 4.0 to 5.0

Guardian

• ‘Bash’ now restores health on takedowns
• Passive renamed ‘Beefcake’ and now increases starting health

Developer's Note: While Shield is an interesting mechanic on paper, it was always hard to integrate it to Roboquest both in terms of health regeneration flow and mechanic clarity. Changing the passive to simple health makes it easier to understand. Shield may or may not make a comeback later down the road as a generic or class-specific mechanic.

New Weapons

• 3 new weapons have been added: ‘Pulse Blaster’, ‘Mortar’ and ‘Torpedo Gun’
Pulse Blaster
An energy weapon hurling bursts of delayed explosive blasts.
Mortar
A powerful artillery weapon.
Torpedo Gun
A quick-to-reload shrapnel-blasting shotgun.

General

• Weapon categories have been removed

Developer's Note: We’re explaining this change in details in the patch highlights.

• ‘Power Gloves’ has been fully reworked and now only has a melee-punch as primary fire
• ‘Laser Saw’ has been reworked and now only has a melee-laser-saw as primary fire
• ‘Cryo Launcher’ has been modified: projectiles no longer have gravity and it deals increased damage against fully frozen enemies
• ‘Dual Guns’ has been modified and now shoots in a burst fashion
• ‘Fire Flower’ has been removed from the game (we need to rework how it works to feel unique and awesome)
• ‘Unreal Gun’ is now called ‘Cyclone’
• ‘Cyclone’ alt-fire now sticks to walls and enemies

Developer's Note: Regardless of how fan we are of the original weapon from Unreal Tournament, we felt like it was a bit too hard for players to properly aim and shoot the orb with its primary fire, making the weapon less viable for a vast majority of players. Making the orb stick to its target makes it much more enjoyable for everyone and we hope it will increase its pick-rate.

• Weapon ‘Mods’ are now called ‘Alt-Fire’ (which seems to be more intuitive for most players)
• Weapons that already have an alt-fire (such as the ‘Scratch Rifle’) now have a chance to spawn with alt-fire variations
• Alt-fire in general are more powerful and their cooldown is shorter
• Enemies no longer drop weapons

Developer's Note: We’re trying to get rid of the mechanics hurting the combat flow. Having to stop in the middle of the fight to compare weapons whereas the game timer is still running or when your brobot is going ham in the next corridor is one of those hurtful mechanics. We relocated weapon drops in other parts of the levels where you actually have the time (and presence of mind) to check out those juicy loot.

• Weapons rarity (number of affixes) is now displayed by a color-code (White, Green, Blue, Purple and Orange)
• Based on basecamp upgrades you have more chances to encounter weapons of higher rarity than before
• Weapon levels are now directly related to player level in terms of numerical values (you should be looting level 1 and 2 weapons when you’re level 1 and 2), but as a result each weapon level grants half as much damage to a weapon as previously (you shouldn’t experience any difference)
• Weapons you found now have a chance to be of 1 level higher than what you’re supposed to find at a specific game level
• Fantastic weapons always have an alt-fire
• We’re re-introducing the ‘Elemental Cannon’ under two different forms: the ‘Ice Cannon’ and the ‘Shock Cannon’

Developer's Note: The ‘Elemental Cannon’ did not fit in the alt-fire systems we implemented in one of our previous updates and that’s why we removed it back then. Now that it’s splitted into two different weapons, we can randomly plug alt-fire into it. Though we’re not currently certain of the current implementation of each of them and we’d be glad to hear your feedback about them.

Affixes

• Removed the ‘Affinity’ affix (considering weapon categories no longer exist)

Developer's Note: Another interesting value of this affix was to increase the efficiency of gun weapons that are often a bit weak compared to other types of weapons. We’ll try to think of other ways to promote equipping guns.

• ‘Crash’ has been removed from the game

Developer's Note: It was just way too strong for an affix and therefore we removed it and added it as a neutral perk instead.

