Here's the third out of four quick devblog about the Endless Update.
Today we'll be discussing the progression systems that support the Endless Mode.
Singularity & Glitches
When we were designing the new mode, we realized we needed something that would make Endless Mode more complete in its intent to be a replayable experience.
And we felt like a "mutator" system would be a great solution to that.
We called those "Singularities and Glitches".
There are "main mutators" (Singularity) and "secondary mutators" (Glitch).
Whenever you defeat a boss, it adds a random Singularity to your run, up to a certain maximum. And every other level completed, it adds a random Glitch to your run, endlessly.
Singularity have a greater impact on your run whereas Glitch tend to modify metric values from the base game or from the Singularities that were added to the run. Pretty much like "enemy perks and upgrades".
Here are a few example of Singularities: Bunny Shield - Some enemies have a shield that can only be broken by headbonking them Safety Goggles - Enemies have a chance to have an eye patch protecting their weak spot Kaboom Protocol - Enemies have a chance to explode when destroyed
Enemies
In addition to that, every level comes with an updated roster of enemies and the difficulty will ramp up endlessly. Enemies get beefier and deadlier, more elites come into play and mechanically weaker enemies are replaced with stronger ones.
Character Progression
Every few levels, you'll have a perk choice, up to a maximum of 5.
Every levels aside from those, you'll have an upgrade choice, up to a certain maximum (resulting in much more upgrades than regular runs).
In terms of items, you won't be limited (that is, until you have them all).
Once you reached the maximum number of perks and upgrades, you continue to level up and get to pick one of three "Boosters".
The main reason we're limiting perks is that going above a certain thresholds removes the idea of "having a build", you just "have everything" and that didn't sit right with us.
Hopefully this will still make you reach high highs and let you experience an "end-game build" for much longer compared to the regular runs. But we will be monitoring this closely.
That's the end of the third quickblog, there's a final one planned later this week (a very short one) and then we'll be in "soon to be released" territory.
Stay tuned!
The Endless Update lands end of November.
Roboquest - Saving the Day
Guardians, it's us again.
We're back with more information on the Endless Update.
Save & Resume
The "Save & Resume" feature is coming in the Endless Update.
"Finally, this should have been there day one". You'd probably be correct to think that. But it wasn't and there isn't much more we can say about it other than "our bad, sorry".
To be fair, that was a lot of work and we wanted to make sure the main game architecture was final before starting it. But it's finally coming.
When finishing a level, you'll be given the choice to "Save and Quit" the game.
This will bring you back to the title screen.
From there, clicking "Continue" will launch your saved run while clicking "Basecamp" will erase your saved run and... bring you back to the Basecamp for a fresh start (after a confirmation window, obviously).
Please note that this feature is not available in multiplayer, only in single player.
This feature is available for both Normal and Endless Run.
Was it necessary?
Let's discuss if that feature was required for the game since it was a growing debate within the community.
Lots of people were asking for it and lots of people were against it (mostly because it would take us time away from developing other features).
Let's get this straight: it doesn't deter us from doing anything else. Despite this feature being a lot of work, the person in charge wouldn't be able to implement other things like weapons and classes anyway (we would need to game-design those, but we were busy game-designing the Endless Update).
And then, the main point defending the idea of having this feature was that not everybody has 45+ minutes to allocate to a full run. That's completely fair and we do understand that everybody has different lives and different spare time for their hobbies.
We apologize if anyone felt like "we weren't respecting their time". It was always one of the pillar of our philosophy (to respect your time), that's why we tried to limit as much as possible the feeling of "grind" in our game (among other things).
In any case, the question became broader with the incoming Endless Mode. A run virtually has no end in this game mode. So regardless of the previous debate about "Save & Resume", we knew we needed that feature for this new mode.
So yeah, that's it. You'll be able to save and resume your runs at a later time!
Power Ceiling
Apparently, we weren't clear enough in our previous devblog regarding power ceiling and player progression.
To be a little bit more accurate, we quickly setup this graph so that you can have an idea of the character growth over time in both Endless and Normal modes.
