This is one of 3 posts i’m making about inventions, which i feel haven’t had much love in a good while. This one is about quality of life features i think the inventions store needs.
Inventions are so janky to unpublish, edit, and re-publish. At the moment if you unpublish an invention—to make a minor circuits fix for example—it can take days or even weeks for Rec Room to realise that it’s not still published, it keeps saying “You already have a published invention with this name”. I had an old sword invention i took down to tweak and reupload and i’m pretty sure i ended up needing Zendesk’s help to delete this fake/broken instance of it on the store despite having already unpublished it, before i could reupload.
We should be able to “Try” non-premium inventions too. It would help to avoid clogging up the downloaded inventions list when trying to compare multiple similar inventions (had this issue just the other day looking for Christmas tree inventions lol). It’s a pain to clear up all the ones you don’t like after you find the right one.
I think it would be good if we could see and access the history of republished inventions in-game. I sometimes see inventions where the original was set to “canrepublish” but it gets drowned out by people making their own variations of it or even just reposting it without modification, and then setting the permissions to something inconvenient like “use only” or “edit and save”. Something i’ve seen done similar to this is on a midi sequencer site i use, where if you copy and modify someone else’s song, it will have a new little section saying “Based on (copied song)”.