• ‘Hitscan’ should work better with multiple-projectile weapons
• ‘Surprise’ chance to auto-critical set to 10%
• ‘Lucky’ chance to auto-critical set to 20%
• ‘Buckshot’ damage increased by 10%
• ‘Neat’ range increase reduced from 25% to 20%
• ‘Heavy’ movement penalty increased from 20% to 25%
• ‘Ion Lance’ damage reduced from 50% to 25% of weapon base damage
• ‘Megaboom’ radius bonus decreased from 50% to 30%
• ‘Warmup’ firerate bonus decreased from 30% to 20%
• ‘Solar’ energy gauge bonus decreases from 15% to 10%
• ‘Quickload’ reload speed bonus reduced from 20% to 15%
• ‘Carbon’ movement speed penalty reduction increased from 10% to 15%
• ‘Puncture’ damage increase per target pierced increased from 30% to 50%

Alternative Fire

• You can now use Alt-Fires with energy weapons when they are overheating
• ‘Can-Opener’ modified: it now simply deals melee damage and heals on takedown instead of executing

Balance Changes

Dual Uzis

Primary Fire
• Damage increased from 6.0 to 7.5

Windmill Rifle

• Ammo in clip increased from 45 to 60

Tommy Gun

Primary Fire
• Firerate decreased from 12.5/s to 12.04/s

Light Machine Gun

Primary Fire
• Damage increased from 12.0 to 13.0
• Firerate increased from 9.09/s to 10.0/s

Blast SMG

• The Blast Ball has been renamed Blast SMG

Pumping Shotgun

Primary Fire
• Damage increased from 11.0 to 12.0

Grandma's Shotgun

Primary Fire
• Damage decreased from 13.0 to 12.0

Flame Thrower

• The Kramer has been renamed Flame Thrower

Grenade Launcher

• The Thumper has been renamed Grenade Launcher
Primary Fire
• Damage increased from 40.0 to 50.0
• Impact force increased from 50.0 to 58.0
• Radius decreased from 1.9m to 1.2m

Graviton Launcher

Primary Fire
• Damage increased from 48.0 to 50.0
• Radius decreased from 1.2m to 1.0m

Throwing Knife

Primary Fire
• Damage increased from 24.0 to 25.0

Revolver

Primary Fire
• Damage increased from 42.0 to 46.0

Dual Crossbows

Primary Fire
• Damage increased from 28.0 to 30.0
• Critical ratio increased from 2.0 to 2.25

Scout Sniper

Primary Fire
• Critical ratio increased from 2.0 to 2.25
• Range increased from 22.5 to 23.0

Arquebus

Primary Fire
• Range increased from 22.5 to 23.0

Sheriff's Carbine

Primary Fire
• Damage increased from 48.0 to 53.0
• Firerate increased from 1.66/s to 1.88/s

Longbow

Primary Fire
• Damage increased from 68.0 to 70.0
• Range increased from 22.5 to 23.0

Shock Rifle

Primary Fire
• Damage decreased from 20.0 to 8.0
• Firerate increased from 5.0/s to 10.0/s
• Range increased from 12.0 to 16.0
• Heat per shot decreased from 5.0 to 3.0

Junk Beam

Primary Fire
• Damage decreased from 20.0 to 19.0

Assault Rifle

Primary Fire
• Damage increased from 10.0 to 11.0

Blast Minigun

Primary Fire
• Damage decreased from 7.5 to 7.0
• Firerate decreased from 16.66/s to 14.28/s
• Heat per shot increased from 1.25 to 1.5

Assault Shotgun

Primary Fire
• Damage decreased from 7.0 to 6.0
• Firerate decreased from 3.7/s to 3.57/s

Triple Shotgun

Primary Fire
• Impact force increased from 16.0 to 19.0

Barrel Cannon

Primary Fire
• Damage increased from 56.0 to 64.0
• Impact force increased from 78.0 to 80.0
• Radius decreased from 1.5m to 1.0m
• Projectile speed increased from 7000 to 12500

Long Rifle

Primary Fire
• Range increased from 22.5 to 23.0

Assault Pistol

• Ammo in clip decreased from 10 to 7
Primary Fire
• Damage increased from 38.0 to 46.0
• Impact force increased from 48.0 to 50.0

Blast Sniper

Primary Fire
• Damage decreased from 47.0 to 44.0
• Firerate decreased from 2.7/s to 2.56/s
• Range increased from 22.5 to 23.0

Elite Sniper

Primary Fire
• Range increased from 22.5 to 23.0

Elite Crossbow

Primary Fire
• Critical ratio increased from 1.5 to 1.75
• Range increased from 22.5 to 23.0

Blast Palms

Primary Fire
• Damage decreased from 21.0 to 18.0

Assault Sentry

Primary Fire
• Range increased from 12.5 to 16.0

• Gaining a level will no longer grant you a perk choice, instead you can choose between different Perks at specific locations in each level

Developer's Note: As explained in the weapon drop changes, this makes for a smoother combat flow both in single player and cooperation. We’re explaining the other reasons behind this change in details in the patch highlights.

