This is the 20th post to have ever been made to this blurb, wild stuff! It has been 140 days since the creation of this blurb, or a little more than 4 and a half months. For this post, we have Tantiem joining us again as our guest speculator. This will also be the last blurb post that will have completely uncompressed pictures. I've been getting complaints as of late that the pages take forever to load, and the only thing that it can be attributed to it are the uncompressed high quality pictures in this blurb.

I also hope you guys enjoy this week's banner, as it takes inspiration from Jet Set Radio, LittleBigPlanet, and Modnation Racers. Took a lot of time to make, and considering I was busy towards the end of this week, I had to get it done early too!

Now with all that out of the way, let's check out what's going on with the community this week:

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.

Thanks to Durb again for sponsoring my contribution to the blurb!

So what exactly is the basis for this weeks speculation?

The Blurb™️ is a great way for people that don't live in every channel of the discord simultaneously to get the low down for each week of what is happening in Brickadia. So a few people might already know what I'm going to talk about, but for those who don't-well, hold on to your unlabeled plastic caps- because this week, we're talking about...

According to the above sources, it's apparent that not only are bots a confirmed feature, but currently in the development branch of Brickadia!

What is a Bot?

A lot of Blockland vets would instantly recognize this term, but for every other curious individual that hasn't figured it out by the context, bot is essentially short for robot, or, in other words, a non player entity that can be controlled through commands.

In Brickadia terminology, these bots would be controlled through behaviours, and (possibly) be able to do anything a normal player can do. In other words, this means AI.

OK, Nerd, why do I care about this?

This feature would allow players to create experiences that feature amazing gameplay elements such as Quest NPC's, PvE moments, mission companions (like fallout), and more!

Other consequences of this feature would include experiences that not only feature multiple players and multiple bots (zombies game mode stuff), it would allow for entirely singleplayer experiences

Isn't Brickadia a multi-player game?

While it is true that most people that play Brickadia EA and retail will care more about the online aspects of the game, being inclusive to different types of players is always a plus.

With the features already confirmed for EA, interesting puzzle and platformer experiences are already possible to be made for small groups or even singular players. With the addition of bots, players that enjoy linear single player experiences would be able to create and consume a giant variety of different game experiences.

Another important question: Are bots going to be available for Early Access release?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

From the looks of it, there might be really basic support for bots in EA (as far as behaviours are concerned), but I'm not totally sure we will have specific access to bots in EA.

Until then, keep dreaming up all the cool stuff you can make in EA soon™!

FIN

Thank Tantiem for that guest speculation column, 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!

Now this has been an update I've been working on for a bit, and I still don't have everything quite down yet. As you might be able to tell, this site finally has a solid background that you can read on while keeping the moving bricks in the background. Now all of you dyslexic, eye-challenged readers can now read with some peace of mind! And for those not as keen, we now have an archive page that lists all the blurbs and their banners so that you can more easily find the blurb you want to search for while at the same time acting as a gallery for all blurb banners ever made for the blurb!

I still have major plans, and I am still figuring out implementations that would make them work appropriately while also not appearing as a mess for mobile users. Again, as I usually tend to say, thank you for all the support you readers provide in just reading the blurb by itself. I am not a pro at HTML'ing, so if any of you guys want to help me out with upgrading this site in the future, let me know, I am always ecstatic to make this blurb more engaging while at the same time visually appealing to read!

On that note, there is ONE more feature on this whole blurb that is essentially complete, but I haven't been able to make function just quite yet for mobile users, so stay tuned for that. If any of you guys have any recommendations on features you want to see on the blurb, like a page dedicated to Brickadia fan-art, a page for polls, etc., don't screw around, let me know! Working on this page takes time, and unfortunately it is a little taxing sometimes especially when I have to sift through pages for resources or information for the speculation column.

Now with all that out of the way, let's take a look at the community content this week!

A recording of a player playing Brickadia on a VR game:

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.

One brief thing real quick, apologies if this week's blurb seems short, having worked on making some backend updates to the site while also experimenting a bunch this week didn't really leave me enough time to get everything in here that I wanted to. But that doesn't mean I'm going to skimp out on giving you a non-interesting speculation column!

As some of you may seen for the user column, I asked an interesting question this week about brick materials. For many of you, this is not a foreign concept as some games like Roblox implement brick materials as part material textures for objects, allowing for the appearance of wood, bricks, and the like. Now what some of you may not realize is that during the early days of Brickadia, there was one material that was in the game!

That's right, WOOD was in the game. Now since they aren't in the game anymore, this leaves us incapable of making any tools or crafting benches. Stupid jokes for 12 year olds aside, the prospect of their being specific materials for bricks is a very interesting and open-ended topic, as the possibilities are almost nearly limitless for this sort of feature. Now as to why it was cut? I do have an idea, that being that it probably didn't look that good, or really mesh well alongside other bricks or even players.

