MY OPINION ABOUT THE GAME AFTER 6 HOURS

[proud vortex]

So, I played the game for 6 hours without sleep, and I am ready to leave my opinion and discussion of a small misunderstanding about its state and the developers.

• Brickadia - for me, it's like a breath of fresh air in the world of socialization, creativity, and opportunity.

I'm a CRAZY fan of LEGO, MINECRAFT, and ROBLOX.
(Yes, my hobbies at 21 are pretty weird, as people tell me.)

And when a friend showed me the game's TRAILER, I was shocked. It hooked me in after 15 seconds of gameplay, and I immediately ran out and bought it for $30 (we'll talk about the price later, as I understand people have different opinions).

What I liked:
Style
Character creation
Community
Creativity and people's ability to create various interesting things
Various graphics settings and optimization (I used EPIC settings with LUMENS and without DLSS, and on average I saw 120-140 fps, which is good for a game on UE5).

Tools, physics, and everything related to buildings.

What I didn't like:
Little content
Lack of scripting
Lack of modding
Lack of a map and terrain editor
Lack of various accessories/body parts for the character.
Little online game (And considering it's EA and the game costs $30, expecting thousands of players would be foolish; the highest number I've seen was 20).
Lack of communication with the community.

As you may have seen (possibly) our discussion in #1441377807744897116 , let me quickly and briefly express my thoughts on this by @fast hawk

1. $30 for EA is both strange and fair, let's be realistic. When you see an ambitious game from a couple of people with the EA tag, you immediately start thinking that the PRICE is too high and the QUALITY of the game is very weak.
   Something similar is happening in Brickaday. Remember Rust, Day,Z No Man's Sky, and thousands of other EA games? Some died, while others have 100,000-150,000 players online every day (I'm talking about RUST). DayZ has about 30,000-50,000 players.

I want to tell you: Projects like these take YEARS to develop, 5 or 10 years, but if the developers do everything right and the community trusts them, usually after a long time, more and more people start coming to the game. Who knows, maybe in 5 years Brickaday will have hundreds of thousands online and so on, or the game will die and remain in EA forever...

2. Lack of an investor/publisher. Yes, @hybrid helm told me that they wrote to the publishers, but the publishers thought Brickaday was the new Roblox, but in fact, what we're getting is A sandbox in the spirit of GMOD + MINECRAFT + LEGO.

3. Kickstarter - I would suggest developers try crowdfunding on Kickstarter. What could it offer? A price reduction on Steam, say, to $15-20, additional funding from the community, an increase in the development staff...

4. PATREON - as an alternative to Kickstarter.

5. Modding, scripting, and a world editor are the MOST requested features by the people I met during my 6 hours of play (and hundreds of others via Discord messages).

I hope next year we'll see the first versions with modding, scripting, destructibility, and a world editor... I hope...

Conclusion: Brickadia is a game with a 50/50 chance of being successful, like other ambitious sandboxes on OE5. (More precisely, Brickadia is almost the only game in its genre and style.)

GMOD - half-dead
s&box - it's unclear when it will be released, and it's essentially an engine and platform
Roblox - a full-fledged UGS platform
Nanos World - in development for almost 6 years and still in closed alpha
Onset - dead
HELIX - focused on RP servers

Essentially, we don't have much left, and I hope Brickadia can navigate this difficult path... or will it? will die like other similar sandboxes...

And thanks @finite pine best construction

I also thank these people for their constructive opinion regarding the death of the "brickadia"

@barren sorrel @olive aspen

I also hope that one of the developers @wheat iris @rigid flax and @hushed parrot will be able to give a full answer to what is happening. To be honest, after the discussion in #1441377807744897116 , I began to worry about the game and its future.

[olive aspen]

I truly don't think there's anything to worry about. It's an indie sandbox title with fewer resources than major well know projects. Just needs time and the community to believe in them / give them the feedback they need to keep making it better. Just needs time

[hybrid helm]

It’s also been steadily chugging along for years now. Every time we get new features (like wires and then even wires v2) we see people make more and more interesting things
While modding would be neat, there’s still so much foundational stuff like minigames and tons of new gates that are necessary. Also without a way for mods to be shared in-game when someone joins a server, no one’s going to see your mods unless they’re specifically server side like omegga or minigame-lite stuff
Scripting would be nice because wires can suck for large projects but also again without the minigame rewrite it’s kind of useless (and it needs to be able to hook into literally everything which makes their test surface WAY larger)

[finite pine]

wawawawawawawawawa

thx X3

[olive aspen]

Yeah this. And the foundational stuff is no easy feat. The devs need to account for an intense amount of things. They're essentially gamifying a game engine, which leaves an insane amount of misuse, game breaking bugs, ect.

[finite pine]

i hope it doesnt die bcoz this is literally the perfect social sandbox game XD

[thin anvil]

keep in mind despite being ugc, roblox is also host to a shitton of problems. gambling, predators, ai, ect.

imo its probably good that brickadia is not as big as it could be right now

besides the cool thing about EA is that even if things move slowly, there's still a hype-cycle that keeps the game moving. i do admit updates have been slow as of late, idk if there has been anything talked about recently on dev socials and #dev-media has been a dead zone for a while as well

but i would warn against catastrophizing during a slow period. there hasn't been any official announcement that brickadia has ceased development and people getting impatient and doomspiraling over mild case of no updates isn't going to help that.

i would say if it takes like several years for anything to actually come out then yeah i'd be worried. development often takes months at a time, especially with only 2 programmers.

if i were to give some actual critique, i would say the devs should think about possibly expanding their team at some point to help speed up development.

[proud vortex]

I proposed two options for funding and simultaneously expanding the team.

1. Kickstarter/Indiegogo
2. Patreon.
3. Hire someone from the community 😄

[hybrid helm]

I’m not really sure what the point is for kickstarter when they’re already selling a product. Like if people want to extra support them they can buy multiple copies
Any extra perks requires extra dev time or new people if they’re physical items and would be difficult to get a good ROI on if they don’t get a lot of funding from it

Patreon would be neat but I’m skeptical people would accept a “pay to get more dev insight/behind the scenes” when it’s still an EA game

They did actually hire vblanco in the last year or so and afaik he’s been focusing a lot on bots as well as some vehicle stuff? so while he wasn’t a community member they’re still looking to hire. They also haven’t made much beyond their initial investment so they’re not so flush with cash that they can just hire (also new hires require onboarding and training and more PRs to review etc. it’s not a hire and get instantly more content)

[proud vortex]

Maybe they will be able to find a publisher in the future.

[deft seal]

plus for patreon, they're already busy enough working on the game and communicating via the blog and discord, patreon would stretch them thinner