Pirate Quest Q&A Mar 2, 2018[]
Rec Room Developer Q&A "Pirate Quest" Edition!
YouTube video by Notorious RBG
Abbreviation key:
Q: Question
DQ: Discord Question
gr: gribbly (/u/gribbly)
St: Steederino (/u/Steederino)
BB: BeeBoz (/u/BeeBoz1)
VV: VotaVader (/u/VotaVader)
Jh: Josh
UP: Unknown Player
Q: What were your ideas of making Rec Room-- what, what were your initial plans, and the future..?
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gr: I think we touched on this in previous Q&As so I'll make it pretty brief, so basically, we are coming up on our two year anniversary as a company in eight months and of Rec Room being live, which is wonderful. The initial idea was, you know, we were super excited about VR and especially excited about the kind of tracked hand controllers that the Vive had just released. We were just like, "Wow, this is super cool!" So honestly we were like-- "Seems like will make the Wii Sports of VR," and then we were like, "Maybe we should make the Wii Sports of VR!" And then we were like, "Maybe someone -- y'know, it would be cool if that were social and we could hang out with people from all around the world and like, play all these crazy games." And so that was kind of the starting impulse, and it's grown into this crazy thing that we're all doing now. But yeah, that was the backstory.
Q: Are we going to get the boxes back when we play our games?
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BB: In this recent update we took the boxes away. We re-tweaked the whole system around, gifts, packages and avatars and them, to fit more with the Merch Booth. We got a lot of positive feedback from the Merch Booth, so we are gonna move forward with that being the main way to get boxes. I'm not saying that there is never going to be boxes again in the future, but right now we are trying no boxes and we are going to see how it works.
MLJ: 'Cause a bunch of us said if we had known that we would've avoided the Merch Booth.
BB: You would've-- avoided the Merch Booth?
MLJ: I would've avoided it, yeah. 'Cause I don't really see a reason to play games anymore.
BB: So you are missing-- you're missing the boxes mostly from the activities, is that what you're feeling?
MLJ: Yeah, because like, the whole point of us going to Charades and playing Charades for like, 4 hours was so we'd get the boxes. Even if it was like one or two stars, it was the fact that we got something out of it that was fun.
BB: Okay. Alright. We were getting a lot of feedback that people were feeling sad about the dupes they were getting from the boxes, that the box experience wasn't really awarding. So that's--
MLJ: Is it bad that I think I'd want that back?
BB: Okay, yeah, understood. Thanks, M'Lady.
gr: Yeah, excellent feedback. And as anyone who has played Rec Room for any period of time knows, we tend to experiment a lot. We change things, we add things, so we're always going to listen to your feedback. So keep it coming! And if we get overwhelming feedback that you prefer it a different way, we will certainly consider making changes.
Q: Will there be a paid version?
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gr: So, yes, in some form. At a certain point, we need to start making some money as a company. We've been lucky to get some investment and being able to create this free social app. What we've said in the past is that we-re always going to have free access to Rec Room. We're basically going to keep Rec Room free. We think of us-- you know, we're a social app, the more players we can get, the better off we are for you guys, for us, for everybody. But yeah, we'll have some premium features; We are not 100% sure. You can probably over the next year or so expect us to start experimenting with some stuff like that.
UN: Awesome, 'cause I'd happily pay.
gr: Alright thanks, that's nice to hear. I appreciate that.
Q: I was wondering if we are-- in the near future will we be able to get moving stuff? Like sliding doors, like animation?
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gr: So the answer is yes, we are definitely thinking about that actively. In fact, in today's update, we introduced what we call "Holotars." I don't know if everyone has had a chance to play with them yet. It's a pretty basic-- there's actually a pretty fun one in the Pirate Quest lobby if you haven't found it. There's a fun Holotar that tells you about-- It was Ghost Beard's Nephew that came in and did that voice acting for us. In terms of animating things, we're definitely looking into supporting various kinds of physics, and expanding out the Holotars. We want to figure out a way to let you move things like open curtains, close curtains, move things around. We're not 100% sure on how it will work but we are definitely going to be exploring that, for sure.
Q: What are the different ways you guys are thinking of moving on and putting-- (inaudible) --work with other companies to bring their branding in?