There are a couple things to take away, but in reference to the main point, wood probably got cut because it probably didn't work out all that well in practice just in terms of appearance. However, if you also notice in this picture, they talk about the idea of a canvas brick. Generally speaking, this refers to the idea of being able to draw on bricks. This would easily allow for players to draw text, images, and the like, and there seems to be interest in the idea from the developers in the image. However, take that with a grain of salt considering it is a VERY old image. Though, the idea of drawing on bricks isn't all that bad, to say the least.

On the idea of different materials though, the possibility of damaged bricks could potentially be within the realm of possibility. One of the developers mentioned a plan for the addition of scuffed, scratched, damaged bricks based on a slider:

Whether we'll ever be able to see any of these additions ever again, we may never know. However, with the soon to come feature of modding in the future, we may very well see players add in their own wood-textures and the like, adding damaged brick textures for all sorts of bricks. Could you imagine a wooden turkey? However, now comes the idea as to how a variety of brick materials could affect the general style of a game as a 3D brick-building game. With the addition of a multitude of brick materials, could players push the boundary too far in trying to make builds as realistic as possible? Could Brickadia go the same route as Roblox, going from a 3D brick game to a 3D user-generated content cesspool of legally-questionable game ports? We'll just have to wait and see what the devs plan next for brick materials.

I, for one, would be fine with a brick material that looks like a granier brick like the type you'd see on a sloped brick.

And that's all for this week of the durb blurb! Apologies if this blurb seemed short, working on updating a site takes a lot of time away from quality blurb-work!

If you want to see your creations, ideas, and speculations highlighted on the blurb, contact me at: durb#3215

See you all next week!

This week, as you can probably tell from the banner, we have a special guest giving us some of his own speculation for this week: Tantiem!

Who knows what he'll speculate? Who knows if he actually wrote something that would absolutely get me banned from the community and permanently destroy my absolutely real chance at being a QA member? The world may never know unless you keep reading!

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.

Cowtastic

"Probably in the applicator. Right now it's hard to find where components are, especially lights. If it was possible to have a scrap-mechanic style system where theres little tool-tips above every brick with a component (of course with the option to turn this off) through walls and whatnot, it'd be a really convenient tool for server admins."

cutter

"I would add a UI that let's players track down components visibly. That way admins or builders can locate audio components without having to check every microbrick.."

"PSA Kenko and Clay Hanson: You must fix the AMD"

Cerv

"I want this search bar to work™️"

Thanks to Le Durb for letting me help them with their famous Blurb. Let’s get into it!

I know everybody is excited about all the features we know are coming up for EA (Behaviours, Physics, Vehicles), but something that may have been overlooked is the fact that behaviour scripting is going to be a collaborative experience!

So I know not everybody who reads this is going to know what eventing was like on Blockland, but I ran into the issue of having to take turns eventing stuff with other people, which could be pretty frustrating. So I for one was super excited to hear this feature of behaviours to be confirmed for EA.

So now that I covered something guaranteed to happen by EA, let's speculate about some stuff not quite so set in stone!

So based on this interaction I had with six a while back, it seems that the actual functionality for behaviour nodes isn’t too hard to create. Further conversation revealed that he has already created all the nodes he wanted to have ready for EA, and that any other node would be really easy to make.

What does this all mean exactly? Well, Unreal’s engine is programmed in C++, and Unreal’s scripting system is also rooted in C++. So, that means that ANYTHING that could be coded in a normal game can be put into behaviour nodes. I wouldn’t call it far fetched at all to have features as important / basic as having brick grids look at players, generating other bricks, firing projectiles, etc…in the game by EA.

At least by the way six described it, behaviours are built to be without constraints. On the other hand, what ever nodes do end up in the game is limited by what he thinks is best.

This final speculation piece is probably the one based in the least solid foundation.

So just to preface this, Six did say that this feature is not designed, only planned for sometime in the unknown future.

This came as a total shocker response, as I had never even considered this a possibility before. I remember many times in games like Roblox, Blockland, and even LittleBigPlanet where selection screens for things like levels and classes were restricted to physical space. So hearing that there are plans to make a behaviours driven UI is totally awesome.

This opens up the realm of possibility for extremely complex games. Games and experiences with custom HUD and screen information all working in tandem with the rest of the behaviours set up on a map. Showing where nearest item pickups are, custom health / ammo display, markers, quest objectives, the list goes on and on!

The final speculative picture to draw in your head to get hyped for Early Access, as well as the rest of this games future, is the following:

Pop open Brickadia, a year from today. You see one of the most popular servers on the list, Block Fortress 2, a tasteful play on words of the beloved Valve game. You join the server, and on spawn are greeted with a custom behaviour UI to select a class. Each class has (as discussed in a previous blurb) custom items for their specialties (i.e. Engineer with sentry). The world is made of hand placed bricks, and you run to move the blocky payload to the destination. All in Brickadia!

