Welcome to this week's blurb!

This week is the final week for the Brickadia community's Wild West themebuild! A lot of great, amazing builds have been made over the course of the month, and now with the end of the month drawing closer and closer, a new vote has been set up by the community to determine what themebuild to take up next! Hopefully prehistoric wins, gotta build them epic dinosaurs, amirite?

This week's banner was a slight challenge to make since I don't have too much experience in making shadows of extremely different colors, feels nice to look at but weird to apply. Pink and yellow? Orange and purple? Weird stuff, but it checks out.

Apart from that, a new development blog has been slated to release next week as told by Sixmorphugus, so stay tuned for that in next week's blurb!.

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

Once again, I feel as though I may be out of speculation content!

Or am I?

Cameras are a critical aspect of any game, whether that be in the form of a natural, good-feeling camera, or a janky, disjointed vomit camera. But beyond a player's camera is the desire of some to capture what it is in front of them. Screenshots, videos, cinematics, parodies, a camera is all a player needs for that. However, not all games give that tool to the player. Sometimes players have to resort to using the first person camera and just have other people run around and do stuff, that's not something that's out of the ordinary. But then you get to the issue of recording more complicated scenes, things that require intensive camera movement and work.

As of right now, Brickadia has the traditional character camera, but anything in regard to something that is able to be placed, rotate beyond the character's camera, or move along in a guided path is something that isn't quite here yet.

However, we do have the confirmation for a neat little thing:

Credit: Sixmorphugus

Now while this isn't confirmation that this is a tool that will be present in the Early Access release Brickadia, especially given the innumerable amount of things being worked on by the development team (innumerable cause I can't name all of them like I know exactly what they work on), this is something that could be considered somewhat significant for people who like to make videos in Brickadia, or for those who like to take some very dynamic, cool-looking screenshots as well.

Now frankly, if there is going to be a dedicated camera tool, I would imagine it has to be something that can be placed as a literal brick object, as well allow for some degree of recording and tinkering with the camera. I mean, every camera's gotta have a way to filter what's being recorded, or at least mess around with the FOV of a camera, right? Now don't take my word as truth for what is to come, anything else we know about that is next-to-nothing, this is me just rambling off my wishlist-desires for a tool like this. Also having camera rotation being built on would be absolutely sick.

I, for one, am looking forward to this kind of tool for all sorts of neat stuff involving flying vehicles. While recording vehicles is one thing, recording them taking a very specific path at a very specific angle is another thing altogether. Could you imagine recording a vehicle sequence with a camera object moving along a specific pathway to get those smooth shots? Currently, there isn't really a solid way to get smooth camera movement apart from nudging an analog stick connected to your computer.

But why do I emphasize the significance of a camera tool for recording things like vehicles?

To really understand, let's take a look at three videos I made a long while back:

Credit: me lol

As you can tell, I was ahead of my time (if you ignore the horrible green screen and the fact that these suck).

Now as cool as these recordings are, they were still exceptionally difficult to make. Now the issue wasn't in the fact that there were no vehicles for me to do this with, it was moreso the issue that as a result of there not really being a camera tool to record with, I was excruciatingly limited on what angles I could work with and what sorts of shots I could make while trying to keep it natural-ish looking, especially with issues like getting the angle of light right.

But with a camera tool, along with the plan for there to be things like hinges and paths for moving objects (like trams), we may yet see someone make something like this in the near future:

Credit: snore wars zzzzz