Approaching the 30/40 minute mark is when players usually complete the normal mode according to our data. Reaching about level 16.
In Endless Mode, by that time you will be around level 22 and you will have reached level 16 about 25% to 30% sooner than normal mode.
So what will happen in the Endless Mode in terms of character growth?
You will reach highest highs
You will progress faster
You will spend more time in the "superpower" state that late game builds bring
Keeping the progression from Normal Mode would be boring in terms of reward distribution after the first time you beat The Moon. It doesnt fit that "quickest" progression and "highest" peak we were looking for in the Endless Mode.
We hope we clarified the situation about character growth and power ceiling.
That's it! But we will be back soon once again :)
Stay tuned!
The Endless Update lands end of November.
Roboquest - That Which Has No End
Hello Guardians!
Today we're back with a (short) devblog to talk about the elephant in the room. The "Endless" thingy.
Let's hero cape right down :)
The Endless Update
Like many of you have guessed, the "Endless Update" is about adding an Endless Mode to the game.
But there are many ways to implement such a system, so which direction did we go?
To Loop or not to Loop
The first major question we had to answer was "would the endless mode be based on playing another run while keeping all your perks from the previous one?". Basically "looping" through the game.
And the simple answer we came up with was "no".
Looping wasn't the best choice for the experience (in our opinion), a few examples of what bothered us:
After your first run, there would not be much more to give you without breaking the power ceiling in either way (you or the enemies)
The base path of the levels of the game and the quest (and other interactable) within are tailored to be encountered once per run, it doesn't make much sense to cross them several times in a row
The repetitiveness of seeing the same stages in the same order over and over would quickly become boring
That means we needed to come up with something different than just looping through the base game.
Then What?
It was weird to start by telling you what the Endless Mode isn't instead of telling you what it is, so let's correct this.
So… the Endless Mode is an alternate game mode, separate from the regular runs.
You unlock it after beating the final Boss for the first time (in Guardian 1 or above) or by crafting it directly with Wrenches at the Basecamp.
Starting an Endless Run works exactly like the regular ones: you choose a difficulty, a class and interact with the Endless Portal to start the run.
Then, you play through a endless series of levels, with some unique twists on them.
Those levels are shorts and enemy-packed, some have battle and challenge rooms while others don't.
Note that you can't complete quests or progress the story in this mode.
And that's it for this devblog.
We will be back shortly to talk more about what we have in store for the Endless Update.
Stay tuned!
In the meantime, happy robot smashing time.
The Endless Update lands end of November.
Roboquest - 8 years in the making
Hello Guardians!
Today's a special day, it marks the first anniversary of the 1.0 release. But it is also more or less the eighth year we've been working on it and the fourth year since its first Early Access public release.
To celebrate, we thought we'd take a trip down memory lane and take you with us (or at least those interested in it).
In this post, we'll be showcasing some (very) old footage alongside visuals you've probably never seen before. It will highlight the different phases the project went through. And that later became the game you're playing now.
The Beginning?
"Eight years?!" You might think it's too long for a game this size. And you'd probably be right. But truth be told, when we started, most of us had just graduated out of school. We thought we were ready to make games (we clearly didn't expect that kind of journey).
So we just started…
We worked on a prototype, both visually and gameplay-wise. And we ended up with something quite different from where we are now.
Gunpawns had a really different shape and tone back in those days.
And it ended up looking like this:
You can already notice the will to make some kind of "forward-combat FPS", you can also notice how the game was called "Robot Quest".
Needless to say, we were happy but… We learned so much along the way of doing this that we thought we could do much better if we tried again.
So we "rebooted" the project and the prototype.
Reshaping the Tone
Aside from cleaning up the mess the prototype was in terms of code, we wanted to go way further in terms of player movement and we also fiddled around with a more colorful tone for the game.
So we restarted a prototype, find some visuals from that period below.
You might recognize a weapon which is still here to this day.
We clearly had amazing UI design skills as well.
