Iron Update: 'Byte of the Living Dead' Full Challenge
Happy Friday, RoboEngineers!
RoboCo has been updated to Version 0.8.0, also known as the Iron update!
This update contains a new full-sized campaign challenge!
Byte of the Living Dead
The scientists and engineers at RoboCo design robots that are prepared for any eventuality! In Byte of the Living Dead, a mysterious condition has been spreading through a remote town, turning hapless humans into mindless minions. You must build a brave little robot to protect a group of humans from these zombie hordes and guide the survivors to the van out back. It's a ghoulish getaway!
And yes, you read that right, this is a full-sized challenge, complete with three objectives and five secrets! This challenge is designed for human interaction so get your favorite Chatterbox voice pack ready!
As you can see from our public roadmap, our next steps are heavily focused on the Meta Quest VR version of RoboCo that we've been steadily working on in the background of our Early Access updates. Expect more information on that front soon!
Byte of the Living Dead: It’s a ghoulish getaway! Protect the humans from the zombies and guide the survivors to the van out back.
This includes 3 objectives and 5 secrets
Aluminum Update: Two More Mini-Challenges and a New RoboRepair Tutorial!
Happy Friday, RoboEngineers!
RoboCo has been updated to Version 0.7.5, also known as the Aluminum update! If you're curious why we called it that, check out our previous dev blog, An Update Regarding Updates!
We've got some new features and improvements to share!
New Mini-Challenges
As part of our effort to improve onboarding and smooth the difficulty curve for the campaign, we've added two new mini-challenges.
Roaring Refuse: Throw the cube of garbage into the incinerator
Using the notion of recurring skill atoms that we described in our last blog, Roaring Refuse preps the skill of launching an object, with fewer overall steps and a wider target than the later, more advanced "Soda Me!" challenge.
The Berry On Top: Place a strawberry on the cakes and submit them for inspection
The Berry On Top preps the skill of dispensing objects one by one, which even veteran players may find tricky! Mastering this will inspire you to make your seed-planting robot for the Chrome Thumb challenge even more sophisticated.
New RoboRepair
We've also added a new RoboRepair where the player starts with a pre-existing robot that has a small problem that needs fixing.
Wheel Assembly RoboRepair: Assemble and attach the robot's wheel so it drives forward
Since new players will start building with developer-made constructs like a fully-functioning left and right wheel, we wanted a more explicit transitional moment where players would learn that such a construct is made out of smaller parts like a motor, rod, and tire. We added a new Wheel Assembly RoboRepair, and followed it immediately with our Motor Controls RoboRepair so that players who are inspired to start building from scratch will move on to the Controls UI next.
Bug Fixes
You can get a full list of everything in the Aluminum update by checking out the release notes on Steam.
Meanwhile, we've been working on the VR version of RoboCo, optimizing performance, bug fixing, and designing and implementing solutions for all remaining scenarios that need to be handled before the VR launch.
Our next update is code-named Iron and will be released between Jan 23 and Feb 23, as you can see on our roadmap.
And that’s it for this week’s devblog. We hope you enjoy tinkering with the new mini-challenges and the latest RoboRepair!
Roaring Refuse: Throw the cube of garbage into the incinerator
The Berry On Top: Place a strawberry on the cakes and submit them for inspection
New RoboRepair
Wheel Assembly: Assemble and attach the robot's wheel so it drives forward
Per our new workflow for localization, while in Early Access, new features will first be released in English with placeholder localizations to other languages. Placeholder localizations are marked with an asterisk, and will be replaced with professional localization in the following Early Access update.
Changes:
Placeholder localization from the Copper release has been updated with professional localization
The Motor Controls RoboRepair has been moved earlier (now found in the Reaching Farther group), so that it comes immediately after the new Wheel Assembly RoboRepair
Required bits to unlock each challenge group have been slightly updated to reflect the added challenges
Bug fixes:
[Usability] The paste icon on a transmitter action slot had no hover tooltip and may have been unclear without one
Copper Update: Copy/Paste of Transmitter Controls and Two Mini-Challenges!
