Hello there! Last week, Game Engineer Carter Williams took us behind the scenes of RoboCo’s physics. This week, let’s take a look at how RoboCo uses Steam Workshop to let players share their robots!
For those who may not know, game developers on Steam can set up an online Workshop for their game that provides a place for players to upload content for other players to discover and download. It’s the perfect place to host robots for a building game like RoboCo.
Right now, we’ve set up RoboCo’s Workshop for internal testing by developers only, and the Workshop won’t be active for players until the game launches to Steam Early Access. But we thought it would be fun and informative to give a preview of how it works.
Finding Robots Made By Other Players
Step 1: Go to the Robot Save/Load menu and select Browse Steam Workshop. This will open the Steam Workshop overlay on top of the game.
Step 2: Find the robot you are interested in. Steam Workshop has lots of handy tools to help you find what you want even as the workshop fills up with more and more awesome creations. You can check out collections curated by the community or follow authors who have released robots you’ve enjoyed in the past. You can filter to your favorite robots, or to robots that match tags like Funny or Automated. You can sort by date updated or by community rating. There are far more options than we can briefly list here.
Step 3: Subscribe to a robot you like to download it onto your local machine. Subscribed robots will automatically update if the creator releases a newer version.
Step 4: The robot(s) you subscribed to will now appear in your Save/Load menu. You can filter to just Steam Workshop robots to find them easily. You can also edit a found robot and save your own version to a new save slot.
Sharing Your Robot With Other Players
Step 0 (optional): When you complete a challenge with a robot, that robot will earn a badge, like this one for “Sandwich Server.” To prevent cheating, the badge will only last as long as you don’t edit the robot, but you can always earn it again with your new robot to prove it is still capable.
Step 1: Save your robot. You will see any badges that the robot has earned from Step 1 in their Stats on the Save/Load menu.
Step 2: Make any edits to the robot’s description or tags. You can add tags for what Robot Actions the robot can do like Climbs, Transports, or Destroys; what type of Controls it has like Automated, Manual, or a Hybrid of both; and what Traits it has like Funny, Complex, or Beautiful. Some tags will be automatically applied by the game, like the challenge completion badge from Step 1.
Step 3: When you’re ready, upload your robot to the workshop. If you attached any Python scripts to your robot as described in our programming guide, these will be uploaded along with the robot. If your robot uses third-party libraries, these won’t be included, but you can put instructions into the robot description to tell users what libraries they need or how to install them.
Step 4: You can now see your very own robot on the Workshop! Other players will be able to filter to its tags, subscribe to it, and upvote it in support of what you made!
A Community of Builders
There’s so many reasons we’re excited for players to get their hands on RoboCo on Steam Early Access soon. But perhaps the number one reason is that we’ve loved to see all the robots that players have made during brief demos and user tests, and we know that having a public RoboCo Workshop is when that kind of community sharing will really take off.
Whether you want to see how other players solved the Silicon Sonata challenge, skitter around the RoboCo factory floor with a hexapod robot that you saw online, build upon another player’s Python code to make the ultimate color sensor robovac, or express your artistic side with a motor-driven moving diorama, RoboCo Workshop is a fantastic resource with the promise to help us all appreciate each other’s accomplishments and grow our engineering and design skills. And fostering a community of builders is what RoboCo is all about.
And that’s it for this week’s devblog! What’s the first robot you plan on sharing with the RoboCo community? Let us know in the comments or in our Discord! Also, make sure to check out our latest episode of Inside RoboCo where Carter Williams breaks down the physics behind RoboCo! Next week, we’re showcasing more RoboCo Content creators in a new Did You See It? – RoboCo Content Showcase!
For the latest news on RoboCo, follow us on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok! You can also connect with other community members and us by joining our official Discord and Reddit!
Don’t forget to add RoboCo to your Steam Wishlist!