Wondering how to make a great level? Check out our new guide!
It has a wealth of information for all skill levels!
What do you think makes for a great Last Bot Standing level?
Let us know in the comments! :)
0.13.1 - New laser challenge, private Last Bot Standing matches and workshop maps!
We just released a cheeky update!
Introducing...
The Laser Challenge!
Surprise! We were fixing a laser bug this update, so we figured, why not make a challenge that uses it! Practice your laser skills with 10 fresh laser-forward levels.
Will you earn the new laser challenge trophy?
Last Bot Standing Workshop levels!
Some of you were asking if you could make and play your own Last Bot Standing multiplayer levels. Now you can!!
With a single click, your work in progress level is on a dedicated multiplayer server and ready to play-test. We now wish this was in every game's level editor!
Once you're happy with your level, upload it to the Steam Workshop. People can then use your levels in...
Private Last Bot Standing matches!
Create your own private Last Bot Standing matches with up to 15 of your closest friends. Download some new levels from the workshop and try them out!
Don't have any friends to try out new level with? Join our...
Live Community-Created Level Play Tests!
You may notice a new countdown at the top of the game.
We're going to get everyone together and test out some of the latest Steam Workshop levels on a Twitch stream together. The first one will be at Saturday November 17th at 10am PST. Load up your game then to try the community-created levels we're testing!
Win Counting - Unlock sweet transport bots!
What's better than ultimately futile human combat? Memorable ultimately futile human combat!
Now when you win a public match with more than 5 players in it, your new Win Counter will go up. Once you reach a certain number of wins, your Transport Bot will automatically be upgraded to a new, more intimidating model.
You may notice this includes a macho mustache garbage bot. Are you happy, cogitoergosum?! Look what you've made us do.
A New Level!
As part of testing the new ability to play-test Last Bot Standing workshop levels, we've added a new map to the public Last Bot Standing rotation called Rising Tide.
As lava rises up, the level's combat surface grows progressively smaller. Kill your opponents before you drown in lava!
Other Cool Stuff!
Coming up next!
There's so much we want to do next, we're going to parallelize the next bit of development!
Don't forget to come join our play test on Saturday November 17th at 10am PST! Add it to your calendar, and see you next update!
Now what?!?!
What a fun week! We’re finding Last Bot Standing is so much fun with full 15-player matches! If you haven’t seen it yet, update your game & come play, or check out this fun video from Draegast!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9DJiEbxxCg
Thanks everyone who shared ideas & concerns with us this week, it really helped us prioritize! We did a bit of planning after this release about what we’ll be working on next, we hope you will like it!
Here’s what we’re planning:
Address the most pressing issues with Last Bot Standing
Start taking direct Submissions of Last Bot Standing levels, trying some of them out on live streams! More details on how that will work, soon. :)
Add US-West Support! To do that, we’ll be switching up how we manage our dedicated servers. That will ALSO give us the opportunity to re-evaluate what regions we have. The goal will be to minimize player pings without splitting people into games that are too small!
Laser Improvements! Currently the laser sometimes damages things that are below the beam -- we didn’t have time to fix that for release, but we’re gonna fix it now!
Make Sure Last Bot Standing stays fresh
Your Wins will Matter! We will start keeping track of wins, and display them in cool ways in the game :)
More Variety! Aside from including some Workshop-created levels (see above), we’ll be doing some fun stuff that makes the game even more different to play at times.
& then… Chapter 4444444444444444444444!!
Obviously no spoilers but, it’s gonna be coooooool! More details closer to starting it :)
Last Bot Standing is LIVE, & New Trailer!
Shower in garbage, human!
Unless, of course, you get smashed to bits in Last Bot Standing, the brand new game mode for Clone Drone in the Danger Zone.
New trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNMs8FTouLk
Join as 15 human minds trapped in shiny robot bodies fight to the death!
Claim the powerful upgrade drops falling from the sky, but be warned; There are not enough for all humans.
Inform your fellow humans that you will soon shower in their garbage remains. Update your game now, and come fight!
"Last Bot Standing" Releases Friday @ 2pm PST, Come Play!
The new game mode will be called Last Bot Standing.