Happy Friday, RoboEngineers!
RoboCo has been updated to Version 0.7.4, also known as the Copper update! If you're curious why we called it that, check out our previous dev blog, An Update Regarding Updates!
We've got some new features and improvements to share!
Cut, Copy, and Paste of Transmitter Controls
Cue classic infomercial voiceover: "Are your robot's controls mapped to the E key on the Purple Transmitter? Do you wish you had mapped them to the U key on the Orange Transmitter instead? Aren't you tired of migrating controls one at a time?"
"Introducing cut, copy, and paste of transmitter controls! Yes, folks, thanks to state-of-the-art technology from the scientists at RoboCo, you can now migrate an action or an entire transmitter with ease. Sign in to your copy of RoboCo and experience this pioneering achievement, absolutely free!"
"You worked hard to build that robot! Isn't it time your robot worked for you?"
New Mini-Challenges for Improved Onboarding
As we've evaluated your Early Access feedback, we've found that the main trend for players who try to get into RoboCo but fall off is that the learning curve is too steep, particularly at the outset.
Building robots is inherently challenging (and fun!), but one of the coolest advantages in building robots digitally like in RoboCo are all the video game techniques we can employ to make onboarding smooth and engaging. One of those is the difficulty curve of the levels themselves.
One of our main initiatives on our road toward 1.0 has been to add new mini-challenges throughout our campaign to smooth the difficulty curve. RoboCo's campaign is a grab bag of increasingly difficult activities. The innovation is great for keeping your engineering challenge fresh, but it can be hard to feel prepared for turning a valve to stop a goo leak when your last challenge was about playing the cello for a romantic dinner.
The main inspirations for our campaign early on were Besiege and Octodad, but another inspiration we've had in the mix was the Nintendo Switch puzzle game Snipperclips. Something Snipperclips' campaign does well is in the short term, you get a variety of activities: fit an outlined shape, pop the balloons with a sharpened edge, or transport an egg without it breaking. But in the long term, you see the activities repeat but in a more difficult form.
Revisiting this based on our Early Access feedback, we broke each of RoboCo's challenges into "skill atoms." For example, the Sandwich Server challenge requires: 1) Basic driving / tank controls, 2) Carrying an object from point A to B, and 3) Stabilizing a raised object. We then highlighted skills that we felt we could break into a single objective mini-challenge, brainstormed a theming for the mini-challenge, and got to work prototyping!
At this stage, we have several mini-challenges in production and on their way to you, but for our first release we wanted to make sure we started with the two that would come right at the start, before Sandwich Server.
Same Day Delivery: Deliver the package from the truck to the front door
Kaiju Catastrophe: Destroy the city
Plus Small Improvements!
The full benefit of the mini-challenges to the campaign progression will become clearer as we integrate more into the campaign, but you may notice how even with just these two, we were able to move our initial tutorial to the Same Day Delivery mini-challenge and to space out our RoboRepair levels into nicer batches.
In the spirit of improved onboarding, you may also notice that we now default to the Constructs tab instead of the Parts tab when entering a scene. We've also added some Base constructs that give a few different vehicle shapes to snap your favorite wheels to.
You can get a full list of everything in the Copper update by checking out the release notes.
This is just the beginning of our mini-challenges and other improvements, so stay tuned! Our next update is code-named Aluminum and will be released between Nov 28 and Dec 28, as you can see on our roadmap.
And that’s it for this week’s devblog! We're excited for copy/paste of transmitter controls to speed up your robot setup, and for new mini-challenges to make RoboCo better for you and your friends!
Same Day Delivery: Deliver the package from the truck to the front door.
Kaiju Catastrophe: Destroy the city.
Cut/Copy/Paste of Transmitter Controls.
