Welcome to this week's special edition blurb!
In the past week for the community, a LOT has happened. By a lot, what I actually meant is that the developers have given the water-starved community a whole jug of water in the form of a development blog and, most surprising of all, a video showcasing physics and hinges! So in this blurb post, we're going to analyze the newly released the physics demo shown by the developers and the development blog next week as a sort of two-part feature!
In other news, the blurb has finally reached it's 10th post: 10 whole weeks of the blurb!
While it may not seem like quite the milestone, I personally thought I would never reach 10 blurb posts on this blurb. 70 days has passed since the creation of this blurb. 10 weeks of community content from the Brickadia community, and I have nothing to say but thank you to those who have stayed tuning into this blurb weekly for that duration of time, it makes me ecstatic, happy, and grateful knowing there are people who read this blurb, set aside a tiny fraction of their day to even take a glimpse of this page, and are always excitedly ready for the next post!
You have no idea how much that means to me, and it makes me more than eager to always deliver the content that you, the reader, enjoy!
With that out of the way, let's take a look at what the community has been up to:
The first thing I'd like to showcase this week are two pieces of fan art someone made, something I NEVER would've expected to happen!:
When I saw those, I was just as happy as my avatar in the first picture and not as beaten senselessly as the second picture!
The community has started up a new Brick Party, featuring all sorts of builds and ideas from builders from the community!
I won't showcase too much from the Brick Party quite yet as not many builds are finished yet, you'll have to tune in next week to see more!
Humongous Koi watching TV:
A throwback to an astounding space ship build, and yes, the thruster flares in the back ARE MADE of bricks:
Sealed, contained, banished:
Someone set smooth movement for their camera movement and set high FOV; very cool, weirdly difficult to watch (my head hurts):
RTX helps to show how tall we really are:
Even though maintenance happens every once in a blue moon, it's still tragic not being able to play for 30 minutes:
Chilling:
eeding
AAAAAUUUUUUGGGGHHHHH:
Community member Rothary has requested progress on my store:
Now we arrive at this week's user column!
Each week I will be asking members of the Brickadia community a question relevant to Brickadia at the moment, whether that be in regard to development, speculation, or even just hopes and desires surrounding the game itself.
The question this week is:
What was your favorite part about the physics demo?
Bluester16
"The virtual insanity clip at the end."
And I agree!
Moonkey
"Besides the part that had my crates bouncing around, it was definitely the tumbling pit with all of the objects encased in glass bouncing around with no spilling... blew my mind and I never thought it would be possible to get that kind of physics accuracy in a game I actually want to play"
I completely share this sentiment, the physics definitely seem refined.
Snails
"The ending obviously."
And I also agree!
Alright forget everything else in this blurb, this is where the meat and potatoes of this blurb post is going to be at.
If you haven't seen the physics trailer already, go watch the trailer here: Brickadia Physics Tech Demo 1 and, if you have any degree of understanding and retaining technical jargon, take a read if you'd like of the new development blog here: Devlog #4: Fast Collisions for Large Editable Vehicles
Now if you're back here and you still haven't taken a look in at least one of these things, shame on you. For this week, we'll be going over the physics demo video since there's a lot to talk about and analyze, next week we'll go over the development blog. With that out of the way, let's get into it:
Right off the bat, we can see how it looks in third person to hold objects with the Manipulator Tool, the tool that allows players to fling objects around in the physics environment. Taking a look at the Manipulator Tool, we can see that the beam is very much so the same as the Painter Tool, the tool that allows players to color items differently:
Somewhat interesting tidbit, though I think a different effect would be a bit of a fresh visual to see. Apart from that, we can also see that the Manipulator Tool above has its 3-beam appendages sprawled outward when the tool is active, neat!
Below, we can see the front-inner view of the Manipulator Tool clearly for the first time without the front bits blocking it!
Looking at the image below, we can see that the Manipulator Tool can apparently be inspected, a feature seen in many games that allows players to look at their tool in first person. If this can be done for the Manipulator tool, the question now is if the rest of the building tools can be inspected.
