Hey everyone! With Steam Next Fest wrapped up, we're now full steam ahead, working toward our Early Access release. From the bottom of our hearts, we want to thank everyone, especially our amazing community, for participating in the Demo!

We loved playing with your different worlds and meeting new players and veterans alike. The creativity on display is genuinely beyond our imaginations! Seriously, thank you. We love this community❤️!

Survey Results
Feedback
 Horrible hit detection
 Vehicles are hard to control, slip, and clip often
 No prefab support for physics grids
 Griefing physics contraptions is too easy
 The Tutorial is clunky, unclear and confusing
 Limited gameplay gate options
Plans for EA
 Improved tools and prefabs support
 Improved combat and hit detection
 The Gallery
 Improved physics and vehicle handling
 Wires V2
 New Game Mode system
 Tutorial World
Key Giveaway
Community Showcase

Survey Results

Near the start of the demo, we put out a survey to help us gauge where we are doing things right, where we fell short, and where we should aim our development goals toward. Nearly 2,000 people submitted their surveys, and there are some interesting findings! That is roughly 5.5% of demo players submitting the survey. Thank you to everyone who submitted one.

First, some fun statistics (unfortunately, non-interactive on here).

Roughly half of players who filled the survey indicate they played the Open Alpha. This is interesting, as only about 10% of total players linked an Open Alpha account:

We have an overwhelming majority of male users:

Our main audience appears to be young adults currently:

The majority of players prefer playing in small friend groups:

During the demo, most people focused on dressing up their avatars and exploring existing worlds, which is about what we expected:

Surprisingly, the most liked built-in world was Officecorp Inc! We didn't know we had so many single player puzzle enjoyers among us:

Most of you were happy with the visuals and performance of the game, but we can still improve on making the interface easier to use:

The avatar editor was well liked in general, though some people are still wishing for even more options, despite us already having hundreds of parts!

It's very interesting how the mouse controls and keyboard controls were rated nearly the same. I think there is still room for improvement here:

Using the hammer to delete bricks is the easiest tool to use. Who could have thought?

Most of you prefer the streamlined mouse building control scheme:

We experimented with a lot of ways to integrate removing bricks into the builder, but it seems the hammer is still the most popular:

We are frankly surprised by how high you have rated the stability of the physics in the demo. Are our standards too high?

Most of you said you were able to figure out some basic contraptions:

Everyone figured out how to drive a vehicle but it was much harder to make a new one that drives well:

Your most desired future features seem to already align with our goals for Early Access and beyond:

It's clear that those of you who filled the survey were already very invested in the game:

Feedback

There was a ton of amazing feedback posted on the survey, on Discord, and on Steam, and we've been reading all that we could. Here's a list of things that you all made very clear needs improving (in no particular order):

Horrible hit detection

Hit detection has degraded noticeably from Alpha 5 (which already had subpar hit detection).

The Alpha 5 version of hit registration is based on an unfinished rollback model, where the server validates hits by rewinding time to see where you hit the enemy on your screen. Unfortunately, the solution implemented isn't perfect due to many factors, and it has seemingly gotten worse due to latency issues from EOS P2P and bugs from engine upgrades.

Another issue with weapons is that bullets come from the muzzle of your gun. Seems realistic and reasonable, but in practice, it is very easy to hit obstacles blocking your shot instead of your target in first person. It makes gun fights in corridors and nearby obstacles very annoying.

Vehicles are hard to control, slip, and clip often

One of the more common problems faced in the demo was vehicles flipping over and having little traction. Plus, since we're using actual physical wheels that actually spin, there's quite a bit of unstable behavior that occurs (especially at lower frame rates!). Additionally, climbing up plate bricks is a bumpy ride.

There were also many cases of "clipping" that occurs when two brick grids interact on a seam. You may have ran into this going up ramps or roads on vehicles where the chassis is low to the ground. This is an inherent limitation of how contacts are generated with physics. This has been mitigated with wheels, but not with brick grids. You can see the core of the issue here:

No prefab support for physics grids

The demo still employs the same old saving system from Alpha 5, which never supported multiple physics grids or entities.

Additionally, the Selector tool is still functionally similar to the one in Alpha 5, with the addition of working with brick grids and some usability updates (like splitting grids apart). However, it's not possible to copy/paste an entire contraption at once!

Griefing physics contraptions is too easy

The demo was intended for playing with trusted users only, and therefore barely had any restrictions on physics objects or their interactions. A few brave souls who dared to host a public server soon found out that there is a reason why we did not include the server browser at first as their creation became permanently covered in thousands of wheels and their vehicles lost to outer space.

Another very common request was to be able to define home positions for contraptions and vehicles so you can reset them with the minigame (or even through wires).

The Tutorial is clunky, unclear, and confusing

The demo became super invaluable for us in improving this area. Tons of new users struggled with not only the content of the tutorial, but also in the way the tutorial is presented. It is very clunky to press "M" on your keyboard to free the mouse, just to be able to interact with the tutorial. We've seen many screenshots where the tutorial widget is still stuck on in the player's HUD, no good!

We quickly added some UX improvements during the demo, such as the third-person interaction prompts to tackle some of the low-points, but there is still plenty to improve here.

Limited gameplay gate options

Wires and the new logic/gameplay gates have opened tons of possibilities for players (and you all have done some insanely creative things with just the ones available!)

There is definitely some room to improve here, especially when interacting with Gamemode features. For example, it's not possible to join a team using wires, detect when a round of deathmatch ended, add score, compare score... etc.