Can easily migrate actions or entire transmitters within the Controls UI.
More Base constructs have been added for players to quickly attach wheels to.
The Torsion Spring part now has a How to Use diagram in its tooltip.
Per our new workflow for localization, while in Early Access, new features will first be released in English with placeholder localizations to other languages. Placeholder localizations are marked with an asterisk, and will be replaced with professional localization in the following Early Access update.
Changes:
The game now defaults to the Constructs tab rather than Parts when entering a new scene.
The initial tutorial has been moved to Same Day Delivery, as that is now the first challenge in the campaign.
RoboRepairs are now in distinctly named groups and have a more gradual distribution throughout the campaign.
The unlock pop-up for new challenges and parts has been visually streamlined.
Objectives in the Sandwich Server challenge can no longer uncheck once they’ve been earned. We plan to apply this to other challenge objectives in future releases.
In English, the "Browse Steam Workshop" button is now labeled "Browse Community Robots" for easier discoverability for users unfamiliar with Steam Workshop. Other languages retain their existing professional localization, and will be updated to match the English in the next Early Access update.
UI hints for the Context Menu, Resize Tool, and Switch Transmitters, have been added to the '?' Hints panel. The Drive hint has been generalized to a Transmitter Controls hint.
Performance improvements.
Bug fixes:
[Pinata] Achieving the "Destroy the pinata in one hit" objective was inconsistent.
[Pinata] User was unable to achieve "Break the Pinata while it's high up" objective.
[Sandbox] Cupboards/countertops in the break room changed color as the player navigated their camera closer and further away.
[Sandbox] Case around one of the static set dressing elements disappeared when viewed from certain camera angles.
[Sandbox] There was unexpected cake and human behavior when the user handed off a piece of cake to the birthday human.
[RoboRepair] Humans did not render properly at certain angles in certain RoboRepair challenges.
[RoboRepair] The screen on the laptop in the resize piston scene appeared unusually dark/dimmed.
[Tutorial] Attaching a wheel, detaching it, and then re-attaching it to the base no longer counts for the completion of the ‘attach two wheels’ tutorial step.
[UI] If the user grabbed a microcontroller out of the menu but returned it to the menu without placing it, the console UI was incorrectly enabled.
[UI] When resizing blocks attached to a rod, the 'Parts are overlapping' warning was displaying as a false positive
[Springs] The coils on linear springs could not be painted/themed.
[Parts] Laser pointer did not have an editable ‘Name’ field in the properties menu, inconsistent with all other powered parts.
[Parts] On desktop, parts were not consistently oriented when dragged out of the part menu into the scene.
Additional minor fixes and updates.
RoboCo Development Roadmap 2023-2024
Gather round, all ye roboticists, tinkerers, and harbingers of chaos - we have some breaking RoboCo news. In a previous devblog called “An Update Regarding Updates,” we shared some exciting information about our upcoming release schedule. Now, we officially have a roadmap! Check it out below.
RoboCo Copper is set to hit your screens soon. As you can see from our shiny new roadmap, this update will introduce two intriguing new mini-challenges for onboarding and a host of additional improvements that promise to enhance your RoboCo experience.
After that, just in time for the holidays, you can expect RoboCo Aluminum between November 28, 2023, and December 28, 2023, followed by RoboCo Iron between January 23, 2024, and February 23. 2024. Stay tuned as we iron out all of the details for RoboCo Iron, and don’t forget that we’re still chugging away on RoboCo VR, which is set to release in 2024.
We can’t wait to hear your thoughts on RoboCo Copper, with its new mini-challenges and various quality-of-life updates. As always, follow us on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads for more updates. You can also connect with us by joining our official Discord and Reddit. What would you like to see in the game in the future? Let us know with your votes on our RoboCo Feature Roadmap!
Last week, we gave you a behind-the-scenes look into RoboCo VR. This week, we’re talking about our return to PAX!
