Dev Blog  ·  March 4th, 2023

Studio Koi Koi and our plans for Whatever Floats your Boat

Hi all,

I’m happy to announce today that we’re moving development of Whatever Floats your Boat to Studio Koi Koi.

This shouldn’t have any immediate impact as you may have noticed that WFYB updates have slowed down significantly. However, we have some significant plans long-term to bring Whatever Floats your Boat back up to speed.

Our studio right now is working on getting workflow up for our other games. That is, modernizing our approach to programming, creating content for games, and maintaining updates.

Unfortunately, Whatever Floats your Boat is near the bottom of this list to approach because the technology is fairly old, and thus, will require a lot to update it. With that in mind, I wanted to at least communicate with you the current plan

Existing problems with Whatever Floats your Boat

We want to deliver several key things around Whatever Floats your Boat that are currently making the game harder to play, and generally leading to the lower player count.

1. Competitive curve - Solve power curve where new players are destroyed
2. Solve performance issues - There are several issues with the performance of the game, as the game, builds, maps, and more have gotten better
3. Mobile controls - Mobile makes up a large amount of players on Roblox. We want to make mobile controls excellent and playable.
4. Technology - Whatever Floats your Boat has a pretty old codebase. We want to modernize the codebase.

Why this probably will lead to WFYB 2

Because we’ve got a series of challenges to approach in this game, I’m fairly certain that we’ll need to make a new game instead of maintaining the existing game. However, I can’t promise that

What will WFYB 2 have in terms of gameplay?

I haven’t figured out everything I want to do for gameplay. However, gameplay changes here will not be wide sweeping in the same way I’ve tried to do things in the past. There are a few notes here:

• We’ll explore resource collection in a different game - This is much harder to design.
• We’ll keep the map pretty similar shape
• We’ll keep the round-based system in place
• We’re interested in exploring stronger creative tools
• We may explore better ranked and competitive modes
• We’d like to explore more interesting and balanced combat systems
• Be able to consistently have content updates with exciting new changes
• Be able to respond quickly to community feedback

I’m hoping to be able to explore some level of a weapon leveling system, with interesting weapons at play.

In general, WFYB 2 will feel and play like WFYB, but hopefully with better tools, better progression systems, with hopefully a better combat system in place that allows for more interesting gameplay.

Future tools for building

Notably for WFYB 2, I have plans to support building systems that allow for resizing, recoloring, and more. I’m hoping these tools will empower a level of creativity not available in WFYB.

Future expansions in the same vein as WFYB

There may be future expansions in play. I really want to make a resource collection game with building that is effectively a single world MMORPG. These game ideas can be explored once WFYB fundamental technology has been established.

Once we establish WFYB as a game, we should be able to remix and combine tools from other games into WFYB. This will allow us a lot of flexibility in exploring artistically interesting games.

Developers from the WFYB community

We’ve had developers in the WFYB community help us maintain WFYB in the past. I’m hoping we’ll get some level of maintenance here for the foreseeable future. I’d like to thank these developers for their contributions.

For WFYB 2, we hopefully will be able to reemploy some of these developers, however, at this point, we don’t really have funding for it.

What is the timeline

We can’t really commit to any timeline, as our studio is trying to figure out how to develop internally and maintain games first! This may require an update to WFYB and other stuff. However, here’s something of a timeline in place as we establish workflows for our Studio.

This timeline is very much subject to change, but I wanted to provide some transparency on what our small team is focusing on:

1. Studio Koi Koi maintains Boxing Beta
2. We update Ragdoll Sim, Ragdoll Physics, and other games into modern architecture (Currently working on this)
3. We prove we can maintain these games at full quality with updates at a rate we want
4. We build out Boxing Beta’s private server system
5. We update Boxing Beta’s gym building system with new building tools which can be used in WFYB, such as resize, recoloring, and variants
6. We build out the gun system that Raven supports
7. We build out WFYB 2 using a combination of technology validated in other games, including excellent controls from our car games, guns, cannons, and building tools from Boxing Beta.

We can’t commit to any dates right now, but I would assume this may take 6 months at least, and potentially years. However, we’ll continue to maintain WFYB as we do this work.

Summary

Thank you for your understanding! I’m hoping that some clarity here on what we’re planning on doing. While WFYB updates have slowed down, we have significant plans to bring the game back up to speed. However, due to several challenges with the existing game, it is likely that a new game will need to be developed rather than maintaining the current one. We hope to explore better tools, progression systems, and a more interesting combat system in the new game. The timeline for these changes is unclear, as we’re currently focused on modernizing its approach to game development.

I want you to know I haven’t forgotten about WFYB, and if all goes well, we’ll have a more stuff in the future. However, I really can’t commit to any dates right now.

Thank you for being such great fans.

— James Onnen (Quenty), and the Studio Koi Koi Team