It’s been a pretty good week, filled with various tasks. At the start of the week I finished (for the most part) a really nice system for the robots’ movements. It’s not quite complete, but it’s already going to provide us with a lot of freedom and expressiveness in how the robots can move around. Once I get the character type animations in for some of the robots fully integrated, I’ll be sure to shoot a video of some of our tests. By character type animation I mean the things the robots do as an extension of themselves (read: personality) as opposed to how they move around the planet.

I also started playing around with some lighting and having the level’s lighting change as the level progresses to help drive the idea of progression and time across to the player as they’re proceeding. I want to spill the beans on what we’re going to do with this, but I don’t want to give away all of our secrets until you see the whole picture of the first level.

This weekend I’m tying in animations for 3 of the four regular robots in the first level. We’ve had them for a while, but I haven’t had the time until now to get them wired into the game.

As always, if you have any questions or ideas, let us know, :). Take care.

I’ve spent the past few days working on the system that controls how the robots move around. It’s one of the two big systems I’ve built up and tore down multiple times (all for good reasons). I think I finally had a big breakthrough today and have found a method that we’ll be able to use to be more expressive with the robot movements while also being fairly efficient. We want to make sure the robots have a lot of personality in the way they move around and I think this system will help us more easily reach that goal.

In the future and once the game’s been revealed a bit more, I’ll likely post videos with updates like this. Still I wanted to keep you guys in the loop with what I’m up to, pretty pictures or not. If you want any more technical details on the system and new method, you can see my DevLog post over on the TIGSource forums.

Take care and have a good holiday weekend!

Hey everyone! Burton here. It feels so good to be posting again. We’ve been hard at work on the game in our nights and weekends around some full-time and contract work. I’ve been blessed to be able to position myself where I don’t need to take any work for the next 3-4 months. This is going to allow me lots of time to focus on making Robots Love Ice Cream (RLIC) as incredible as all of you guys deserve.

I hereby promise and pledge to keep this tumblr posting ball rolling and I’ll post something a few times a week. There’ll be some cool screenshots. Sometimes it might be a video showing off something in particular that I’ve been working on. Sometimes it will be just some quick notes about what we’re up to or write-ups on aspects of the game we’re working through presently. I’ll try to keep it interesting, but I want to give everyone a great look into all of the effort that goes into make the game and all of our strides to make it something special. If there’s anything you guys have questions about or want to see, let me know!

On the code side:
Currently, I’m working on getting the gameplay well represented. I’ve got practically all of the gameplay mechanics created, but not juxtaposed against and with one another. I’ll be working on creating as many cool movement patterns mechanics as possible this week and then I’ll get together with our lead art guy and between the two of us we can come up with a really cool timeline of gameplay for the first level.

On the art side:
Art guys will be working to construct the first environment out in Unity. We’ve built this environment up and torn it back down again a few times. Through this process, we’ve been learning a bit about what we can handle in the game performance-wise, how we think the level will read in gameplay (this is super important for a fast-paced experience), and what steps we need to take in the order we need to take them.

I’ll leave you guys with two characters. The first fella’s name is Spinston. He captures a planet’s citizens and holds them for a king’s ransom in ice cream.

This guy’s name is Scrambles and he’s a stationary turret type robot. He hovers and fires from his bottom-mounted turrets to impede the hero’s defense of the planet.

Have a great one, :)

Hey friends, here’s a cross-post from our Kickstarter page that we originally shared on Thanksgiving Day. Just to give you a window on what we’ve been up to:

——-
Hello everybody,

Since today is Thanksgiving day here in the United States, we at Addo Games wanted to take the opportunity to reach out and say how thankful we are for your support. While we’re at it, we also have an update on Robots Love Ice Cream.

Even though most of our progress has been behind the scenes, we’ve been hard at work on both the game and the Kickstarter rewards. We’ll be sending out surveys for mailing addresses and T-shirt sizes this coming week to help us fulfill your rewards.

Physical rewards will be shipped soon, depending on the level at which you backed—right now we’ve got awesome vinyl stickers and postcards ready to go, posters at the printer, and T-shirts in vendor selection. Digital items like the soundtrack and wallpaper pack will be released when the game launches. If there’s a rewards item you liked that wasn’t in your pledge pack, we’ll also have a few things available for purchase online later this year.

Without your help, this endeavor wouldn’t be possible and we owe you our profound thanks. We’ve set a high bar for this game and we are looking forward to giving you a glimpse in the next month or so. Development has ramped up more slowly than we would have liked because of the usual indie developer challenges, but trust us, we’re as impatient as you are for the release of Robots Love Ice Cream, and we’re as determined as ever to make our game something truly memorable and special. As of right now, the plan is to get the game onto your iPads in April 2012.

In the spirit of the holiday, here are a few things we’re thankful for:

-The incredibly talented creative people who are contributing to our project
-Fresh ground/brewed coffee and our ancient-but-irreplaceable Starbucks coffee maker
-Online supplier coupon codes
-Skype
-Rooster cookies
-Tools like Smartsheet and Evernote that help us keep our heads on straight
-Sincere words of encouragement from friends and family
-The Unity community
-Internet radio (especially the game music channels)
-Fellini’s Pizza - site of creative/strategy summits
-Twitter
-The opportunity to pursue our dream and have all you amazing people volunteer to come along for the ride

Again, thank you for supporting and loving Robots Love Ice Cream!

Hey guys,
I definitely feel like our level of communication has been less than where I’d like it to be. I apologize for that. We’ve been working really hard on all of the efforts around the game, as well as some other-life efforts to pay our bills.