In the Demo, it wasn't really possible to make anything too groundbreaking when making gamemodes. (Though, there were some creative usages of physics and wires to make games like payload and survive-the-falling-cars!)

Plans for EA

We want the launch of Early Access to have the right foundations and the best possible user experience we can muster, but we also don't want to launch the game next year. So, the changes below from what you saw in the demo are our MVP for Early Access, and we are currently targeting a release in July 2025.

Improved tools and prefab support

Tackling the issue of saving vehicles and other physics contraptions, we will be upgrading the prefab system to support the new features that BRS did not.

The Selector will also be getting a big upgrade, such as being able to select or deselect individual bricks, and select by brick grids, which should make the Selector much more powerful than just only being able to select a box-volume.

Improved combat and hit detection

Improving the hit detection has been fairly tricky, and originally we wanted the combat system to be very precise. On the technical side, it implements a rollback system (similar to Counter-Strike 2) to ensure hits happened where they happened on your screen. At least, in theory, that is supposed to be what happens.

Due to various factors like Unreal Engine missing fixed-tick character movement, network replication and compensation, the implementation isn't very effective. We will likely move towards favoring client hits, with less aggressive server-side "sanity" checks and/or simplifying the implementation.

And another small but impactful change: the physical muzzle of your gun being blocked will no longer stop bullets the way it used to. Makes it much simpler to build maps that work correctly in first person.

The Gallery

The Gallery is a new feature coming to EA, where you can share your creations with others. It comes with full in-game integration, enabling you to easily find and upload content for all things Brickadia.

We will likely have a blog post detailing all the features and goodies that the Gallery adds, stay tuned!

Improved physics and vehicle handling

As mentioned earlier with clipping, this issue is unfortunately a limitation of physics engines. But, there are things we can do to (hopefully!) fix this, such as implementing sweep-based vehicles/wheels. Definitely stay tuned for a future blog post on this!

We plan on adding various weight bricks / the ability to change your vehicle's center of mass, which should help improve vehicles from tipping over. Increasing the tire friction is an obvious next step after improving these, and improving the handling of vehicles, especially at high speeds.

Wires V2

One of the limitations of gates in the version of wires that shipped in the demo was the reliance on brick components to implement their functionality. This puts many limitations on what gates can do, like having a variable number of ports, or supporting different wire types.

Wires v2 introduces "generic" gates, allowing us to implement gates for many different wire types. This is particularly useful for math gates that support integer and float/double math. Additionally, logic gates will benefit by having any number of inputs/outputs, and will let us design new types of gates such as selectors that need the flexibility.

Anyone who tried creating a complex contraption will likely have noticed timing issues where signals take different time to propagate down paths of different lengths, or even managed to get your gates stuck flickering in a loop for seemingly no reason. While this might be neat in a hardware simulator, it is extremely annoying if you are trying to make things just work. For the new version of wires, the system will correctly order the gates by their dependencies and propagate everything in a single tick.

A new gate, the Microchip, will also allow you to compact entire logic gate circuits into a single gate. A great utility of it is being able to modularize your wire circuits and share them on the Gallery! Plus, there are some really exciting things Microchips enable, as you'll read below.

New Game Mode system

We will be replacing the ancient minigames system with gamemodes! Functionally, they will work very similar, and our plan is to keep as much familiarity between both as possible, while improving the UX and confusion around setting up minigames.

Game modes will be able to be packaged up into a bundle that you can activate independently from the worlds, so you can easily combine different maps with playing different modes on them.

Problems with the old minigame system included figuring out which bricks/entities should be part of the minigame and unclear configuration, which leads many users (even experienced ones) to wonder why things just don't work the way they expect when creating minigames.

Once we're happy with the new UX, we're expanding the power of gamemodes in a dramatic way.

As mentioned before, we're adding the Microchip, a useful tool in the wiring arsenal for compacting circuit designs. In the context of gamemodes, they get a whole lot more powerful and interesting:

Microchips can also be attached to players, or directly integrated in your gamemodes to add new logic. Originally, we wanted to wait on Behaviors (our scripting language) to bring this ability, but it seems obvious that wires are a great fit here too, so we're adding it for EA!

We will be adding onto the collection of gates available, allowing you to do even more powerful things, like listen to game mode and player events, and do things with those events when used in conjunction with the Microchip.

Tutorial World

The tutorial widget we had in the demo, while it helped a little, definitely left many users confused. For EA, we plan to include a detailed Tutorial world that guides you through many of Brickadia's building features, one by one, in an approachable manner.

If your favorite future feature isn't listed yet, don't worry! This journey continues on far beyond Early Access.

Key Giveaway

For those who opted-in to the key giveaway in the survey, we've gone ahead and emailed the randomly selected 5 winners a Steam key. Congratulations to the winners, you will be able to play the game as soon as it releases!

Thank you!

And to everyone that had a chance to play the demo, thank you! For those who haven't seen any of the amazingly creative builds users have built, here is just a handful of ones we picked from our Discord and socials:

And finally, some crazy devices that employ sound. Take a listen!

We’re really excited about what’s coming next, and we can’t wait to share more with you soon. As always, thanks for all your feedback and support—it means the world to us! If you have additional feedback, you can always drop by our Discord (we're active there!), or send us a message through any of our social medias.

And lastly, Happy Frog Day! Wait, what do you mean it's not Frog Day anymore, and it was last week? Oh well, have this frog anyway.