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gr: I think the answer there is "maybe." It is certainly something we've talked about and it seems like something that seems like it could be fun. I think for us, we would want to make sure it was the right kind of partnership. Those of you that have been playing Rec Room for a long time will remember we did a partnership with Servios a while back when they released Raw Data, which was real cool. We did some custom items, they were really fun to work with, and so-- yeah, I think you can expect us to do some partnerships. It's really just a matter of finding the right opportunities. For us, we are so busy updating the game and building up custom rooms and things, that we probably don't do as good a job as we should reaching out to people. So if you ever think of good companies, or you ever want to put people in touch with us-- support@againstgrav.com, let us know.
Q: Are you glad that all the big Youtubers played your game ages ago and got it big?
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gr: Yeah, absolutely, of course we do. We want everyone to come play Rec Room and have fun. So if people want to stream it and kind of get people excited about it for us, that's wonderful for us and we really appreciate it. So yeah, we love that.
Q: Is there going to be-- are you gonna be add on more circuit functions?
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gr: Let's talk about circuits for a little bit. Is Duffy here? He's not. Okay, A couple updates ago, we introduced circuits into the custom rooms, so this is like, chips you can wire together to create behavior and logic, with the goal to create your own games in Rec Room, that's really what we're trying to do. And the question was: are we going to keep expanding that and making it more powerful? Absolutely, 110%. That's a big priority for us. So, in this-- in today's update, we added a couple of new chips. There's random number generator: we've connected dice rolls to the circuits, so you can trigger circuit events with dice now. There's sound effects-- there's a sound effects chip so you can trigger sound effects. We are about to add circuit control for the to Holotars. So the Holotars are recordings of your avatar so you can be like, "Hey welcome to my room! Blah blah blah!" We're gonna allow you to trigger that with circuits. That's coming really soon. Basically the plan is we want you to be able to build complete games, and share complete games with circuits and the Maker Pen and the other custom room features. I've gotta say, I know I end up saying this every Q&A but I'll say it again just for posterity: We are continually blown away by what we see people build in Rec Room. It's fair to say-- we share it internally around the company all the time, and we're like, "Look at what they built! That's amazing, we can't believe it!" So yeah, we're always inspired to see what people build, and so we're gonna just keep adding more and more power for you guys to make more and more amazing stuff. Eventually, we want to retire and just let you guys build all the games. (laughs)
Q: What are the goals for the clothes? There's four different sets you can buy in the S rank, and how come the 4 sets are all the same price when there can be an A rank, or C rank, or B rank?
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Jh: The idea, basically, is that we are going to give you more outfit items that are not gloves if you do well. We want to have more opportunities for people to get more and more combinations of different gear. And so-- We also really want you to earn gold while you're playing Pirate Quest and spend that gold on things you really want and you care about. And so-- as you play, make sure you then save up so you can buy the hat you want. Really, it's about giving you more desirable things to work for and spend your hard earned gold on.
Q: I'm wondering if you would be, like-- allowing us to disable tunnel vision when we teleport and when we turn.
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gr: So, I think the answer is probably yes. I think-- you know, we can certainly look at it. I think our policy is that-- y'know, now that VR has been around for a while-- when we first launched Rec Room, we wanted to be really, really careful about making anyone ever feel sick or weird or anything like that. I think now we've all got a little more experience under our belt, and that we know that some people can really stand a lot of motion. Some people can really-- We now have a lot more experience with VR and we know that people have a spectrum. Some people are really sensitive to motion sickness-- some people are able to tolerate a lot of motion, some people are really susceptible to motion sickness, and so we'll just keep adding settings so people can adjust to their own comfort level. I think you can expect us to experiment more with motion and things over the next couple of updates. We've got some interesting things in the pipeline.
Cl: With comfort flying and everything, you can actually- there's a setting in your watch called "comfort flying," and if you uncheck that, that'll reduce the tunnel vision for flying. And also, specifically about teleporting, you can uncheck "motion teleport," and if you uncheck motion teleport it will not have the comfort vignette.
UP: But it blacks out, doesn't it?
Cl: It will do a blink, yeah. But it's not gonna give you tunnel vision, though.
gr: Thank you, Cloud, I forgot to mention all of those practical things. But I will say stay tuned for the next update, there's gonna be some interesting stuff in that for people who care about those kinds of topics. One other thing I think I forgot to mention in the booklet, but the other thing we did in settings was we made it so when you turn off watch notifications, it shuts off all of them. So that your watch won't buzz, you won't get the haptics, so I know for some people that was a real pain in the butt.