• There are neutral perks (available to all classes) and class-specific perks (that you can only loot with certain classes)
• All perks have been updated to match the new system and some of them have been removed from the game
• ‘Perk Upgrades’ have been removed, instead you can pile up to 15+ different Perks to specialize your build now

• Items have been removed and merged with the Perk system

Developer's Note: We’re explaining this change in details in the patch highlights.

• Added several types of “shops” where you can purchase various game elements (such as weapon, perks or affix rerolls)
• Added a new in-game currency called ‘Powercells’ to purchase items from shops
• Shops aren’t all available at the beginning of the game and unlocking specific basecamp upgrades will increases the amount and variety of shops you encounter
• Removed all consoles as a result

• Updated many basecamp upgrades
• Added some basecamp upgrades

Developer's Note: Those changes are simply temporary to follow the other game system changes. The basecamp will be overhauled later down the road as you might have read in our previous devblogs.

• ‘Soccer Shoes’ gadget removed

Developer's Note: Following the base headbonk damage increase.

• ‘Hero’s Cape’ required height to reach max damage increased by 2m
• ‘Sunglasses’ now reduces your health instead of your armor

• Arenas now open when all enemies are vanquished instead of when reaching 10% of enemies remaining
• Reduced the delay between two enemy spawns in arenas from 1.5s to 0.5s

Developer's Note: This makes sure the intensity of the combat remains high throughout the entirety of the arena fight despite the change above.

• Enemy projectiles are faster
• Enemies are faster
• Enemies move more often
• Enemies shoot a bit less often when in large groups
• Enemies load up their attack a little faster (5% in average)
• Updated enemy line across the Act 1

Developer's Note: This is only the continuation of the work we’re doing on enemy line ups and we’ll continue in that direction with the implementation of new enemies.

• Trail bots’ sprint speed reduced by 10%
• Most enemy projectiles no longer pass through enemies and instead simply disappear

Developer's Note: This should remove some of the frustration of being shot by an enemy through another one, despite not seeing the incoming projectile.

• Guardbots impact resistance increased by 10%
• Boombot, Boomfly and Rocketpawn explosion radius increased by 30%
• Icebots now trigger a cryo explosion when being destroyed
• Exploding boombots now apply impact to nearby enemies
• Shockpod base damage reduced from 10 to 2
• Smallbots tend to move more often when nearby the player
• Boombot, Boomfly and Rocketpawn no longer take double damage against burn

Developer's Note: This was a change that we thought was implemented in the game for a long time now, but apparently it wasn’t, so we’re fixing that. Right now, there is no valid reason to implement a “weakness” or “damage type” system and even less if it only works with one element out of three.

• Enemies deal more damage in average in higher difficulties (starting from Heroes+1)
• Enemies have less health in average in higher difficulties (starting from Heroes+1)

Developer's Note: Time-to-kill is a very important metric that should always remain relatively low, because that’s how it is fun to smash robots.

Bosses

• Added a system to have a better random boss rotation (and avoid encountering the same boss several times in a row)
• Bosses’ aggro system has been changed and Bosses should more often switch target instead of targeting the same one over and over again
• ‘Mark’ duration on Bosses increased from 2.5s to 3.3s
• Time needed for the lava to cover the ‘Sir Catercoaster’ arena’s ground decreased from 20s to 13s (total time to fully cover the arena remains at 80s)
• ‘Lady Bug’ is now called ‘Queen Bee’
• ‘Dr. Turret’ rotating laser speed reduced by 20%
• ‘Billy Boom’ health increased by 5%
• ‘Billy Boom’ back-plate can no longer be destroyed (and only opens up when ‘Billy Boom’ gets down)
• ‘Sir Catercoaster’ health decreased by 10%
• ‘Queen Bee’ health decreased by 10%
• ‘Judgeball’ health decreased by 10%

• Added 5 new challenge rooms in Act 1
• Added invisible projectile-blocking walls to all doors, entrances and other safe areas to prevent enemies from shooting you and vice-versa
• Locked doors now have a color-code corresponding to their key color
• Quickly updated the tutorial to include all current mechanics

Developer's Note: The tutorial is something we’ll be overhauling later down the road. Considering the heavy changes the game is ongoing, it would be a waste to update it now. Though, there were (and still are) a number of mechanics that weren’t explained or were outdated so we had to make this change.

