Apologies for the delay in the release of this blurb, I caught COVID a couple days before last Monday and that really screwed with me working on anything. Think having the worst headache, fever, and feeling like slump for a couple days before finally being able to sit up for prolonged periods of time. Not fun, not epic. I will say though, with the extra time given to me, and the fact that being sick kind of felt like a mini-vacation at home, I got to give more detail color-wise to this week's banner. Keep in mind, no Leon's were hurt in the making of this banner. In all seriousness though, it was very awesome working on this banner since I love both pirates and old maritime sailing ships, cool stuff!

Anyways, for this week's speculation column, we'll be taking a look at three pieces of content, a video, a message, and an image recently shown. Hopefully you guys like this week's comic as usual, I know I don't talk about it as often but I do always enjoy making a funny gag for the comic, and I hope you guys find them a bit humoring as well.

Now with all those shenanigans out of the way, lets take a look at what the community has been up to this past week:

Quite a bit has happened recently, some that we can look forward to discussing in future speculation columns, but today we'll be taking a look at a couple things: a brief snippet of a psuedo-reveal, a new video by the developers, and a potential animatic?

First thing's first:

Credit: Saturn

Now while this isn't saying straight up that we're going to be expecting a development blog IMMEDIATELY as if it's something to be giga hyped over already, it does reveal that we could potentially see a new development blog some time soon, whether that be in the next month or so. So keep an eye out for that, and given that the goal from the developers is to have development blogs more frequently without a millennium passing in between, this would be the perfect opportunity to see if they're able to work up to that goal! On what the development blog could be about, I would not have a clue, especially considering anything regarding development information being available more frequently would probably have less development information in those blogs since there's less to cover over smaller spans of time. It ain't the same as getting a mountain of information each time, but I think anyone would be happy with a more frequent meal instead of surviving on droplets.

Secondly: This new environment is so beautiful! (Youtube Short)

This Youtube Shorts video covers a bit of the new information we saw from the last development blog in regard to environmental settings, as well as a very cool snippet of the video I want to look at real quick: the plane in the final part of that video! As it turns out, this actually isn't a plane flying in the air using actual vehicle features. In all actuality, the plane is frozen in the air, and the clouds are moving past it really fast, and the propellors are just making it seem like it's moving by spinning fast while the plane is moving.

I know what you're probably thinking though. IT LOOKS SO GOOD! I know, I was thinking that too. It is interesting to see how at this point in Brickadia, we still have not seen more information revealed in a direct way about vehicles other than small fragments of pieces, as well as "emulations" of how vehicles could function. Again, many of the same questions do pop up again, like the existence of standardized vehicles, wing parts, all that sorts of gobblemagook. While this comment is particularly old, it does give some vague idea as to how vehicle creation of any kind could be done, though I wouldn't completely take this as absolute certainty: plans change, and for all we know, they may have come up with a better way of making vehicles.

For now though, it'll seem like we'll have to wait until a video shows in detail and describes in details how vehicles will function, move, and do anything.

Lastly, a recent picture was shown yesterday on Brickadia's discord by Sixmorphugus:

Now, it was a little tough making sense of this picture, but one thing to keep in mind is that Brickadia was made on the Unreal Engine. As such, I imagine this is probably a viewport part of the game IDE that allows you to edit the game in regard to literally anything about the game. Keeping that in mind, notice the camera on the left, the arms, and the fact that another player model is on the right. Keep in mind too that an icon on the right has a spotlight and a lightbulb, and behind the right player, there is a sound icon. Keeping these things in mind, one could speculate that either this is an animatic, or perhaps a new menu for Early Access. While it is difficult to extrapolate on just this image, I would imagine that to promote the game Brickadia, the developers likely want more than just videos describing the game. As with any game, animatics showcasing the game itself is a standard practice, and given that we haven't seen anything for a game of Brickadia's magnitude (magnitude as in potential, to be exact), I would imagine that'll change quite soon.

The reason why I thought it could be the making of a new Early Access menu, however, is because of the fact that given the release date of Brickadia is potentially in a couple months, they'd probably want to get that started sooner rather than later. However, I would also imagine that having a player run in the menu and constantly making footstep sounds would probably be annoying, so it's VERY reasonable to subscribe to the animation video idea. But who knows, we'll just have to wait and see. If it is an animatic though, it better be epic and awesome, animation is always a very creative way to express ideas and concepts, so hopefully with Brickadia, they'll make something that really POPS. Just watch it turn out to be "actually, we were just updating animations lol".