UP: It was Naftie yesterday, yeah--
gr: It was Naftie that finally pushed us over the edge and made us think, "We gotta fix this bug."
Q: Are you guys planning on making other game modes in the future?
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gr: Absolutely. Josh you want to talk about this at all?
Jh: Sure, yeah. I would have said the exact opposite answer and I think we are done forever now. So, ah--
gr: Well, it's been fun everyone--
UP: GG.
UP: Wait, wait, wait, please, are you gonna have like, events in here. like Christmas and Halloween, like change the maps?
Jh: The real answer is yes more games, tell us what you like, post on Discord, post on Reddit... yes. gr: We are definitely going to do more games. We definitely listen to feedback. You definitely influenced our choice of Pirate Quest; seeing the excitement over the "Pirate Quest" as a theme, which was definitely something that influenced our thinking as we made this new Quest. By the way, has everyone tried the new Quest? (chorus of "Yes"s)
gr: Yeah, it is super hard, it's super hard. But yeah, hopefully everyone's having fun with it, and please let us know what you think, 'cause we'll definitely be making more quests in the future. What was I-- what I was gonna-- oh yeah, events! There was a question about events. I think-- We don't have all the details here yet. We haven't really thought about it. Definitely something we've been talking about is-- We won't create events, we will create an events system, because if someone wants to do a Christmas event it should really be you.
Q: The new holograph things, the holo-- will we have more-- I was thinking more customization, like Star Wars like, you know how it's all blue, or something like that. Or you can resize it to make it small and fits in your hand, and you can watch it. Also, a question on the new creative pen; its shiny now. I don't know if that's going to stay forever. Like, I don't-- it doesn't bother me, I'm just saying.
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gr: Yeah, for sure. We are definitely going to keep updating the Holotars. We're pretty excited for the expressive potential. And we like very much that the Holotars are pretty easy to make. Like, y'know, the Maker Pen and the circuits are pretty powerful and we're going to make it more powerful. It takes a lot-- y'know, you've got to be pretty skillful with them and make something cool. Holotars we like that you can kind of jump in and make something pretty quickly; so that's pretty cool. In todays update, the Maker Pen stuff definitely got a little shinier. VotaVader, you wanna talk about that?
VV: So that's basically because I can't do math. We've already fixed that, and it should be coming in the patch-- the fix for that should be just as it was before.
Q: I've got one talking about being able to add a bio to your profile, and then I have another one-- Because this game is really good in positivity, but there's a lot of guilds out there that don't stand for the same thing, and I have an issue with players putting my tag in their name, and then they go do something bad, and I get in trouble for it. But if there was some type of system where they couldn't put it in their name, unless they were dedicated to that specific group, it would make it a lot more easy and less confusing.
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UP: Kinda like a guild-bio thing.
gr: Let me repeat those questions so everyone can understand what we're talking about. The first part was, maybe it'd be good if we let you flesh out your bio maybe like add some biographical detail to your player profile, y'know so on Rec.net or in the watch you can kinda get more info. Yes, we're definitely planning to do something like that, that's on the list. I think we'll let people kind of express, "hey, here's what I'm about, here's the kinds of things I like to make, here's the kinds of things I wanna do." So yes, we'll do that. The second one was about groups and clans and things like that. Yeah, I think we're kinda actively thinking about how we wanna add support for groups as kind of an official feature in Rec Room. So you can kind of make a club and-- y'know I think our current thinking, BeeBoz, you might wanna talk a little more about this. Do you wanna hit this one?
BB: Sure, I'll give it a shot.
gr: Yeah I would just maybe share some of our thinking and we can get some immediate feedback.
BB: Yeah that sounds good. So what we're thinking right now is that clubs or groups will be a spin-off of rooms. So you'll have a room that's like, your clubhouse, your main space, and then you can be a member of that room, and then that would show up somewhere, that you're a member of that particular room. So that's the kind of-- the way that we're thinking about rolling it out at first. Do you think that would help kind of serve what you're looking for?
Sp: It's kind of, but like, so like say like-- I have no problem with anyone else, their group, that's what their group does, and I completely support them and everything they do. It's just that, it's trying to make it so easy if someone's faking being in your group.
BB: Right, yeah, I think what-- with the system that we're thinking about, you would specifically-- you would request membership to a room, so let's say they had the (promotion removed) room, you would request membership to that room. And then (promotion removed) would say, "yeah, we want you to be a member!" If it was a private room. And then on your profile page, you would say that you're a member of the (promotion removed) room. So it'd be very like, explicit which groups you were a member of and which groups you weren't. Cool?