Below is the map we created to try out the new style of movement we wanted for the game. One where we'd be able to move faster, jump higher and even double-jump! At that time, we didn't have any other movement capabilities.
We called that map "Lunapark".
We spent countless hours just running, jumping and traversing it. Tweaking every single movement value.
One little trick we decided to implement was to modify the player's acceleration after landing. When simply moving, the player's character acceleration was really high, and it tampered with the ability to stop precisely when landing on platforms. So we added something that slows down your acceleration for a little while after landing. This is a trick that is still in the game today and (hopefully) provides a better platforming experience overall.
The 'Dark' Days
Once again, we learned a lot during the new prototype. And once again, we wanted more. So we rebooted everything, again. But this time, we leaned towards a more serious approach in our visual concepts. You can see what it looks like below.
One positive thing about this reboot though is that we were finally joined by real programmers. That meant no longer needing to reboot the code because we ended up with some spaghetti-thing that was impossible to expand upon.
Dark Canyon
Old Concepts of the Moon
Advanced Key Art of the Moon
Concept Arts for Fields
Concept Arts for Story/Cinematics
But after fidgeting for quite a while with that direction, we realized we weren't really happy with it.
Let's turn on the Light!
That wasn't what we were looking for. We've always wanted a game that feels good to be in in terms of mood.
So we tried something more "colorful". But we were still quite far away from the final "cartoon-comic" style you can find in the game right now. Find some concepts arts below.
Zen Gardens
Residential Districts
Promenade
Chill Zone
Futuristic Apartments
And we were also becoming """"better"""" at handling Unreal Engine and its lighting capabilities.
Fields
Suburbs
Haven-City
Canyon
We also turned our eyes to investors and people who were willing to support us financially speaking in general.
So we had to make a trailer for that…
Comic-style Turn-around
While we were quite happy with the overall tone of the colors and the game being more "vivid", we still felt like we were missing something. So wanted to go more all-in in the comic-book approach.
Here's what it started to look like in our concepts / paintovers at the time.
But it didn't look quite as good in-game yet...
Or didn't it?
Meanwhile, we were also leveling up in marketing and business development.
The Early Access
After continuous tuning, we finally managed to find our artistic seed: the comic-style we were striving for.
And fortunately for us, because we were running out of time. We needed to actually make the game now and not just fiddle with graphics and gameplay.
So we released it in Early Access in 2020.
Some of you might remember, you joined us around that time!
We even made a little something to thank the first 200 of you who joined our Discord. We still can't believe we actually recently reached 15.000 members!
And we also had the chance to attend Gamescom one year later!
Also, a little something our main (and only) animator did in his free-time… Probably the first time we could enjoy the presence of Buddybot in our studio.
Final Form
Three years later, in November 2023, Roboquest finally reached "its final form".
Our concept artist worked hard for the Steam Key Art.
And of course, the game evolved quite a bit...
Conclusion
Well, this was quite a long post, mostly because of all the visuals we shared.
We hope you liked this trip down memory lane, we sure did here at the studio. We laughed tracking back those visuals and remembering the fun (and challenging) times connected to them.
As for the future, the Endless Update is coming end of November. Like we said earlier, we will be sharing information about it over the course of the month. We will also share devleaks on Discord (we will sum them up in our posts here on Steam when able).
Stay tuned Guardians, have a great robot-smashing times!
And most importantly, thanks to everyone tagging along to that amazing journey.
Roboquest - End of November
Hello Guardians.
The Endless Update will be dropping at the end of November.
Stay tuned for more news incoming over the next month, alongside other funny bits about Roboquest.
In the meantime and as usual, we hope you're having a happy robot-smashing time!
The Playstation port will include: - Cross-platform (people from all platforms can play with each other) - Haptic feedback - Adaptive trigger - Target 4k/60FPS on Playstation 5 - Available for Playstation 4 and 5
Please note that this isn't delaying the Endless Update :D
Have a great day Guardians, and a happy robot smashing.
Roboquest x Flat2VR
Hello Guardians!
