Development Roadmap – August 2014

Alright, so we’ve got our flipper cubes and electroplates. Rails and plasma are causing mass devastation. What’s next?

Camouflage

It will be possible to apply “paint” to cubes on robots to make them more colorful. Regular uses will be able to choose colors from a “fixed palette of bright colors”, whereas premium users will have a “full RGB color picker”. It will cost RP, of course!

Camoflauge work is starting this week. We’d expect to launch it fairly quickly. We’ll update more when it’s making good progress but in theory it’s no more than a couple of weeks work. — Mark

One plan coming soon is a feature called ‘Camoflauge’. The idea is that all users can color their Robot using a fixed palette of bright colors (at an RP cost each time you color a cube). Getting damage reveals the color of the armor underneath. Premium users would have access to a ‘full RGB color picker’ so could use literally any color they want. We felt this would inject some free creativity which wouldn’t compromise the performance of your Robot and gives a bonus to premium users without heavily penalizing users who do not want to spend at first.–Mark

Spotting System

In a rather crypic remark, Mark said they are working on a new spotting system. The red enemy tags will be removed, but it remains a mystery as to what they’ll be replaced with. Hopefully this will make it easier to flyers to avoid being spotted and shot to pieces.

Work to remove tags and replace with ‘Spotting’ system is starting this week. — Mark

More Maps

With the release of Tharsis Rift, this brings us up to five maps. We can expect another four maps, to bring the total up to nine. Then the older maps will be refined.

we are aiming to get to a minimum of 9 maps to you guys as fast as possible, they will include maps from new planets too – once we have a good spread of maps across all tiers we will begin polishing them by improving the gameplay balance and boosting the graphical quality of the maps. — Fat_Digester

Weapon Rebalancing

The community is up in arms about rail guns and plasma damage. We will probably see some damage reduction for these weapons.

On the last patch [Tharsis Rift] the balance has been broken a little and we will fix it next release very likely. Rebalancing takes always at least 2 or 3 releases. — sebasjammer

Clans

Sounds like your basic clan system. One would assume the clan will also have a private chat channel.

So, we’ll be starting work on Clans soon and we’re starting to think about how it will work. This is the idea so far… Anyone can create a clan, but until you have 15 members it is not recognised [sic] with a badge and [TAG] in game

The guy who forms the clan is the clan leader

Generals must invite, promote, and remove people from the clan

There are lots of ranks in the clan, General, Colonel, Captain, Sergeant Major, Sergeant, Corporal, Private, etc. (or may go for ranks based on Star Wars i.e. Emperor, Lord etc. or maybe based on Naval, i.e. Admiral, etc.

The top rank in the clan – owned by the leader – is based on the size of the clan

Each rank below the leader can invite and promote people in the clan to a rank up to the next one under their own (so a Sergeant can promote someone up to Corporal but not higher)

Users in clans will have the clan [TAG] and a badge to show their rank

Each clan leader can define their own rules

We’re also thinking about putting Clan badges in the game etc. when clans reach certain sizes Should all be a lot of fun. –Mark

Spider Legs

Spider legs will allow robots to walk around and stick to walls like bugs.

Really early prototype video showing how the new Robot Spider Legs might work It will stick to walls eventually, it’s still early days. –Mark

Robot Stats

Perhaps we’ll be able to see the weight and max speed of our robots? I still want to see the center of gravity.

Robot Stats on large screen in the Mothership –Mark

Leagues and Leaderboards

Leaderboards sound cool, but I’m worried that its going to work like Starcraft 2 where your progress is tracked and you advance in rank. As you increase in rank you fight better and better players. There’s nothing wrong with this per say, but this isn’t interesting to watch.

Watching 1v1 battles in Starcraft is interesting because it’s a 1v1 game. Robocraft is a team game, like World of Tanks. This is pure speculation as the details of Leagues remain secret.

League and Friends Leaderboards on the other screen in the Mothership –Mark

we’ll be putting the new ‘Leagues’ \ Leaderboards on Steam –Mark

The real Robocraft starts at T6 which is when the Robo-Leagues will begin when launched –Drognin

eSports

There’s several reasons Robocraft hasn’t taken off as an eSport. Since platoons are limited to three or four players there’s no way to make teams. Even if there were a way to assemble a large group of people, you’d face another random team. Finally, there is no way for a caster to view the game and stream it with commentary.

Until they add a way for Team A to face off against Team B and add a way for casters to join a game as an observer I don’t see Robocraft taking off as an eSport. I think this would also help a lot with retaining players for more than a week, which Freejam has recently complained about.

Creativity is very important for us, but we want to move toward an e-sport model. This means introducing conditions and conditions can limit creativity (although the real creative people can find workarounds for conditions). In future, though, we could introduce new game modes for pure creative people. –sebasjammer

Robot Shop

You’ll be able to buy pre-build robots in the Robot Shop. Hopefully they’ll be cooler than the default robots. If they come with a garage slot I’d expect them to cost 750GC + parts.

Robot Shop, a shop where you can buy pre-built Robots made by Freejam Yes, the Robot will be supplied with a Garage slot. –Mark

Boss Battles

They’ve been talking about boss battles and megabots since December 2013. Perhaps we’re getting close.

Boss Battles (1 large Robot vs. 20 low Tiers), and Challenge Matches (4 vs. 15) –Mark

Hero Bonus

The hero bonus gives you bonus RP if you die and your team wins. You won’t have to stay in the game to get it.

Yes, in future we will add the ‘Hero Bonus’ which makes up the difference between Bravery and Victory if you die but your team goes on to win. We didn’t want to force people to watch Spectator Mode if they didn’t want to. –Mark

No, we know it would suck to force you to watch the rest of the match, just to get your Hero Bonus. The game would finish as always, with you destroyed and getting a bunch of bonuses, you’d then repair and enter another match. On return from that second match you’d get your bonuses, and after you clear the bonus screen a new ‘Retrospective Bonuses’ screen would appear, which would award Hero Bonus and Assist from the previous match. You’d only see this screen if you had got the bonus. –Mark

This is planned. We are planning to add a ‘Hero Bonus’ which is awarded retrospectively, so if you die, but your team goes on to win, you will get the Hero Bonus. Equally we’ll award Assist retrospectively as well, so if you do most of the damage, then die, then someone else kills the enemy, you still get the Assist. –Mark

Medals and Achievements

At some point there will be Steam achievements.