Sp: I asked that question 'cause there were a lot of other clans that had that specific question, because there was a lot of mis-confusion with some people.
gr: Got it. Alright.
Q: Have you ever thought of adding instruments to the game?
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gr: Y'know, very briefly-- yes, we think about that a lot, because we see a lot of people creating rooms to share music with each other and do musical performances and stuff like that, which is just-- which, it's awesome, we love that. I'm really into music myself. It's funny I hear you say when you're loading into the game, you tend to drum. I always do that, like whatever the theme song is while I'm loading I'm always (hands drumming motion)-- made me think that we should put some drums in the loading screen, so you could be like playing the drums while the game loads. (laughter) It'd be kinda fun.
UP: With the Holotars you can do acapella, like an acapella group.
gr: There you go. Yeah.
UP: Yeah, that's what I was thinking of doing.
gr: Yeah, the Holotar barbershop quartet. (laughter) So probably, anyone who's been involved with multiplayer programming will probably be aware that the lag is kind of a challenge. Y'know, there's Internet lag that makes collaborating in real time on music challenging. Not impossible, just makes it challenging. So that's kind of why we haven't done it yet. But it's definitely something we'd like to get through.
Q: When will you put some of the Pirate Quest things into the Sandbox system?
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gr: So I don't know if there's any reason that we wouldn't put it in soon--
Jh: No reason.
gr: So yeah it's just a matter of us getting to it, so I would say in the next couple of updates, we'll add some of that stuff. What would be the number one thing you want?
UP: Torch!
BR: Probably the-- to be honest like. the cannon and the torch.
UP: Frying pan!
UP: Yeah, frying pan.
gr: Okay, right. Loud and clear.
BR: Oh yeah, no, the frying pan. I changed my answer, the frying pan.
gr: The frying pan is my personal favorite.
UP: The fish and the frying pan.
Q: You know how someone earlier suggested clans? Maybe you could have clan wars, like you could settle disputes in a war or something.
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gr: Oohh, alright, so the question was maybe we don't just have clans, maybe we have clan wars. I don't know, what do you think, BeeBoz?
BB: So we encourage all kinds of hostility between groups of people? That sounds like a good idea. (sarcasm)
Q: I like what you guys are doing with the Merch Booth, but I was wondering if you could continue adding on while at the same time expanding so that way it makes character customization a lot easier. Instead of just randomizing it.
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BB: So Edgy, are you asking like, are we gonna sell more-- a number, a higher number of items in the Merch Booth, instead of like eight items or ten items, let's sell 20 or 30 or 40?
Ed: Yeah, or show just like older items, like the older they get, the cheaper they get?
BB: Yeah, I think certainly something like that. We're moving towards more and more items in the Merch Booth at a time. That is a direction that we're headed. So you'll see more stuff there, you'll find more stuff that you particularly are excited about, not just the six items or whatever that we have for a week. Yeah, that'll be coming soon, keep an eye out for that.
Q: Where does the number 87 come from?
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gr: The answer is it's the number between 86 and 88.
Q: Will you ever be able to upload videos to Rec.net and if so can they be edited? Because I've got a friend who's making videos about Rec Room, little shorts, and they're really funny and what I'd really wanna do is, have a movie theatre where they can be displayed. It would be really cool if that could happen.
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gr: I'm gonna give you one of my trademarked maybes! It's a great idea, I like it, we haven't really thought about it too much. We definitely would like to support video recording, we sort of have half-supported it in the past with the cameras. It gets a little tricky since it's kind of a different system on each different platform so it's work we gotta do to get it working, but yeah-- we definitely want to support that and again I'll repeat what i said earlier, we are consistently amazed at the creativity and skill in stuff that people build so the more that we can do to highlight it and make it easy to share the happier we're gonna be. That's a great suggestion thank you.
Q: Has the thought of a utility belt in quests so you can carry weapons and items ever come up?
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gr: Yes, that's something we've talked about; I think we've called it holstering, the ability to kind of put things on your hip and grab them off later. I know VotaVader has prototyped that in the past and so I think we'll at some form, in some cases will experiment with that. I know for the Maker Pen we want to make it available and easy to carry around so when you're making rooms and stuff you can have the Maker Pen just on your hip and stuff and much easier to get to. We haven't quite figured out the details on how that's gonna work, but yeah. We like the idea. Definitely like the idea for sure.
