Blocks and Bullets returns with a new major update coming very soon! ubre has been working hard on one of the most advanced features in this game so far: bots. They're designed to adapt to constantly changing map environment, adjust to your skill level, and just make your gameplay more interesting. You can learn more about bots down below.

Updates for this game have been slow recently, so as a little compensation, at the end of this blogpost I'm going to share some work-in-progress content for a new major update, which will come out hopefully in foreseeable future!  

Are you alone or too scared to fight against real players? Blocks & Bullets now has fully working bots! Bots come programmed with different behaviors and skill levels to replace players, from finding cover and throwing grenades, to switching weapons and predicting your movement.

Right now we have general purpose buts that follow logic given by the gamemode and engage in combat when spotting an enemy, but in the future we'll support many kinds of unique player behavior. Maybe a bot prefers to build walls around their flag compared to one that climbs the highest point and starts roofcamping.

Needless to say, to make bots run we first had to make npcs walk, and while we already have a few NPC examples to show we prefer to do it with the upcoming PvE gamemodes.

You can add bots with the big ADD BOT button or kick them by right clicking on them.
There's also the new Autofill feature to handle bots which we'll explain shortly.

Other than breaking blocks in front of them and jumping to reacher higher points, the bots have no way to manipulate the world around them, which is half the game!

We already have plans to allow the navigation system to include solid blocks to break with a higher heuristic cost, same with empty blocks where bots are supposed to place one. That will take a while to get right though.

I say we're still in a good spot right now, none of our competition has bots, not in s&box but outside of it, even the original Ace of Spades didn't have them.

When creating a lobby you now have the option to autofill the game with bots.
The amount of bots spawned is defined by the map and gamemode so you won't have to worry about micromanaging them.

When a real player joins, one of the bots will leave, the opposite happens as well. This also takes into account the team sizes, so you'll never have to worry about having a single bot for teammate while going against 8 players.
 
If you decide to disable or enable autofill during the match, you can do so with the bnb_autofill false/true command. Soon enough we'll add the option in the lobby creator and dedicated servers.

We also have the new Quick Play button, which will instantly join you to the best lobby available.
If it didn't find any lobby with players (or bots), it will open a new one with autofill enabled.
We have a map and mode rotation for quickplay as not to scare new players with wacky gamemodes such as Tower of Babel or Gibs.

This is for all the zoomers and xoomers with short attention span who can barely get 1 minute of playtime and drag down our average.
Hopefully our average playtime increases now!

You could probably notice that recently all of our maps stopped displaying shadows. This has been fixed by Sam now, and map rendering should be back to normal. Thank you Sam :-)

As I've mentioned, there were other changes made since the last blogpost. If you've missed our previous playtests, (don't forget to join our Discord server!) here's a quick recap what has been done since then:

Yeah, as you can see, this list is pretty chaotic, sorry I can't remember any other significant changes!! Good chunk of our Small Fish developers have been heavily focused on our other game, My Summer Cottage. It's too early to talk about any details publicly, but stay tuned! 

This blogpost feels kind of empty and makes us look lazy. So as a compensation, let me show some work-in-progress things! Around one month ago (wow, time flies huh) yart has asked me to come up with a new server browser design. As a result, this is what I've made:

There is a number of reasons why we have decided to do a server browser refresh. First of all, previous design was made when we weren't expecting that this game will grow so much content-wise, so I didn't bother adding lots of detail in it. 

Second reason is that Facepunch have greatly expanded amount of information we can put into server data now: this includes things like server name and other game-specific details. Previously this was impossible. Now, we can provide much more useful details about every server in the browser, which should help players to pick a perfect lobby. 

You'll be also able to tell the difference between player-hosted and dedicated servers. We plan to host a bunch of servers with fixed map/gamemode rotation so anybody can join them anytime. 

As ubre mentioned, bots system provide us a very important foundation for even greater features. One of those features is a PVE gamemode - it is too early to talk about the details, but we're feeling very positive about it. Until then, here's a preview of a delivery drone:

It's still work-in-progress and lacks some detail, but I hope it will feel better in-game! This gamemode will be the highlight of a next major update, and hopefully will make the game feel more special: we're happy with state of PVP gameplay and really want to see how this game performs in a PVE environment. 

Once again, thank you for playing Blocks and Bullets and joining our playtests - hanging out with the community is an important (and genuinely fun) part of making platform games, and we hope to see you on the upcoming playtest. ??