For this week, we have a very Mr.LoL themed blurb and banner! I was inspired to make this after a community vote AND after the fact that I was sick, so for me, and considering what has recently been posted by this user, this felt VERY fitting. For those unaware, Mr.LoL is a very cool member of the community, and while he might not be a crazy contributor of some sort, his community content is very, very enjoyable to look at, and we'll be taking a look at some of those!

Additionally, members of the Brickadia community were asked to design their own idea for a cosmetic that they wish they could see in Brickadia, some good and some on the funnier side!

On top of that, for this week's speculation column, we'll be having Tantiem once again take the reigns for speculation, and be excited for it as he covers recent bits and pieces of development information from the development, VERY interesting stuff!

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

Hey all, Tantiem again filling in for Durb’s speculation section. Speaking of Durb, has anyone checked out his Patreon yet? I didn’t know it existed until last week!

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. This week, we will be speculating about the mysterious dev media posts, what they could be relating to, and potential reasons as to why Sixmorphugus decided to post these specific ones.

Credit: Sixmorphugus

This one looks to be an in-editor screenshot of a default character running, and behind them in the same scene is a pair of arms, looking to be a first person camera view for the player. It also looks like the running player is lit with a point light, a spot light, and a sound as well as collider.

This was posted with zero context, with many calling it “camera arms”. Many had speculations about what they think this could be; from an edit to the first person / third person camera controls, to a new animated sequence for the game.

I will get to what I speculate this image could mean, but only after analyzing the second dev media, as they are slightly related.

Credit: Sixmorphugus

This image is a bit more clear on its purpose. I believe the original intent here was to showcase funny head’s immortality is set in stone due to its phenomenally bonkers cult classic status (egg).

The important thing to note here is that this is simply the first entry in a list of many model reviews. It is fair to assume that many more items we know of (or possibly haven’t even seen yet) are going through a design critique, and many may possibly either get removed or remodeled in a way to more closely fit within the style guides of the project.

Why is this important though? And why did I say that I would leave off my speculation from the above image until later? Because these seemingly unrelated and vague screenshots of development actually both point to one thing, at least in my mind. In addition to other slight indications of development progress, such as this:

Credit: Sixmorphugus

Focusing mostly on the part about the inventory rewrite being fully done, and multiple other blog posts being worked on simultaneously, I think I can accurately guess the topic of at least one of them: the polish update!

No, I don’t mean the Polish, or even nail polish accessories being added, but rather major aspects of the game are undergoing quality review and polish updates, and I’m willing to bet some golden bricks that one of the next three blog posts released will focus on polish features, including (but not limited to): UI refresh, Avatar Customization refresh, inventory rework, building controls rework, etc…

I think this is super exciting personally, from a few different perspectives. First of all, when a game gets polished well and in the right places, it becomes an entirely new experience. I don’t think I can properly expound how massive the change from A4 to A5 felt to me, and that was nowhere near the magnitude of polish and change we are expecting from A4 to A5. A lot of placeholder alpha assets probably also need to get 86’d and replaced with more official versions.

Additionally, polishing is one of the last steps you undergo during development before release or major update, meaning that timeline wise, EA coming out this year is not an unrealistic expectation. As cool and exciting as all the new features will be, I think the development team is working really hard to give that “brand new game” experience to all the die hard fans that have been following the project for 7+ years (in addition to all the new players) by reworking everything about the game, down to the finest details.

I understand that it can be hard to say when your game or build is ‘done’, since there will always be one more bug to fix, one more animation to smooth out, and one more UI element to reorder. Eventually, the hard decision will be made to say that good enough is good enough. After all the time and effort that has been put into polishing the game for its big debut, however, I can confidently surmise that in more ways than one, Brickadia’s early access release will be a refreshing take on everybody’s favorite sandbox brick game. Wishlist on steam, and tell all your friends about it!

(Upon further review of the first image, I’m pretty sure it’s just a separated prefab of the player: default falling animation, bean collider, spotlight for flashlight, audio emitter, and both first and third person rendering views. Maybe not as special as previously thought. Oh well. Too late now. What a shame. How unfortunate. Just kidding everything else still stands. Or does it?)

Follow the blurb for more bleeding edge details on bricjagame ~.