Q: When you block somebody they used to be completely invisible but now they're transparent and can still be annoying, could we change that back to making them invisible?
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gr: We'll definitely take that suggestion, we're constantly kind of tweaking the moderation systems. It's kind of a balance between making people completely invisible so they can't bother you at all and then sometimes if you're playing paintball and someone's blocked, we kinda gotta figure out what to do with like-- then you can't aim at them or they can't shoot you so it kind of-- it gets a bit weird. We probably need to figure it out so that like--
Au: Would it make more sense where-- so like, when people are in Rec Room or in some sort of lobby, they can be invisible, but like, during a game, they can be visible. Y'know, in that form.
gr: Yeah, yeah. That's probably a good idea. Thank you for the feedback, I appreciate it.
Q: When it comes to Youtubers and streamers and everything like that, I think it would be nice if there would be some kind of credibility for everything they've advertised in this game, maybe give them some sort of special badge to let people know "Hey, we're a streamer, we're a Youtuber..."
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gr: Here's what I'll say about that, Shawn is currently on vacation and traveling the world, but talk to Shawn and Mamamonkey, they've been kind of talking directly to people who are streaming and people who are doing stuff. They really own that kind of thing, so they'll have a lot of thoughts and basically if you can convince Shawn and Mamamonkey then... we'll do it.
Q: Will the Holotars ever be able to record objects you're holding as well?
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gr: Yes, we're gonna look into making it so that all that stuff gets recorded too. The more attention the Holotars get and the more people use them the more attention they will get.
Q: Will you ever add back the Go-Karts?
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gr: Well, at the time it made a lot of people feel really sick, it was really difficult for some players so we decided not to ship it at the time, now our current thinking is what we want to do is get the custom room and creation systems good enough that you can make Go-Karts. So i think it's unlikely that we will make Go-Karts, but we very much hope that someone in the Rec Room community makes Go-karts that you can drive around in and sit in and work like little vehicles.
Q: There was a whole lot of bugs and glitches, are you guys going to fix those?
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gr: So the question was: your game is a giant pile of crap, don't you feel ashamed of yourselves? And yes, yes we do. We absolutely do. We apologise. No I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
BB: Is there a specific bug that's troubling LazyOtter?
LO: The clothing. The box thing...
gr: Yeah, the giant box. Okay, yeah, let's talk about that, so you're absolutely right. In all honesty, we definitely have bugs. There's a lot we know about, there's a lot we don't know about. We really appreciate it when people bring bugs to our attention, it really helps us, especially if you figure out how to reproduce them and tell us how to reproduce them, because that makes it much easier for us to fix. But the bottom line is, you know, we're really prioritizing experimenting and developing Rec Room as quickly as we can, and so sometimes that means things have a few more bugs than we might want, but we think it's more valuable to learn how VR should work and how we can make it really awesome, even if that means breaking a few things from time to time. We always apologize, we always feel bad when things break. We always try and make sure that you don't lose anything like your items or your custom rooms or anything like that. Even if they're a bit weird for a while they'll always come back, because all that stuff's stored in the cloud. So yeah, apologies for any bugs. The tradeoff is, we want to go fast and make sure each update has a bunch of new exciting stuff in it, and that means that sometimes we have to break things, so sorry about that.
Q: So I have a serious question and a kinda not so serious question, and I'll start with the not-so-serious one. So in Pirate Quest we're running out of ammunition, I've got three players and none of us have weapons, and I was wanting to see if I can throw players at the enemies so that we can kill them and get something, because we're running low on ammunition. The second question, which is more serious, is: exclusive items in the boxes. One-star and two-star boxes don't seem to be possible to get anymore and the exclusive items, you can't get those randomly, or at least it would seem like you can't get them randomly any more, so I was wondering if there was any way to get the exclusive items in the future?
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Jh: Okay, well I'll answer the first question first. So you're saying that throwing players (sound cuts off)
PP: No, I try to grab them, but they don't highlight.
Jh: Alright, how about BeeBoz, you take the second question.
BB: Sure. So I think the second question was how do you get exclusive items, can you get them out of boxes? The ones in the Merch Booth, is that correct?
PP: Well I mean the exclusive items from, say, Paintball: Clear Cut, there's a lumberjack set and there's Disc Golf: Propulsion with the scientist set.
NRBG: Like the one that Josh is wearing!
