Welcome to today's blurb!

Apologies for the radio silence for the past week, work put me on to work 6 days in a row recently AND I got sick. Currently, my voice is gone!

Health issues aside, the demo is over! They've taken the child away! Have you emptied out your tissue boxes in response? Have you gotten everything that you wanted to do completed in the demo?

I, for one, am very happy with the demo release. Not only that, can you believe that the demo was extended for ANOTHER week right when it was supposed to originally end it's week-long run?

Credit: Brickadia/Steam

If only they changed some of the wording in Steam's message to 2-3 weeks, then maybe that would help us out in playing the demo longer, don't you think?

Jokes aside, playing the demo while it was out was the most fun I've had in reference to the game, and seeing what was possible to make and what you other players made was an awesome experience.

Not only that, I finally got one of my pet projects out of the way that I've been working on for the longest time: I got to make a walking Strandbeest!

So hopefully we don't have to wait too long for whatever comes our way for the community next, whether that be another demo or the literal release of the game.

Now, enough yapping: let's see what awesome stuff people made during the demo, this is going to be a long blurb!

Just a disclaimer, this particular blurb may take a second to load due to the amount of media being presented, so please be patient. In addition to that, there's a LOT of content to look through to put on this blurb, so if you don't see your own pictures or videos here, it may show up in a later blurb due to the huge swathes of media I can pick from, so enjoy!:

The time has passed. Two weeks of Brickadia in the way we've seen it in development content for years now.

If I can say anything now, it would be that if you were doing something during those two weeks or skipped on the demo, then you absolutely missed out on the complete delight that was the demo for Brickadia. Even that, might I add, is an understatement.

Who would've thought that there would've been a week extension on the demo's availability? Even putting that aside, who could have imagined just how much was packed in on the demo's release? Joints of varying functionalities, new music tracks, a refined physics system, an in-depth UI overhaul!

Now I can list the number of things that the demo has in regard to features, but for those that tried it? You already know. So instead, let's get into my own experience and what I thought of the demo.

I thought it was awesome, near-perfect, and a must-try experience. Clear and simple.

That's really all I have to say on that, but don't act too surprised, you'd probably say the same thing.

So hoow about we get into some nit-picks and preferences that I would've appreciated while playing the demo, plus some things I noticed while playing.

For starters, while getting vehicles to work can be just the slightest bit tricky at first, seeing your car move after 10 or 20 minutes of work is incredibly rewarding. The only thing I'd probably say in regard to vehicles is probably tweaking some settings for when you first make the vehicle with the engine brick. What do I mean?

Here's a quirk I ran into real quick. I make frame of the vehicle. Ok. Slap the wheel joints onto there. Easy peezy. After that, wire everything up, slap those wheels onto the car, aaaaaand it's moving a little slow. Okay, not a problem, let's edit that engine! I change the driving speed of my vehicle, and all of a sudden, my car is doing somersaults. Well, good to see my vehicle is up for some action, but I'd think I'd prefer linear movement rather than vehicular acrobatics.

But why does that happen in-game? Well, you gotta know how torque works! Torque is the amount of force the joint ouputs to get something to actually move. A lot of torque means it's going to push mountains out of the way to get that wheel turning the way it should. Not a lot of torque means that wheel is subject to the friction of the floor more than the punch of the joint. So because the torque is naturally set to a decently high number, the moment you jack up the drive speed of the vehicle, it goes flipping around.

Now obviously this isn't the worst thing ever, but it's just a small quirk that I think could be given a simple solution. When placing the engine, perhaps the values for torque and drive speed should be inverted (relatively speaking). High drive speed, low torque! I can understand why the torque was probably set so high. I imagine the developers thought these wheels were going to be thrown on very large vehicles. After all, the bigger the build, the higher the torque you'll need. However, in my experience, I was making, more or less, smaller-scaled vehicles.

On the topic of vehicles, I noticed in the demo that the only thing we were able to color on the wheels was the rims of the tires, NOT the tires themselves. I remember seeing in a picture from a development blog that they could be recolored. Bring it back! If I want to make an accurate lunar rover, those tires have to be close to the hexidecimal color values of B7C2C1!

Since we're talking about colors, I also think that having entities like the physics ball brick and the tires themselves should be easily recolorable just like bricks themselves. The only way I remember being able to color them at that time was through brick placement, and THAT can be a little annoying, if not confusing. Also, materials! I can't change the material of my tires and physics spheres! If I want my entity balls to be bubbly spheres, I need to see through them with some sort of glass material!