• Goliaths in ‘Haven City’ now loot large health pickups
• The ‘Junkyard’ in ‘Road’ now provides better upgrades
• ‘Road’ visuals updated
• ‘Energy Center’ visuals updated
• ‘Challenge Rooms’ visuals updated in certain levels
• Improved rail positioning in all levels

• Your perks are now displayed as icons at the top-left corner of your screen
• Perk icons at the bottom of the screen have been removed
• Weapon level is now displayed over the weapon pickup
• All deployed minions now have a floating health bar (alike enemies)
• Minions deployed from primary abilities now have their health bar also displayed nearby the ability icon
• You can change the game language without restarting the game
• The tab overlay now displays player’ stat tied to damage scaling per level
• Map area color changed: challenge rooms (purple), safe area (green) and special areas (orange)
• Updated weapon tooltip critical ratio display: now displayed in ratio rather than percentage (1.25 instead of 125%)
• Updated weapon tooltip range display
• Updated weapon tooltip for multiple projectile weapons: now displays 5x10 instead of 50 (for instance)
• Slightly updated the visual around the player health bar and class icon
• Slightly updated the visual of your brobot’s health bar
• Updated the visuals of the player’s status effects
• Added placeholder icons for weapon alt-fires
• Updated icons for Wrenches, Powercells, Keys and Data-Logs
• Added a Shield icon to display your current Armor value nearby your health bar
• You now see a progress bar when being rebooted by your brobot
• Dealing damage with elemental effects out of your weapon range is now displayed in gray numbers instead of coloured numbers to better indicate that you’re too far from the enemies
• Added an interface feedback for some perk effects

• Added a visual effect on weapons when under the effects of various bonuses
• Bosses now have a proper visual effect when affected by elemental statuses
• ‘Judgeball’ visual effects updated
• Added a new player animation when you’re being stunned
• Updated most weapon impact visual effects
• Updated most surface impact visual effects (for example when shooting grass or dirt)
• Updated the rendering and position of the burning status on all enemies
• Added a visual effect when sentries are destroyed
• Updated the laser visuals of the ‘Laser Saw’ and the Recon’s ‘Dagger’ and added color variations depending on their element
• Added new or updated old visual effects for explosion emanating from the player (alike ‘Hero’s Cape’)
• Added missing overheat visual effects on certain energy weapons
• Added a thruster visual effects to ‘Judgeball’ charge attack
• Added a shield visual effect to ‘Judgeball’ shielding beacons
• Added a ‘despawn’ visual effect to some projectiles
• Updated the visual effect when fully freezing an enemy
• Updated ‘Dr. Turret’ fire area visual effect
• Added a visual effect cue above ‘Trail Bots’ head when they start sprinting
• Updated enemy laserbeams impact visual effect
• Updated ‘Mark’ visual effect
• Started implementing some environment visual effects in specific levels

Developer's Note: This is just the very beginning of what we would like to do regarding environmental ambient and mood. We’d like to add or adjust lighting, post-process, sounds and other visual effects for all of them.

• Added specific sounds for almost all Alt-Fires
• Added a sound for ‘Dr. Turret’ area of effect
• Added a new sound for Commando’s ‘Shorty’
• Updated ‘Shock Rifle’ shoot sound
• Updated ‘Graviton Launcher’ shoot sound
• Updated ‘Tactical Shotgun’ shoot sound
• Updated ‘Blunderbuss’ shoot sound
• Updated ‘Grenade Launcher’ shoot sound
• Updated ‘Revolver’ shoot sound
• Updated ‘Cyclone’ shoot sound
• Updated ‘Blast SMG’ shoot sound
• Updated ‘Longbow’ shoot and charge sound
• Updated ‘Scratch Rifle’ reload sound
• Updated Weapon Equip sound
• Updated Jumpad sound

• Hugely improved performance related to text display
• Updated performance of most visual effects in the game
• Updated user interface rendering performance
• Updated the performance cost of a lot of game systems
• Overall CPU performances should be better

• Rotating the map will no longer hide certain elements
• The game systems will no-longer fail to register Goliath’s death in ‘Haven-City’ when destroyed by the client robot (leaving you unable to progress into the game)

Apr 29, 2022

Roboquest - Public Playtest is open

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!).