BB: Okay, okay, yeah. So, we have those items, we also have some more items like that that we haven't released yet, and--
IKP: Like the dodgeball one?
BB: For example the dodgeball one, yeah. So, yeah so I think there'll be a way to definitely get those items. They're not in the boxes in the Merch Booth right now. The mobster and the flapper item from last week in the Merch Booth-- those are in the boxes in the Merch Booth now, so if you want to get those and you didn't get them last time you can buy the boxes in the Merch Booth and get them there. But eventually yeah, the Propulsion items and the Clear Cut items and more items like that will find their way back into the game, we're just not sure how we want to sling them in yet.
Sn: Does that mean-- can you get the suit and the mobster and flapper stuff in the regular boxes?
Cl: So right now there are no random boxes, the only boxes you'll find are in the Merch Booth, and yes you can get the mobster and the flapper item in the boxes in the Merch Booth.
Sn: And how many stars are there exactly?
Cl: The price is linked to the stars, so the highest price are four-star ones, the next highest price are the three-star ones, and the lowest price ones, which were the hand items are two-star.
Vo: How do you get the two-star boxes though?
Cl: That's a good question. You can't right now. Soon though, soon.
gr: Yeah, so as I say, you can't right now. Remember what we said about we like to move-- we like to change things a lot and sometimes we break things.
Q: Okay, so my friend yesterday got an item that I wanted out of a box, and I've got an item that he wants, so I was thinking of like a trading system but you can't trade quest items.
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BB: Why hasn't anyone asked for a trading system? So I think trading items between players is something that we are going to be experimenting with at some point. Can't do it right now, but expect to see something, you know, not super soon, but not super far away either, where we can trade certain kinds of items between people.
gr: Exciting.
Q: First from the Paintball league: we would really like to be able to turn on flying for spectators in custom Paintball games.
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gr: Loud and clear. So, something that we're going to be working on for the next update is-- you may have noticed, we kind of made a bit of a mess of non-sandbox custom games. Like, you used to be able to save and publish a paintball game, and we kind of messed that up when we did save and load so we're going to be working on that next sprint and we're hoping to kind of come out with a much more organized way of saving and sharing customized paintball games for example, so we'll look at if we can include flying. I'm not 100% if we can but we'll definitely look at it. We understand why you would want that, it makes total sense.
Q: Could we get some sort of message board or a bulletin board in custom rooms so that people could take pictures and post them, and maybe it would be Circuit-enabled for a high score system?
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gr: Yes, let's talk about that offline. Hit me up on Discord or something like that and let's talk about the details because yeah, that sounds cool and-- yeah, so the question was: could we add like a circuit-enabled kind of bulletin board thing for custom rooms, and so the answer is probably - we'll have to look into the details, but like generally speaking the way we think about custom rooms and items is the more general-purpose it can be, like the more different things you could do with it, the more likely we are to do it, right? If it's just like one really specific thing we might not be able to prioritise that but if it's something like that which I think a lot of people could get value from, yeah, that's something we're happy to look at.
Q: Are you planning on bringing a zombie game to the game?
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gr: This sounds like a question for Josh or Cloud.
Jh: Are we planning on it? Well, we don't do a very good job of actually planning for anything, but you'd like to play a zombie game. Do you think that would be quest or how would you like to see that done?
Te: Like a quest.
Jh: That sounds pretty cool.
VV: So... Call of Duty: Zombies basically?
Jh: Ah, there you go. Maybe a quest where you have skeletons or undead enemies that you smash with found objects, like that could be pretty cool.
gr: No, no one wants that.
BB: No, zombies.
Jh: Cloud, you want to add anything to that?
Cl: Sure, I mean we're always entertaining new quest ideas and I think one of the things that we'd love to see is that when people are posting on Reddit and Discord like your new quest ideas that you come up with. All those influence us in future quests. Before we had pirate quest I think one of-- somebody from here, not this room but the community members recommended pirate quest from a long time ago, and we'd spend, you know dilly-dally and going back and forth between different ideas but ultimately what you guys want influences what we make.
Q: Is there ever going to be an open world kind of thing?
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gr: I'm not 100% sure, but-- open world means different things to different people, but something I will say is that, one of the things we are looking at, now that we're done with the new quest it means that we have time to work on some new levels and things for other stuff-- (Notices glass hovering in front of him) How'd that get there? Does everyone else see a glass up there?
NRBG: Vota!
gr: It was-- oh it was Vota!