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!

Some of you guys might be wondering why today's blurb released pretty late today, and the answer is quite simple:

I promise it won't happen again, but I will say I did have a pretty good 8-hour sleep and a nice breakfast.

With that out of the way, let's take a look at what the community has been up to:

You may have noticed for this post that there was one image that focused on player scale being a feature that used to exist. However, when you look more into Brickadia's early development, you may come to discover that there were also previous bits of the game not so well known. The question I have though is that in regard to all of these features, could any of them ever make a come back?

Before we dive any further, let's take a look at what used to be in Brickadia:

Now we already covered player scale being a feature in Alpha 4 of the game through the use of commands, but what about different player forms?

In early Brickadia, the default player avatar was a lot more wider. In addition to that, every time the player spawned in, their outfit would have a randomized color. Now in the image above, the player is scaled to enormous heights, so just a disclaimer, that they weren't actually that tall. However, the idea of there being different body-shapes beyond what we currently have that involve differently sized players is certainly an interesting idea to say the least. Now we do have things like skeleton body parts, robot body parts, and the like in the game already, but what about the possibility of body parts like this?

Now that's not me saying we need something like this:

Now something to note is that the short Brickadian was a joke image, and the video is a literal meme, neither of these were ever in Brickadia in any publicly playable form from what I understand.

But you should get the idea. Now understandably, the issue with including a feature like this where there are differently scaled players is mainly in the fact that very large players end up becoming huge targets and bump into collisions a whole lot more. And for tiny players, then there comes the issue of them being too tiny to shoot. Then there's the whole matter of huge scaled players having their own walk speeds in proportion to their own sizes, and yada-yada. That's not to say all of this can't be done, there are some games that manage to implement things like this quite well and still work out fairly well. So that leaves us to wonder whether or not such a thing could ever make a return on a much larger scale.

Another thing to talk about real quick is the fact that early Peaks, which is a mountainous, snowy map, was supposed to have patches of grass and sand!

Could we ever see the return of a version of Peaks like this in the future? We do know that a terrain system will exist in the future, could it involve a system where we can "repaint" Peaks to have grass, sand, and more? Could you imagine walking through a desert version of Peaks (no jokes about desert peaks just being water cause all the ice melted).

We all know that Brickadia is still heavy in development, and we STILL don't know when the game will release exactly apart from a general date (which we'll get to in our next blurb post wink wink), but who knows if the developers will pull a bait-and-switch and give us a bunch of these features we didn't even think about! I, for one, would think it'd be very epic to drive on a tiny motorcycle though a desert wasteland which is actually just Peaks and immediately get blown up cause a player that's like twice my size stomped me with one foot.

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!

What some people might not know is that I do dabble in sprite art! This specific banner was made using the NES's NTSC color palette. While not as dubious as a 4-color palette, it's still very interesting dabbling with different color palettes from different systems. What some people might not know is that I used Aseprite to create this particular banner. For the rest of my banners, I used the software program FireAlpaca to draw and animate, it's pretty nifty and I've used it for years!

With that out of the way, let's see what the community has been up to!

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.

Thank you to Tantiem for always asking the good questions!

I don't know if any of you were there for early Roblox in or around 2007 to 2008, but generally speaking, there was a point where as a result of the fact that people didn't really know how to create shirts or weapons and stuff, some less experienced, younger users resorted to placing bricks directly onto the player to try and create armor and fake weapons.

With a feature like this, creating custom tools that could have several different behaviors sends me back to those early times. Could you imagine building your own slingshots in the palm of your hand, or creating enormously giant hammers just to hold it with one hand?

Now obviously it probably won't be exactly like that, but I would be one to speculate that in the near future, if custom items were able to be created that could be held in the player's hand, it would only be a matter of time until we got brick implementations onto players. Imagine hanging from a tether from your back in a sort of brick chain link, or being able to replace the player's arm with an enormous microbrick-built mech arm.

With what Tantiem asked Sixmorphugus, though, I can completely imagine that the road to having this sort of idea implemented wouldn't be too difficult, but then again I am not a master programmer. One thing to note to is that as of recent, players have been hoping for a feature where the color of a player can be changed in a sort of a silly way:

Perhaps with this kind of suggestion making it into Brickadia, who knows, it might encourage the developers to try and create even more wild implementations for custom items and what those tools can do to the player. I, for one, absolutely welcome the idea of a custom tool that shoots a cage at people and traps them inside for me to drag around. However, it is very much so an interesting surprise that this particular concept has some future to it, but we'll just have to wait and see what kind of future that is.

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!