So, it happened. After quite a bit of time, Brickadia Early Access is available for people to play! We still can't really believe it.

We've been loving your creations on the Gallery. We saw a concurrent player peak just a little higher than what we had in the free demo, which is amazing for day 1 of the paid release! We also saw a really nice amount of engagement with lots of servers being put up and plenty of players running around doing things.

Short Term Roadmap

Bugs

It turns out the best way to find out how many bugs your Early Access game really has is to launch it! While we've tracked and fixed dozens of bugs during the closed beta, there are still a few more we didn't manage to get to in time.

Notably there are lots of crashes coming in from AMD. For now we've made the game switch all AMD users to DX11 by default as that seems to not crash. We've also bought one of the affected AMD GPUs and began debugging it, but it only arrived today, so it will take a while to fix the DX12 mode.

We're going to address the most critical issues as they pop up while we work on the new features. The first hotfix went out today, with more coming over the next weeks.

Gamemode System

The Minigame system we currently have is causing a bunch of problems and badly needs an update. It was made for Alpha 4, where it wasn't really possible to make any kind of real gamemode, and was meant more to help players mess around together in an otherwise building-focused server.

Over the coming months, we'll be working on a Gamemode system that will replace it. There will only be one Gamemode supported in a server, but Gamemodes will be much easier to use than Minigames and much more powerful. Crucially, they will be much easier not to use incorrectly, resulting in people who downloaded your world spawning outside it and other issues.

It'll be designed for hosts, rather than random players who want to deathmatch in the middle of a server hosted by someone else. In addition, once your Gamemode is done, you'll be able to put it on the gallery alongside all its internal wires, due to a feature called Gamemode Microchips we'll talk about in the next section!

Don't worry for your existing worlds with a default minigame set up - everything should port over sensibly. In fact, due to the removal of the "included bricks" system, many worlds that are currently broken will immediately be fixed!

Wires V2 - Come on... More Stuff!

Wires V2 is an upgrade we made to the wires system for EA. It turns your wire contraptions into a graph that is stored on the server, like this:

Wires are now automatically organized into a dependency graph so we can update all gates in the correct order in a single step. This means you can build arbitrarily complex circuits without having to deal with any of the problems getting multiple signals to arrive at the same time like in the demo! The new system is also massively faster.

This does add a new restriction - the graph can't have cycles, so you need to break your circuit up with delays. But it also means things that were slow in the NextFest demo can suddenly run very very fast:

It also means that there are no more "false" states. Unlike the demo, wire circuits fully update when an input changed, rather than signals taking 1 tick to propagate.

The new system has allowed us to add something called Exec wires. Exec wires make wires into a scripting system, by passing along a pure "update" signal rather than data. Any data passed into an exec port becomes an update signal if it changed to a nonzero value. Unlike the demo, this lets actions run in a chain:

Unfortunately, making the system itself took so long that we could barely include any gates aside from rewrites of the ones we already included in the NextFest demo! Which is a shame - because once those are in, Wires V2 will really start to shine.

Our plans for the following weeks are thus:

• Microchips - compress your logic circuits into a single 1x1f brick. Create entirely custom gates by combining the gates that come with the game!
• Variables and Branching - Store, read and write values when your wire nodes run. No more manually building flip flops or using the blend gate to store data!
• Proper Gamemode Support - MANY more gates for responding to minigame events like new rounds, custom chat commands, entity manipulation and more!
• Gamemode & Player Microchips - Store information on your gamemode/minigame and on players via microchip grids that save and load. Create callable circuits and build a fully reuseable gamemode - just with wires!
• Implicit Input Combining - Wire multiple things into one input. Booleans implicitly OR, numbers implicitly add, execs implicitly union. In some cases, save tens of gates!
• And Much More - Array variables and iteration, queues that can wait for many events with parameters, loops, data displays, strings, kinematic joints, entity homes, and more...

New Prefab System

This sadly didn't make the cut for the initial Early Access release, but we're very close to having our new prefab system completed.