UP: It's Against Gravity! (Laughter)
gr: But something with-- something that's pretty high priority and something you can expect in the next couple of updates is, we're gonna do a-- what we call a blank slate world. So for creating custom worlds, rather than starting with the Park or with this Performance Hall, with the, you know-- you can start with a blank slate with nothing in it, so everything in the room is something that you've built. So that would mean you could have as expansive of a space you want. If you want to make like a PUBG or something like that, obviously there's a bunch of mechanics we have to add, but yeah, I think that kind of battle royale game you need a lot of space for. So, if that's what your friend means for open world, then yeah.
Q: So who exactly is the voice actress for coach?
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gr: The answer is: What makes you think it's a voice actress?
NRBG: Well she is recorded, and did said something, so I assumed... but anyone can be a voice actress.
NL: That's what you get for assuming, Notorious.
NRBG: Natti, I don't need your guff right now.
gr: Where-- where was that voice actor from before? This, uh-- I'm going to plead the fifth on that question.
Q: So for the new options for watch notifications you can have it on or off. I always have it off, so I'd still get the buzz but not the giant notification in my face. So now, I do get my notifications, but now I can't see.
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gr: How about we do this: maybe we should make it a slider. So it can be off-- all the off, on all the way on, and like buzz only with maybe just the haptics and the buzz. Sound good?
Q: We can use custom weapons for Paintball, like bow, which a lot of people do. Are there going to be added more weapons to custom games for Paintball? For example, a sword with blocking option from Pirates?
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gr: Yes, generally. As for the sword, I'll defer to Josh about that one. 'Cause that may be more challenging from a technical perspective.
JH: So, we have played around with swords in Paintball before briefly, and it doesn't just drop in, unfortunately. A whole lot of, like-- just, it swings through people and it doesn't feel very good. But, a lot of the guns, absolutely we can add, so maybe if there are some new favorite guns, y'know, now that the Pirate Quest is out, they might want to see those in some of the other gamemodes, we will probably-- definitely do that. But again, with the swords, if we hear it's a really desirable feature for you guys, then we'll take it very seriously.
Q: A lot of people were very creative actually to create their own gamemodes, their own models where people can play against. I was actually thinking of, there is only one hit option, where when you hit an enemy or another player and it says, "Hit!" Are you guys thinking actually of doing something different, like a respawn option?
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gr: The answer is yes; for sure. That is basically one of the next big things we are working on, is making it so that you can create module-complex, and module-complete games; that is for sure.
Q: What is the future of circuits?
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gr: There's a couple more things we can talk about with circuits. Circuits, for anyone who hasn't played with Circuits, they're basically a system where you can wire up chips to create logics like, you can be like: "Oh, something happens, we're gonna do some math and we're gonna like, decide something else that happens. It's basically a very simple form of programming so you can create your own games. There is basically two major things that we're looking at right now with circuits that kind of are gonna be "the future of circuits," like you asked. On the one side: every update you can expect us to wire the circuits into more and more things, like the next things you can add circuits to the Holotars, for example, so you can trigger them. When we do the respawning and stuff like that, that'll all be circuit-enabled so you can be like, "Hey this circuit says this number is now eight, so that means you should respawn something there or move something over there." So all of this stuff-- basically more and more things have been getting circuit-enabled. Actually internally, if Duffy was here, he's been playing with-- we've put a circuit input onto some of the paintball guns, so that you can fire based on circuit things, and make targets and that sort of thing. So that one's pretty cool. So that's one thing-- the other big thing we're thinking about is basically making circuits shareable. One thing with circuits is that they're pretty tricky, and they're not very, y'know-- they take a lot of input and brain power and learning to kind of-- because you're basically doing programming when you're using circuits or electrical engineering. So they're really great but they can be quite challenging. So something that we wanna do is make it so that-- when someone creates something really cool with the circuit, like y'know there's people building computers and keypads and lock-boxes and all kinds of crazy stuff. We want you to to be able to package that up and share it with other players. So basically, when one person has solved a really complicated circuits problem, they can hand it off to someone else and then they can use it as is or customize it, and stuff-- Does that make sense?
HP: Yes.
gr: So yeah, that's kind of what we're looking at as the future of circuits. It's basically all about making it so that you guys can create your own games and share then with each other. That's the whole idea here.
HUGE thanks to alifeee, PoliteIguana, Humblebug, and Shoxic for helping transcribe this Q&A!