Confirmed:
See you Friday!
Battle Royale Launches September 21st!
Holy progress, Commentatron! There is so much new stuff from the past few weeks, we figured it’s way past time for an update post!
We’ve been working hard on creating a super fun Battle Royale game mode, and it’s turning out AWESOME! It’s hitting that point where play testing is becoming fun enough to become an actual development distraction (always a good sign).
If you’d like to try out the work-in-progress development branch with Battle Royale or otherwise follow ongoing development, check out Erik’s Twitch stream & our development branch guide!
New Movement Mechanic: The Dash
The Dash ability will launch with the Battle Royale game mode, and will be available in all game modes (even single-player).
The Dash ability (SHIFT + direction) allows you to perform a quick, short leap in a given direction, provided you have the energy to use it. Combined with a well-timed swing (or used to avoid one), it can become a very powerful addition to your combat toolbelt.
It also makes you look pretty cool.
We’ve already been finding the dash’s quick, punctuated motions make combat feel more dynamic and fun, and helps avoid chase scenarios where both players are running at the same speed -- now there’s some excitement to it!
More Lag Compensation!
We’ve been continuing to improve the “hit feel” of multiplayer combat, and the Battle Royale update will introduce two major improvements: (1) cranking the server & client-side network send rate up from 20 packets per second to 60, and (2) using a hybrid client/server hit reporting mechanism that should help hits register more often while still detecting cheat attempts.
Erik has been using this cool visualization of sword hit detection to test out different lag compensation techniques:
Maybe in a future game, you’ll just draw flowers with your sword...
Beyond that, we still have even more ideas for how to improve the networked melee hit feel (including getting US-West region support, our provider suggests it’s coming soon!) -- & this update should be a nice step forward!
New Levels and Battle Royale Improvements
Screw launching with one gigantic map, Clone Drone Battle Royale will will launch with a bunch of medium-sized maps!
These maps will take advantage of some newly added level features, such as...
Laser Kills, Shrinking End Zones!
You may notice some levels have laser cannons on them.
Don’t fall off the edge of the map.
Spectate Mode
Just because your robot body has been sliced to bits doesn’t mean you can’t keep enjoying the game!
Now you can fly around, follow players and watch the game (starting with whoever killed you).
Level Editor Additions
While we’ve been working on these new levels, we’ve been making some pretty cool additions to the level editor (which will become available to Steam Workshop creators when we launch Battle Royale)!
Multi-select, Align Tools
What’s better than the ability to move an object? How about the ability to move ALL THE OBJECTS?!
Those of you familiar with Photoshop, Flash, etc. will appreciate these other handy tools which will be available in our next release (align, distribute, chain). Here are some outrageous things VastLite has been making with them:
Move Groups
When we added Moving Platforms, we were amazed and a little disturbed by what players were able to accomplish with such a simple feature.
Move Groups takes that to another level. You will be able to move not just platforms, but other objects in the level with these groups.
Look what X606 made using move groups (in the development test branch):
Stay tuned for the upcoming release of Clone Drone in the Dancing Zone.
Just kidding.
Maybe.
Playtest with us & let us know what you think!
Come watch Erik live-streaming developing the Battle Royale game mode LIVE! & join one of the development branch test matches to try it out yourself.
Otherwise, see you in the arena September 21st!
Battle Royale is coming!
Will YOU be the last human standing?
We're excited to announce that the next major multiplayer game mode will be... Battle Royale!
Wait... like... another Battle Royale??
If you're expecting 100 players to drop from a sky thing and then sneak around a large island with human houses... that is not what we're doing. :)
Clone Drone's take on the popular game mode instead builds on our learnings from Long Live Santa!, the merry Christmas game we prototyped last December.
We're placing a strong emphasis on fierce action, tactical trade-offs and contested upgrade drops.
Contested Power Upgrades!
Powerful upgrades become available after the match starts.
To get them you must be the only living player inside of their capture zone for five full seconds!
These drops help drive players together, providing an interesting trade-off between risk and reward. You can avoid the fight entirely with just your starting upgrades, but as more competitors are eliminated, you'll really wish you snagged some power upgrades!