The Game, Man. Talk About the Game!

I (Burton) have been hard at work designing the underlying logic that all of the enemies will use to get around. I think I have finally settled one something that will let us plug and play behaviors. So we can change how an enemy attacks by swapping out how attacking mechanism, while the rest of his behaviors like how he roams around, stays the same. Over the past few days, I’ve been working on the basic logic that a capturing robot will use to get to a building that has a Citizen in it. Just a reminder, the Citizens in Robots Love Ice Cream are your health. If you allow the robots to make off with the Citizens, then the game is over. So it’s your job to make sure the robots take as few of your Citizens as possible.

Our creative efforts have been spent working on building concepts and robot concepts for the first level. We’ve finished that, picked out the five non-boss robots to use in the first level, and we have defined their functions and behaviors. Next steps on that front is to model all of these items out and get them in the game world. Once we’re happy with how they read from a form standpoint within the game, we’ll work on getting the robots and buildings modeled and textured. We’ll also start animating the robots.

Our immediate focus is to work through the entire first level of the game and learn our lessons from it. We want to try and get as much of the bumps and bruises related to the gameplay experience behind us as possible. My reasoning is we don’t want to be making the same mistakes across all five of our game levels at the same time. Once we’re happy with where that first level is, we’ll show it off to you guys. We’re trying to hold our cards a little closer to our chest than we did during Kickstarter to protect our interests (and yours!).

Kickstarter Rewards

We’re currently in the process of ordering a lot of the pieces to fulfill rewards. We’ll be placing our sticker and postcard orders in the next 48 hours. We’ve got paper samples for the posters and once we choose which stock we’ll use, we’ll order enough for our first run of posters and drop that off at the printers for printing. We’re looking at using Finch 100lb Cover stock (Not sure on the color or exact type just yet). It’s serious stuff and one of our favorite artists uses it for his posters. As for the t-shirts, we’ll be working on those while the posters are being printed off. It’s crazy how much there is to do apart from working on the actual game. Still, we’ve put a lot of work and care into making sure the rewards our Kickstarter backers are getting are top notch.

Once each reward piece is completed and we start fulfilling our physical reward obligations, I’ll make a point to post the designs here so you guys can check them out. We’re planning on creating a store for some of this stuff too, so if you didn’t back the project or just want more of what we’re selling, you’ll be able to get it there. We’ll be doing some more merchandising stuff as we roll out each level, but I’ll leave it at that for now!

Thank you for all of your encouragement and support. Have a great one!

I thought I’d put together a survey to see what people thought would be the best locations to showcase in Robots Love Ice Cream. You can vote for one you see or enter your own. I’d love to hear your thoughts. The Sweets planet idea came from Chris Rickwood, who just did the music for Orcs Must Die and the theme for Madden 12.

Full disclosure, I’m intentionally leaving planets we’ve already fully decided on doing off of this survey. I want those to be a surprise, :).

Update: I added some of the “Other” poll answers to the main poll (votes intact). Keep sharing this and get your friends voting! If you’re visiting for the first time and don’t like any of the options listed, you can write in using the “Other” option. Thanks!

We are planning on unveiling some of our already selected levels prior to the game’s release. We want to make sure we get them perfect before we share them with you guys!

Thank you!

Thanks to all of our backers, the Kickstarter project was successfully funded! We had so many friends and media people stepping up to help and spread the word about our project. In what should have been perhaps the most stressful day of the entire campaign, I have to admit I was having a lot of fun with the process and talking to new people about our game and watching our Twitter feeds light up with activity. I want to make sure and recognize the people who may not have given, but spent the evening talking us up and sharing the game with everyone they knew. It was awesome and I wanted to recognize those guys as their contribution, while not financial, was really pivotal in our success.

So, what now?

Over the past two months, we’ve been really consumed with trying to make that effort a success. Now, we can take a quick breath, and charge onwards with the task of making this game something very special. The Kickstarter process and the possibility that we might not make our funding goal actually helped us get some clarity on how we should approach the project and the work ahead of us.

I think the consensus among the team is that we’re going to work hard over the next month to nail the creative aspects of the game. Kickstarter had us working a bit too reactively trying to produce new things to show people to keep interest high. Now, we can pull back and make sure our creative aesthetic is going to be consistent and pushing the envelope far enough.

We’ve got some cool concepts drawn up for elements in our Feudal Japan themed environment. Once we’re happy with where those are at (we’re still working on scale of these assets in the game), I’ll make sure to share them with you all.

That’s about all I have for now. Thank you again for the support. The Kickstarter process was very intense at times, but you guys made it incredible!

-Burton

Hey guys,

I’ve put together a few new promotional shots that show off some of the fruits of our labors.

Ice Cream Truck (Hero)

This is still very much a work in progress, but I think it’s a great start. I’ve got the truck rigged and animated with suspension and chassis rocking that speeds up and slows down depending on the speed the player spins the planet at.

Koi Fish Robot

This little guy is one of the characters for the Japanese feudal level. Our current plan is to have him capture Citizens through his mouth from the inhabited buildings on the planet below.

In-Game Peek

And lastly, here’s a screen from the current build of the game. Not everything is represented in this shot and the buildings are definitely placeholders, but things are moving along and it’s starting to look a bit like a game, :)

Please feel free to share these with friends and game blogs. We definitely need your help meeting our funding goal for Kickstarter. The project ends in 12 days (July 31, 3a EST)!

Robots Love Ice Cream on Kickstarter

Thanks,

Burton