[UPDATE] Wow! Thank you so much for all your passionate feedback on the forums. I think it’s pretty clear that many users have major concerns about the changes outlined in Chapter 3, so i’m going to sit down with the devs at Freejam and discuss all your feedback.

We’ll take a big step back, read all the feedback, and then come back to you when we have a plan.

Nothing is set in stone at all at this point.

Previous text for Chapter 3 below ==========================================================

If you need to catch up on previous Chapters, Chapter 1 is here and Chapter 2 is here.

I’ll start today’s chapter with a discussion about ‘making Robocraft intuitive’. Typically intuitive things are the things we have grown up with an gotten familiar with over many year of living on this world and playing games.

Physics IS intuitive:

Adding more blocks makes it heavier

Centre of mass

Friction

Thrusters make you faster and help you fly

Rotors help you fly like a Helicopter and Wings like a plane

Robocraft combat mechanics are NOT intuitive:

I must put a Pilot seat on a Robot for it to work, why?

Damage propagates like electricity through connected cubes, why?

Resistivity, Protonivity and Barrier Protection are things?

Gunbrella’s, Anti-Gunbrella’s and Tri-Forcing are also things?

Only 6 weapons can fire, if you add extra they will not fire, why?

Weapons that cannot see your target shoot, and those that can do not, why?

Also, Robocraft has a huge evil force slowly eating it away from the inside – Redundancy.

Why should you be forced to put 10+ guns on? Why should you need 6 to get ultimate efficiency? Why should you put on more wings than you need to survive.

Spamming things on your Robot for ‘redundancy’ is not depth in combat engineering, it is super anti-creative.

All of the above unintuitive combat mechanics and the evil of ‘redundancy’ comes from a single problem in Robocraft that must be corrected.

“Functional parts can be shot off my Robot during combat”

So, we’re reworking the entire game first starting with a completely new damage model. No more will functional parts fall off when they are damage. No more redundancy. No more horrible unintuitive game mechanics. No more Pilot Seat.

Rather than just do ‘Health Bars’ we wanted to retain some of the great moments where you see a Robot disintegrating as you damage and destroy it, and seeing the Robot break apart when you deal critical blows.

So, we are developing a new system that creates an interior indestructible skeleton that joins all of your functional parts together. Think of this as the ‘skeleton’ and all the other cubes and cosmetics as the ‘flesh’.

As you take damage your flesh is stripped away revealing the skeleton. When you finally take the killing blow when your health is at zero, your Robot will break into parts and fall to the ground in a huge Epic explosion (hope we nail that part as it should feel satisfying as hell).

Here’s a very early work in progress of the ‘Skeleton Damage Model’ in action:

Please note, it is important for us that users can gain competitive advantages by good building, but we want the differences between good and bad Robots to be just a few %, not 500+% as they are now. How can creative Robots ever survive if the difference between good and bad Robots is 500%. That’s anti-creative and anti-freedom. That is forcing you to build certain things because we created game mechanics that forced you to do it. Combat build advantages should be subtle and intuitive.

As you can imagine, this change is huge. It affects everything in the game. All weapons need to be reworked, Teslas, EP’s, Ground vs. Air, the entire game needs to be rebalanced. They are just the tip of the iceberg.

More will be revealed in tomorrow’s Chapter.

EDIT:

For clarification. The skeleton is generated automatically by a path-finding algorithm that connects all the functionals. You do not need to build the skeleton, you just need to build the Robot you want. Shooting any part of the Robot will deal damage to the Robot. The health lost is represented by the cubes that fall off.