The new prefab system finally replaces our legacy "brs" save files from the first alpha version, which can only store bricks from a single grid in a very inefficient manner, with a completely redesigned one based on the worlds format. We will include a brs -> brz converter with the release so old builds can still be loaded in.

Prefabs will then be able to contain full physics contraptions, properly tuned cars (including their wheels!), logic computers, and whatever else you can think of.

They're going to be integrated with the main catalog UI, so you can put prefabs in your hotbar the same way you do with bricks and entities. And we're adding a gallery for them so you can share them with others.

Bots

This was actually one of the most requested features to the game that we've been able to see, with lots of players having a strong desire to use bots to make zombie servers, or simply adding ambient NPCs that roam about the map. We didn't have strong plans for this, but we think it'll be cool to throw in as soon as we can especially with our focus on adding more gameplay features.

The initial version of bots will be ready soon, letting them hold different weapons, move around randomly, and be controlled through wires. This is only the starting stage, but we'd like to get this out the door quickly so that people can start experimenting with them. Here's a preview:

They will be improved over time, with features like smarter navigation, direct wire controlling, and a special bot type to replace players that disconnect from a minigame. These features might take a while to get to, depending on priorities once the first version is released.

Sounds

A much smaller but still prevalent complaint that was brought up, presumably from the excess of deathmatch servers, was the difficulty of hearing other players when they were walking around. If someone was sneaking up on you, you could barely hear them!

We'll be adding a bunch of smaller features to try to allow hosts to set up exactly how they want such things to work in their server. This requires certain systems to be rewritten first, but we'd like for the game to support dynamically changing how loud and how far certain sounds are on a team basis for minigames. You should also be able to change how a team perceives sound, such as making teammates sound quieter than enemies.

This is one of the lower priority changes, so we have no ETA on when that will happen. In the meantime, more sounds are going to be added to the audio components, as well as the environment settings. If you've got any desires, feel free to suggest them in the Discord!

And More...

• Aircraft - We've been experimenting in the last 2 days with tools for making aircraft. There is nothing that is showable yet but we expect this feature to develop quite quickly, so I've included it here.
• Better Admin Tools
  • Finder tool server admins can use to see a tree view of all entities in the world and find hidden or far-away spam entities.
  • "Home" positions for entities that they return to when respawned, leave the world, or when the gamemode is reset (mentioned with wire changes above).
  • Better, more in depth permissions for players - we've already started on this one!
• Avatars on the Gallery - It's coming, folks! We're just working on what the UI looks like.

Long Term Roadmap

While it's too early to fully get into details, we have quite a lot of other features we're interested in adding to the game, over the next year.

• Editable Voxel Terrain - Building terrain is super hard! It's so difficult and tedious for even experienced builders that it causes them to not try to build things. Unfortunately, if you don't build any terrain, Brickadia currently imposes upon you a very heavy visual punishment - the sight of bare plate as far as the eye can see. Terrain would fix this.
• Destruction - You've probably tried blowing up a wall of bricks with a rocket and noticed that nothing happened whatsoever. So lame! Luckily we're going to do something about it.
• Scripting - We're moving into prototyping for this. Luau is currently on the table, but research is ongoing. Stay tuned.
• Custom Content (Modding) - We have existing plans for how common types of custom content can be added to the game and automatically replicate to players joining servers. It's very much on our minds still!
  
  PS: We have removed all technical measures preventing modification of the game such as package signing and obfuscation. These were leftover from the Open Alpha and never intended to ship in the release. While we don't think this is the correct approach for a multiplayer game in the end, feel free to mess around locally in the interim. There will be no support.

Anything Else?

We'll be keeping our ear to the ground on what our players think is vital to add to the game. The things that we prioritize will change over time, so make sure to provide your feedback on what you think is most important, or if there's anything we haven't yet mentioned you want to see.

That's it for now! If your game doesn't work, let us know and hang tight, we'll fix it. Otherwise, we hope you are having fun! This is just the beginning of our journey.