Power Upgrade: Flame Raptor!
Have you always wanted to ride a fearsome fire breathing robot raptor? Of course you have.
Ridable Raptors is the first Power Upgrade in Battle Royale!
We're also thinking about the best way to introduce ridable raptors in singleplayer, but have yet to decide the exact shape that will take.
Power Upgrade: Mega Size!
Tower over your enemies and strike them down with your superior reach!
It's fun to be a big bot.
Power Upgrade: Energy Laser!
Overpowered? I don't know what you're talking about.
Follow our progress!
Since multiplayer is way more fun to develop alongside real, live humans, you'll often find us developing it LIVE on Twitch -- and we've set up a beta branch where you can play along with every change we make. It's already getting quite fun -- come play and help us make it even more awesome!
See you in the arena, or for our next update post!
0.12.2 – Bug fixes!
We just fixed a bunch of bugs:
We're hard at work on the next big update, but these issues were bad enough to warrant a little hotfix.
Find out what data we collect and what we do with it. Your privacy is important to us, and so is complying with the new European legislation (GDPR) going into effect on May 25!
What else is new? Well, we are hard at work on the next big multiplayer feature.
In addition we're also looking into a few high priority bugs floating around and aim to deploy a fix for them early next week.
More info soon!
0.12.1 – Greatsword: The Lag Slayer
On April 18th, 2018, the average time played for Clone Drone somehow went up from around 20 minutes to an HOUR.
What the heck happened on 4/18/18??
If you guessed "Doborog & co. launched multiplayer after 4 months of extreme game-overhauling development", you'd be right!!
While we've had a blast playing against everyone after launch, and many of you had kind words about the new game mode, the day after launch we were left not-yet-satisfied with the overall feel of combat. Multiplayer hits often felt unfair, random, or surprising. At times, it felt like the best strategy was to swing blindly and pray to the server gods!
Before moving on from 1v1 duels, we wanted to improve client and server performance and responsiveness, and make melee hits feel more fair and predictable.
A few weeks in, we've got a fun update ready with a game feel we are thrilled with. Improving combat feel will be an ongoing effort for us, and this should be a healthy start!
Introducing the Greatsword!
Replacing the old sword in multiplayer, the greatsword is bigger and has a longer windup time.
Why the longer windup? It gives us the power to compensate for lag!
The problem: Attacks landing at different times!
"My sword passed right through them!" was a common reaction to our first version of multiplayer.
Although we used to start showing a swing right away on your computer, the server wouldn't start its swing until after receiving your computer's "swing now!" network event.
By the time the server tried to deal damage, your opponent might have moved out of the way!
What's worse -- when your hits did land, your opponent would often get killed before they even got a chance to see your swing start. "How did that kill me??"
The solution: Eat the lag in the windup time!
Our goal is to make sword swings land at the same exact time. Your head should appear to fly off at the exact moment you see your opponent's sword pass through your neck.
To achieve this, we start with an alternative set of animations with a powerful windup sequence. Each strike takes note of and sends along its synced-up start time -- letting the server and your opponent both skip forward to the exact right time in the swing animation when they learn about it.
The result is that both you and your opponent see the strike land at the exact same time. It's like TIME TRAVEL FOR YOUR SWORD!
In play-testing, we've found it feels much better than before, and results in many more epic moments of "OH GOD THE SWORD IS GOING TO HIT ME" (and then the sword hits you).
Let us know what you think!
The Greatsword Challenge!
Since the Greatsword has a longer wind-up and thus a new timing to master, you'll need some practice with it.
We've added a new Endless Challenge where every sword is a Greatsword!
Multiplayer bow now works at close range!
Multiplayer kicks feel better!
We expanded the multiplayer kick collision box and added lag compensation similar to that of the Greatsword!
Duel Invite Match Customization
You can now customize the number of starting clones and skill points for custom duel matches!
Optimizations and Various Fixes
More fun stuff coming, stay tuned!
We have some exciting plans for the next multiplayer update. :)
If you're feeling extra adventurous and want to test bleeding edge versions of the game before the next update, follow our development on Twitch and watch for opportunities to try out what we're building next, live!