Now one other thing that I should talk about is the tutorial. I don't think the tutorial for the demo was as fleshed out as the developers probably wanted it to be, nor do I think that this is what we'll be expecting to see as a true tutorial for release. My big gripe with the tutorial in the demo was that you couldn't easily exit out of it. Not only that, I didn't really learn anything!

"But durb," you may say to yourself, "the text is right there telling you how to use a tool or do something, what's the problem?"

I'm more a fan of tutorials that are hands on compared to a paragraph of text. In other words, I want to play, not read. Visual, kinesthetic learning seems to always be the way to go with tutorials. After all, you learn to play the game by playing it! So if I can play it in a way that forces me to learn how to use tools while having some fun, I think that's alright! So perhaps instead of text, maybe there can be a tutorial world in place of that that engages the player in making use of their creative arsenal, the end result being an educated, plastic mind, and a good time.

Lastly, joints! For me, the big selling point of the demo was physics interactions not only with vehicles, but with the joints especially. They allow for a countless number of uses both in terms of interactibility, design possibilities, and spinning! However, when designing my beloved, most beloved Strandbeest, a problem became quite apparent to me. With anything that requires a lot of rotational movement, say a crankshaft, you need something to keep it in place with! Now technically speaking, there probably is some way to do that without strut collisions, but I'm not THAT smart, and that'd be overdesigning something that should be inherently simple to begin with.

For that, I have an idea that could work out for that express purpose! As of right now, keeping something similar to a rotating piece like a crankshaft in a moving frame in place WHILE transferring that same exact physical rotation is a mechanically difficult problem. An annoyance for people who want to make mechanically-sound contraptions! For that, I recommend a new joint piece, the HOLLOW JOINT!:

I think a joint that you can extend a brick through just to have that brick kept in place would be very convenient, a piece I definitely needed during making my Strandbeest, for sure! One thing to note is that while I did design it with a long nub one one end, it would probably be better of the joint had a flat end to it so that it could readily be placed into a brick. Micro-sized variant included, please!

Other than that? If there's anything else for me to say, other people have probably said it, and from all those two weeks of playing the demo, I can't really think of any other complaints, if you can even call them that. While I may have sounded like I had a huge problem here and there with the demo, you know what's really the case? I need that demo out again. I CANNOT wait for the release of the next demo, if not the full release of the game.

So I suppose now would be the time to speculate on a question that I feel like we can maybe answer here, after everything we've seen. It's probably good that we tackle this question now too, considering what we got IS a demo, a demonstration of a product before we get our dirty hands on it:

Does the demo show Brickadia as a worthwhile product to buy into? Could Brickadia be a success and make a gorillion dollars, going off of the demo experience?

Alright, that was two questions, but you get the idea.

In my personal opinion, I think that if Brickadia had the behavior system that we're currently waiting for (which we didn't see in the demo release), a wider selection of vehicles to create, and a new and improved minigame system, I think it would be well worth the money.

But can Brickadia be a big success?

To answer that thought, let's build some context:

When I first booted up the demo during the first week, while I did play around with one of the starter worlds, one of my first thoughts was "I need to play this with other people."

If there's anything I can say, the way to play this game IS with other people.

Even the developers realized this too! On the day the demo was slated to close down, the demo came right back up at Steam's request. However, it came with one change. A server list! Before, you needed invite codes to play with other people. In contrast, it seems the developers saw that the best way for people to enjoy the demo was to really just server hop around a whole lot, and play with a lot of people.

But server lists and the fact that you can play with other people doesn't alone define a good game. I can hop on Overwatch right now, but that doesn't mean I'm having FUN.

If you're playing a game, you're expecting a game in it. And this demo has A LOT of game in it. Again, we don't need to go into EVERYTHING that was in the demo, but just think about it. Physics, vehicles, new tools, wires, the amount of stuff you can make that alone almost feels infinite. And the best part about it is the fact that you can play around with all of that with other people without forcing your PC to chug! What other game allows you the ease of access to all these sorts of features without having some major limitation and, might I add, an actual lack of features hovering over your head?

And the craziest thing about it is that this demo is STILL missing major features! There are more things to wait for, so if I'm giving as glowing of a review as I am now for the demo, even though this is more of a speculation column, imagine what's going to be the case for when the game is fully released, or when the next demo comes out (if there even will be another one).

Okay, enough kissing up.

Now I'm not claiming to be some expert who's capable of stating definitively whether or not something will be a financial success. However, just like you (the reader), I know what it feels like to have fun! For me, the game is fun. If the game is fun and I can enjoy it with other people, then I think it works out. And given that the biggest aim for this game is to be fun with a lot of people in an online, multiplayer setting, then what else is there to say?

Well, probably the disclaimer that I am not saying the game WILL be a success. But I certainly believe it can be.