Some of you have been asking us about the VR version of Roboquest which trailer was revealed at Gamescom 2024. We're here to talk about it.
Throughout this article, we'll refer to Roboquest VR as "RQVR" and Roboquest simply as "RQ".
First of all, know that RQVR isn't tied to RQ, it is a standalone game. Owning RQ won't give you access to RQVR. It has a set of specific and unique features related to VR. It isn't just a 'port' of the game, it's a full VR adaptation.
And RQVR is developed by "Flat2VR Studios", a studio specialized in VR games. They already made several VR versions of well-known games. Find info about them here.
They contacted us to adapt RQ, because they thought it had the potential to be a great VR game. And seeing their WIP videos and the way they're implementing the weapons (pull & release for the bow, dual wielding weapon etc.) was very impressive!
RQVR is aiming for a late 2025 release and will be playable on Steam VR, MetaQuest and Playstation VR2!
Here's a WIP video: If you want to follow how RQVR is doing, you may do so following Flat2VR's X here.
Note: RyseUp Studios is not affiliated to Flat2VR. We are helping them to some extent but we let them total control over the creative process to actually make VR Roboquest an engaging VR experience.
'Aight, that's it. Wish you the best robot smashing times, maybe (eventually) in VR at some point.
Roboquest Devblog #16 - What was and what will be
Hello Guardians!
We've been silent for a while since the release of the Dead Cells Update. So we're back with a short devblog to give you some information on how things went, how things are going and what is coming!
Let's hero cape right down :)
The Dead Cells Update
We've read here and there that some people were worried that we "delayed" the Endless Update for the Dead Cells Update (probably due to the update of our roadmap). If anything, this roadmap update was more about being more accurate about the release windows than anything else.
We didn't delay anything in order to release our crossover with Dead Cells.
To give you a bit of context, while we are cooking the Endless Update not everyone has things to do at all times. That's when we can skim in some other - sometimes unplanned - content for the game.
In addition, we realized that nothing was really happening for Roboquest in Summer. So we figured out, "well, why don't we push a little something?".
That's when we started thinking about doing a crossover with Dead Cells. We have been following the game and especially Motion Twin for a long time now and we felt like it would be cool to contact them. Not only did we really like their game, we also think it'd be a good thing for Roboquest to partner up with such a big title.
That's how this "smaller" update came to life. And we had the weapon filtering system almost ready already. This was something we were cooking for a while since it was a mandatory system for the long-term of Roboquest. And funnily enough, the Collector seemed to fit well with that mechanic.
So if anything, the Dead Cells Update made us release the Weapon Filter system earlier than expected and was there instead of… not having an update.
So yeah… we are glad about this crossover and this update didn't "delay" anything for you Guardians!
The Endless Update
You probably have lots of questions regarding the Endless Update, some of which have potentially pretty obvious answers.
Though we won't be revealing anything just yet, we'll probably be ready to start showing off some of that stuff starting end of October and in November.
In any case, we're hard at work on it. This is probably the most work out of all the updates we've released this year. We hope it'll be worth the wait for your guys.
Here's a little something to help with the whole "waiting" thing:
What's the plan then?
We have a few announcements and community events planned for October. Some of them will be featured on Steam while others will only be communicated through X and Discord (not because we don't want to keep you Steam-people in touch, but because it would be weird to drop them here when they have nothing to do with Steam).
Rest assured that we will post here for the most important ones anyway.
After that it will be November. And it will be time to show you guys what we've been working on!
Aaaaaaaand, over.
Wish you all the best robot-smashing times and see you soon :)
Roboquest - Weekend Deal
Hey Guardians!
Roboquest Weekend Deal has started!
Starting now, up to September 9th, Roboquest is featured as part of the weekend deal on Steam.
In addition, Roboquest is up for grab at 25% off until the 19th of September!
We recently released the Dead Cells update, find the information about it here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/692890/view/4328605968617499501
And we're currently hard at work on our next update, which is the Endless Update. We will be back with a devblog and more information about it in the weeks to come, stay tuned for that!