At this specific point in the video, we can spot a new cosmetic, which appears to be 2 thin gas tanks that the player can wear on their back. Additionally, two new body parts, which have been seen before, can be seen on the same character as well, the new body parts being the two feet pieces that are supposed to represent prosthetic feet:
Moving further along, we also find another new cosmetic shown in the video:
At this same moment, we also find player-made gears made out of microbricks moving the elevator up the shaft, showing that decent microbrick gears are likely a possible way to move objects as well. The means by which these gears move up could also likely be seen with the thin gray tracks behind the elevator platforms that are in each crevice of the elevator.:
Soon after, we see this fantastic shot showing the capabilities of physics and the potential for vehicles at the same time. The wheels can clearly be distinguished as microbrick cylinders. This will be important to keep in mind later, but for now, it's important to note that with the amount of high-count physics parts being seen and vehicles being shown to be any size, along with information from the Development Blog, it appears a lot more objects can be physics objects and vehicles in greater amounts and sizes versus if physics and vehicles were released right now with how bricks are currently loaded into the game:
A huge key point of interest to point out is the fact that prefabs and, presumably bricks, can be placed on moving objects and vehicles. This shows that even regardless of orientation or speed, bricks can still be placed on moving physics objects regardless of those properties!:
soder!!:
Only later do we also find that the map itself is being moved by large wheels. If you look along the ridges of the wheels, you can clearly make out the markings of microbricks. Given the previous case in which a house was shown moving with microbrick wheels and this case here, it could be reasonable to assume that we will not be seeing any larger cylinder pieces that are currently in the game, which, at max size, are 2x2 studs wide:
In an impressive display, a lot of simple prefab models are thrown into a giant washing machine build, also showing just how big and fast bricks can move with hinges:
However, it is at this point that some small cracks can be seen in the system. As is present in all games that involve physics, bricks can be seen in the video clipping into each other. The sole example I was able to find of this happening was during this washing machine segment, in which you can see a couple Leon models clipped into the side of the washing machine. Of course, you can't really blame the developers of this game for that, but that is an interesting thing to take note of:
While this may not be relevant, it is also interesting to point out that a lot of, if not most of the builds seen in this physics demo are player made, NOT developer made. As a matter of fact, some of the builds in this video, especially the blue ship and the entire room seen in this part of the picture, are built by one of the members of the community (Magus). Who knows if we'll see more player-made builds and objects in the next physics demo?:
In this part of the video, you can also take notice of the fact that the bottom metal spinner that the player stands on fidgets around while spinning. This could likely be as a result of the amount of physics objects clashing against each other. In some possible way, it could also potentially reveal some degree of friction that bricks could potentially have with each other. Who knows?:
During this part of the video, we can see a player sitting on a giant broom sweeping away smaller builds. It's important to note that the player here is just using the set emote to sit down on the bench. It is curious though that functional seats that players can stay attached to have not appeared yet in the promotional material for this game. This could likely just be chalked up to still-in-development:
Lastly, for the final segment of the video, we get a Brickadia parody of the music video Virtual Insanity by Jamiroquai. This scene was actually done the same way the real video was shot for this scene, in which a room was created and moved around on top of a floor. As a matter of fact, I got to speak with the builder of this room, Toriel, about this set, and got to see the build that was used in the physics demo video itself!:
This is very much so quite the room, they moved the room over the baseplate with no studs on it to achieve the effect they were going for:
Now for a video that's only about 2 minutes long, there's already a lot to take away it, it's amazing how just a small snippet of something can get you so excited for something even grander, but we'll just have to wait until release to get our hands dirty. And considering this video was released just about 2 months away from what would be considered Q3 2023 Summer (July - September), who's to say that we won't get another video next month or in July? But hey, now we're just getting ahead of ourselves.
That's it for this speculation column, I could go on and on about the stuff revealed, but it would probably take up two blogs-worth of page space, and frankly, this page is as unoptimized as it is already, so we'll cut it here. Next week, we'll be going over the content from the development blog itself, and reveal what the developers have shown that wasn't seen in either video and development blog.
And that's all for this week of the durb blurb!
If you want to see your creations, ideas, and speculations highlighted on the blurb, contact me at: durb#3215
See you all next week!