Hi Everyone,
Thank you for your continued questions and support! You have definitely kept us busy this week reviewing feedback from the Steam community, the Gametechmods forums, Youtube, and questions we received from two members of the mod community who were kind enough to come into our offices.
In going through all the feedback we're finding that it falls into a few basic categories.
1. Bugs
2. Improvements
3. New features
We thought we would take this week to answer questions related to a couple from each category as well as a few miscellaneous ones. Please don't feel that your question wasn't a good one if we don't answer it, we may have missed it or more than likely we just don't have a good answer for you yet.
Bugs -
Your attention to detail is great to see, and sometimes a bit scary as well. Some of you lovingly dissected the early trailer and others vivisected it, either way you found some bugs.
> The connected components are not centered properly. [Insert still image from the video of the rotating mace-windoo-doo bot. That's not the official name of the bot, but maybe it should?]
In this early version we have all sorts of odd misaligned connections, including the ability to place parts in places you shouldn't (ouch). This will be addressed for release. As we discover misalignments we bug them. We can't promise every misalignment will be fixed given the millions of combinations, but we will do our best to get to them all!
> The wheel physics look messed up dude.
Yes they do. Initially we were using the basic Unity vehicle physics. We thought that would work. We quickly found that when you made a bot using the vehicle physics and the default shock-absorber system that is included it wouldn't work when a bot was flipped over. Essentially the default Unity vehicle physics would behave like a car upside down, shocks and all, without a downward force on the wheels. We had to scrap that system and start a new one that allowed for upside down bots to drive around as you would expect. Unity by default also has weird rubbery physics when objects are connected so things weren't actually rigid the way you'd expect them to be, which also meant taking a different approach for connecting items together.
With that being said, we knew the physics would be a tough one to conquer from the start and while we've made some good progress I'm sure there will be plenty of day-one videos of bots flying all over the place, falling apart fantastically and flinging themselves into some type of planetary orbit or the bowels of hell. We like to laugh to, but not so much that it hurts or makes us cry.
Improvements-
There were several things you saw in the videos, screenshots or in the copy that were missing or we could do better.
>Why just the stock Robot Arena 2 components?
The truth is we had to start somewhere with the components and we felt the easiest would be with the RA2 components. We do plan on having many more components than the ones in RA2 for launch. In future videos you'll see some new ones.
>Why do all the bots in the video have the same white/silver color?
When we made the video and took the screenshots we didn't have the bot lab paint shop hooked up yet. The bot lab will have a paint shop with familiar features to RA2. We'll have more to share in future videos.
>The chassis creation in the video looks different than in RA2. Where did the old method go?
There is much, much more flexibility in chassis creation than in RA2. That does sound like a bit of hyperbole but the truth is there are lots of ways to create chassis in RA III. The RA 2 method, which we call the extrusion method, still exists in RA III, but we didn't show it in the video as the UI was still coming on line. The video shows the new primitive shape approach where you pick a shape from many base shapes, and like a block of clay you can mold and shape the chassis by pulling vertexes in each layer to get what you want.
New Features-
> Will I be able to import my stock Robot Arena 2 bot into RA III.
This is a big one for many folks and is something we have talked about a lot. We don't think this will be possible to do before the launch, but the format we are saving the RA III bots in is very mod friendly so it certainly could be possible in the future.
> Since you are using Unity what about Mac and Linux?
Using Unity does give us options to go to Mac and Linux. We are carefully considering each as they have some challenges even with Unity. Presently we don't want to get distracted by those challenges however so we're focusing on Windows now. We're hoping that the challenges for Mac and Linux are minimal however as we would very much like to see Robot Arena on both.
>Can you rupture or puncture the chassis?
We agree that this would be really cool. As we balance all of the development tasks this one is a bit more technically challenging than we have plans for today. It's not off the table it's just not something we'll have initially.
Miscellaneous-
To everyone that suggested we reach out to Nerd³ or reached out to them on our behalf it looks like it worked, thank you! We appreciate @DanNerdCubed for the tweet letting people know that we're on Steam. We would be happy to share an early version for them to take a look at!
To those who asked how much the game will cost, it actually depends on what part of the world you are in. The science of pricing on Steam is a whole other topic, involving fluctuating currencies and market pricing realities for games in each region. With that being said we are asking $19.99 for RA III in the US and will do our very best to make the game reasonably priced throughout the world.
Like most folks who create games we would like to have enough financial success so we can continue to add new features and make more significant improvements beyond our launch. We know that many folks downloaded Robot Arena 2 for free because it wasn't readily available for purchase. We would like to try and make it as easy as possible for those people to justify purchasing.
Thank you again for the questions, please keep them coming - we'll be back next week to answer them!
-Robot Arena III Team