Just to announce we released a quick fix regarding minor audio issues and a few missing achievements. Please keep us up to date if you run into any problems while playing.

As of today, the new Sketchbots Early Access update is live, featuring a number of minor fixes. Also, when playing against the computer AI in the duel mode, you can select the AI difficulty, which currently supports a fairly basic AI brain you've seen before and a more complex one for a better challenge.

During the past few weeks we've been hard at work at expanding the duel mode. Now there are more options to customize your game, as well as a whole new game mode. Previously you could only play in a last-man-standing type of game where the winner is the bot to outlast all others, but now you can play in a deathmatch mode where you rack up kills to increase your score. When the turn timer expires, the team with the most kills will be the winner. A few additional quality of life improvements have been added, such as the options to punish players who hide in a corner of the map and await others who will walk into their line of fire. You can also find an expanded credits screen in which we credit all our sound effect contributors. We are very thankful for the resources they made available for us to use!

Introducing the Chaser! If he sees your bot, he won't stop until it's destroyed. Will you be able to deceive and avoid him? You'll have 9 new levels to test your wits against him. Or create your own in the level editor. Apart from the new enemy and levels, you'll find a number of new achievements, UI fixes as well as an extended and remixed soundtrack.

As of today, you can play against an AI opponent in the duel game mode and your robot brains are saved when you select a rematch, preventing the need for reloading them manually. Aside from that, a number of minor quality of life tweaks have been made and the bullets you robot shoots have a nice bit of kick to them to make the impacts feel more meaningful.

After releasing the "Duel" game mode a few weeks back, we dedicated the past two weeks to tweaking the mode to make it more enjoyable. You'll find the map generator working a bit better, with less chance of running into an unplayable map and a number of minor bugs and issues have now been fixed.

After quite a bit of work, we're proud to announce that the "Duel" game mode finally made its way to the public build of Sketchbots! Challenge your friends to see who programmed the better bot in 1v1, 2v2 or 4 player free for all. Maps are randomly generated from fixed presets so you shouldn't be able to cheese your way to victory. Since the game mode is still in its early stages, we'd appreciate players reporting as many bugs as possible, we're hard at work to make the random map generation even better for future releases.

As part of our last biweekly patch, we finally made the step to include achievements in Sketchbots! For starters, there are 9 of them, some connected to particular level types, a few connected to the level editor and a few more random ones. If you earned a few of the achievements before, we'll try to activate them when you load up the game next time, but some of the achievements (for example "Destroy 100 enemy bots"), will remain unlocked and you'll have to destroy 100 bots to earn it. We apologize for the inconvenience.

To celebrate two months since our Early Access launch, we decided to release a new set of levels. 9 of them to be exact, with a few easier ones and a few really challenging levels. And we put in a bit of effort to give more focus to the levels in which you control more than one bot, which have been not so frequent in the game thus far. If you play on multiple devices, you'll love our Steam Cloud support, now your finished levels will be marked wherever you play, as long as you're logged into the same Steam account. With that in mind, we reworked our save system, to make it more compatible with Steam. You'll also find a new music track, this one accompanying the more difficult levels, to get you pumped up for solving them. As always, we'd love to hear your opinions on the new levels, it's key for us to see which direction the community wants us to take the game into.

After a massive update two weeks back, we decided to focus more on polishing out the features currently in the game during this update period. You'll notice a whole array of new sounds, both from the UI and the playing environment. You'll also see a couple of new robot models. We did our best to make them as distinct as possible so players would clearly see which is which on first glance. A lot of the UI fonts have been cleaned up, you'll no longer see as many individual elements with varying font sizes from one another. And since we introduced an option to share levels, it was only fitting to rework the level editor to make it more user friendly. And you know how when you previously made a mistake, you had to go through the pain of remembering how the graph looked like before it? We finally put an end to the trouble by allowing players to simply CTRL+Z (or press the Undo button on the UI) and revert the graph to the previous state. We hope you enjoy the new update!

While our first two patches mostly featured UX improvements and overall polish, we figured it was time to release a new set of levels. With that in mind, we created a whole new level type in which your goal is to toggle the tile color by walking over them. With the new level type, we also added 9 new levels, ranging from slightly more advanced to some of the most difficult levels in the game so far. The "roller" enemy also has a new models, making it easier to distinguish from the "turret" enemy. You might also notice a few new sound effects for the robots as well as a few minor UI tweaks. As an additional bonus, we've partnered up with mod.io to enable our players to share levels on their service. When you create and complete a level through our level editor, you'll be given an option to upload the level. Other players can then use the new "Download level" button on the main menu to access a list of user made levels and download the ones they like. Players can also leave a rating after completing a level.

After almost a month of listening to all your feedback, we're proud to announce that the Sketchbots UI has undergone a massive rework. Instead of having to pan between the level and the robot graph, now you can see the level in a minimizable window inside the graph. And we managed to make it fit the theme as well ;) We've also updated a number of menus to make them more friendly towards a number of screen resolutions! Not a massive list of changes this time, but we feel that the UI is a crucial part of the game and have dedicated all our efforts towards it.

We're happy to announce the first of our biweekly patches has gone live! While the game is in Early Access, we plan on posting regular updates, some may include new levels, some minor gameplay tweaks or features. Since the launch of Early Access, we've collected a ton of feedback and improved various parts of the game. The main issue is still in the UI and we're planning on making a major update during the following two weeks. In the meantime, Steam OS users and other Linux users can finally play both the demo and the main game on their systems. We're hoping for a MacOS release soon. A full list of updates includes:

• Linux release
• Robot and main menu sound effects
• Additional hints regarding features that weren't explained properly
• Lowered music volume
• Fixed issues with overlapping components in the editor
• Added missing hints
• Reworked editor click detection