RoboCo first appeared at PAX West 2019. We were a part of the Indie Megabooth, a renowned event at PAX that specifically focuses on showcasing awesome upcoming indie games. Some alumni of Indie Megabooth include Astroneer, Celeste, and Dead Cells.
It’s amazing to think about how far we’ve come since then. Players who visited our booth in 2019 were among the first to play RoboCo, as it was the first time Sandwich Server was available to the public. Now, we have 10 other challenges, an open sandbox, robot programming, and so much more to showcase!
RoboCo will be at Booth 656 from 10 AM to 6 PM starting September 1st and ending September 4th. We hope you’ll consider stopping by to build some robots and meet our staff in person! For those that can’t make it, be sure to tell your friends that haven’t bought the game yet that RoboCo will be on sale for a record 25% off, our biggest discount of the year yet!
And that’s it for this week’s devblog! We hope to see many of you in Seattle. We’ll check back with details on what to expect with RoboCo Copper coming soon!
Last week, we announced our new update schedule as well as the release date for RoboCo Copper. This week, we’re taking you behind the scenes of our progress with RoboCo VR!
What’s Happened So Far
As you may know from our (Mostly) Complete History of RoboCo devblog, RoboCo originated in VR. We started working on the desktop version of RoboCo in 2018 and, while that’s the version of RoboCo so many have come to know and love, we have never given up on our dreams to also bring this compelling robotics experience to VR. We’ve come a long way since the initial VR prototype. Check out the video below to get up to speed on what the VR version is like!
You may recall that when we announced the release date for RoboCo on Steam, we also talked about how RoboCo will be a standalone title for the Meta Quest 2 and that VR compatibility would be added to the PC version of RoboCo free of charge!
But There’s an Amendment to That Original Announcement…
RoboCo VR, both the Meta Quest 2 version and the Steam update, will now be releasing in 2024.
It was a difficult decision but in short, the reasons why we’ve delayed RoboCo VR are very much in line with why we updated our release schedule for RoboCo on Steam Early Access. Our scrappy development team is working on BOTH RoboCo VR and RoboCo 1.0 for Steam, and, in order to make sure both games are the best versions of themselves they can be, we need to make sure we’re optimizing our team’s time and resources as effectively as possible. It also allows us to improve upon features like these…
Here’s What We’ve Been Working On
***This footage was all recorded from RoboCo on The Meta Quest 2!
VR Tutorials
We've ported our tutorials to VR to help players get building! Our initial tutorial and our RoboRepairs now include VR-appropriate steps. It also uses a dotted line to guide you to its user interface callouts.
For this recording, we're showing the initial tutorial in the Sandwich Server challenge that you're used to, even though this tutorial will actually be moving to one of our mini-challenges. No sneak peeks there yet, but stay tuned!
VR Camera Improvements
Cameras in VR are super important! A good VR camera can give a sense of presence, while a weak one may make you queasy or disoriented rather than immersed. Different players also have different comfort levels, so VR cameras often benefit from being customizable. Those of you with long memories may recall that RoboCo's VR camera has three modes when driving your robot in Live mode: Step Follow, Smooth Follow, and Free Look.
Our Step Follow camera is designed for the most common player who wants the camera to keep up with their robot but might get motion sick from a Smooth Follow camera. The Step Follow camera automatically teleports you to catch up after your robot gets too far away. But user testing revealed that it was updating too eagerly, so we've changed its behavior. The Step Follow camera now waits for your robot to be far away from you and for you to let go of transmitter controls. Just that single rule change yields a night-and-day difference in how it feels. As a player, you now feel in control of when the camera updates, but it also doesn't take conscious thought and becomes second nature.
We also got rid of any automatic snap rotation in favor of manual snap rotation. This is what we've always wanted, but RoboCo has a lot of controls so we had to figure out how the control scheme could accommodate it without disrupting other controls. You can now manually rotate by squeezing the grip button (to tell the game you're trying to move the camera and not the robot) and then flicking the joystick left or right to snap rotate in 20-degree increments.
