Robot Rumble 2 - Dev Diary: kupa_!

Roboteers, stand by!

Hi all, kupa_ here, one of the developers for Robot Rumble 2! Firstly, a quick apology for missing last months Dev Diary. The team has been hard at work on some major new features and the month just ended up flying by! What has the team been working on, I (don't) hear you ask? Well read on and find out!

The Golden fires Crumble Tumble up in to the air with a powerful hit in the community BH4 Arena! Both bots built by @iforgottofocus in the RR2 Discord.

The Dreaded Scaling Bug Fix!

The Scaling Bug has plagued RR2 since its inception, causing all Shapes (Custom or otherwise) to be the wrong weights compared to real life. The name comes from the fact that scaling a Shape up or down would dramatically increase and decrease its weight compared to its volume. This also resulted in oddities with hollow shapes being the same – or in some cases a higher – weight when compared to their solid counterparts, effectively making them decorative at best, and a downgrade at worst. This has been one of the biggest issues with building accurate robots in RR2 due to the massive effect it has on the weight of a bot, leading to the current state of vastly overpowered bots running armour and motors that real-life robotics teams could only dream of.

Luckily this has all come to a close, and we are happy to announce that the Scaling Bug has in fact been vanquished! We have been testing intensively with our Discord Community (link at the bottom of this post if you'd like to join us) and have found that this has breathed a whole new lease of life in to the meta, promoting more realistic, specialised bots and boosting up the use of motors and materials that are designed to fit certain niches that just weren't present in the older builds of the game.

Hornet triumphantly lifts Fire-blaze in the community Riverside Arena! Both bots built by @meikagreycloak in the RR2 Discord.

There is of course the flip side of this change: all existing bots have changed weight, some more extremely than others. On average we have seen peoples heavyweight bots balloon to around 1.5x their current weight. In some extreme cases we have had a couple of bots in testing end up at three times their current weight! This means that some bots may be beyond saving without major redesigns or even full rebuilds. Due to this - and the list of planned new features and changes we are still working on - we are branding the next Major Update as a sort of soft relaunch of the game. More information on this will be in future Dev Diaries.

However, to mitigate part of that pain and to ensure everyone at least has something to play with day one of the new update, please allow me to introduce another treat coming in the next Major Update:

Stock Bot Teams Part 1!

We are happy to announce that we are bringing the first full set of Stock Robots in to the game! The current Stock Heavyweights were only meant to be a placeholder for a much more full roster of stock bots however this project fell by the wayside a little, luckily we have an amazing community who were more than happy to help out! For the next Major Update we are planning on introducing EIGHT stock teams, each with FIVE bots across multiple weightclasses to play around with for a grand total of 40 new stock bots. Each team will have its own theme and specialisation to ensure that each one stands out and requires different strategies to defeat in the arena. Above you can see the bots of our first team - Meta Menaces - featuring futuristic designs and deadly vertical spinners!

That's not all, because there is one last bit of news we are happy to reveal that will make sharing and playing with our thousands of community bots even easier than ever:

That's right, we are in the final stages of getting Workshop support up and running! Watch this space for more information in future Dev Diaries.

As always, we have also been working on improving performance and fixing bugs whilst working on the above and cannot wait to share more information on our plans next month! Once again a massive thank you to all who have supported the game and the team!

kupa_

Robot Rumble 2

https://discord.gg/RobotRumble2

Huge sparks as Spoingus and MK III KiloNova go weapon to weapon! Bot bots built by @squawkingchickenrobotics in the RR2 Discord.

This updates header features Skarred built by yours truly.