VR Controls Improvements
Good VR controls give you a tactile connection to the virtual world through your hands. In a complex building game like RoboCo, you also need access to a wide range of tools for editing. While sometimes you just want to grab a block and move it, at other times you may want to multi-select specific parts on your robot and move them only along the X-axis.
To make these edits quick and easy to access in VR, we've been remapping some controls and we've also been updating our VR selection tool to have more intuitive behaviors for selecting single parts, multi-selecting, and deselecting. We expect to continue tweaking controls based on user testing feedback to ensure that VR is as intuitive and usable as possible.
And More!
Since we last updated on the VR front we also have:
Updated the flow upon completing a challenge so that players are guided to their Results on the tablet.
Ported features to the file system of the Quest 2 so that robot saving and loading, campaign progress, and all other game data work on that platform.
Ported robot sharing to the Quest 2. We've set up a workshop that will allow Quest 2 players to share their robots with each other, much like Steam users can. Please note that the Steam workshop and Quest 2 workshop will not share the same uploads due to the different accounts and backend tech.
Dug into all the technical aspects of RoboCo to optimize the game for increased performance! Some of these performance optimizations will benefit PC or PC VR. Others are specific to the Quest 2 so we can bring all those squishy humans and that sweet robot physics to a standalone headset with no need for a PC! Optimizing is another initiative we expect to be ongoing as we eke out every frame.
And that’s it for this week’s devblog! We hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look into what’s been going on in the world of RoboCo VR. Next week, we’re announcing our inclusion in a familiar game expo! 😉
Last time, we announced the inclusion of springs in RoboCo! This week we’re talking about our updated release schedule, which we’ve affectionately called “An Update Regarding Updates”.
A CuTe Update Will Be Available Soon
As of today, we plan on releasing our next update sometime between October 3rd and November 3rd, 2023. Called RoboCo Copper, this update will include 2 new mini-challenges for onboarding, plus additional improvements. Players won't know exactly which features fall into an update until the week before the update is released, but those that enjoy theorizing may want to keep a close eye on what is currently in the In Progress category of our RoboCo Feature Roadmap as we get closer to the date.😉
Why call it RoboCo Copper? This new way of naming releases provides a number of benefits. For one, we can now share a firm date range for releases far in advance - by basing our releases on goals rather than specific features, we can hit our release dates even if some planned features unexpectedly fall behind due simply to the unpredictable nature of game development and our scrappy team size. The new release model also broadens the possibilities of our updates in terms of flexibly reacting to and incorporating user feedback. A further benefit is that our resources will now be more easily optimized across our multiple initiatives (most significantly, continued development towards 1.0 of the PC desktop version and an expansive new VR mode.) Going forward, our releases will have thematic names like RoboCo Iron, RoboCo Aluminum, and so forth, similar to the naming conventions for Android OS releases.
RoboCo Copper is Just the Beginning
RoboCo Copper is the first of what we hope to be several updates. We anticipate these updates to occur once every two to four months. While we understand that some players would like updates to happen more frequently, keep in mind that our small development team is hard at work developing BOTH RoboCo VR and RoboCo 1.0 on Steam. We believe this cadence is our best way to optimize our resources to make both titles the best versions of themselves they can be while still delivering awesome content like new challenges, parts, and features to current players.
Keep in mind that you can also make your voice heard by voting for your favorite features on our RoboCo Feature Roadmap and/or leaving suggestions in our #suggestions channel in the Official RoboCo Discord too! While we can’t promise every feature suggested or voted on will get included in the next update, we will do our best to make sure the ones with the most votes are prioritized and are more likely to be included if we have the bandwidth.
And that’s it for this week’s devblog! We hope you’re as excited about the future of RoboCo as we are. Next week, an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at what’s been going on with RoboCo VR! 🎉🤖🎉
