3 posts tagged programming

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 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!

Around spending an incredible amount of time promoting both the Kickstarter project and the game in general, I’ve been working on developing out the gameplay logic for Robots Love Ice Cream. The quicker we’re able to do this, the sooner we’ll be able to begin balancing the experience.

In today’s update, I wanted to give you a little background now on how we’ve envisioned the basic gameplay will flow. These are our current ideas that we’re working towards implementing and testing. These approaches could change as we tweak the experience, continuing to make sure the game remains approachable and enjoyable.

Player’s Health = The Planet’s Citizens

In Robots Love Ice Cream, the player’s health in the game is determined by the number of citizens you as the player are tasked to protect. If a given level has 10 citizens, you must protected them in order to continue playing the game. Throughout the progress of a game level (each planet is a level), the robots will come down towards the planet and look for citizens to capture. If you can envision the classic UFO beam that takes things up to the ship, that’s close to what we have in mind. On each planet there will be an assortment of buildings that carry the personality and theme of that planet. Buildings with lights on have a citizen in them. If there’s no citizen in a given building, the lights will be off. We chose this concept as it allows the player to race around the planet as quickly as they want and still be able to understand how well they’re doing by the state of the level’s visuals. If the planet is pretty dark, with fewer buildings lit up, the player will feel that tension and understand that they’re closer to losing. The basic thing to understand is that you need to be looking out for suspicious robots (hint:most of them are suspicious!) hanging out above any buildings that still have their lights on.

Level flow

When a game level starts, the player will enter into the game level. To give the level a sense of robot presence and bring in some tension and purpose, we’ve been discussing how to show the player a planet already under attack from the robots. As the hero, you’ll arrive on the scene to deal with the problem. Once the player has arrived, the game will start and robots will begining to approach the planet and the buildings and citizens the player is tasked to protect. The robots will come in waves and it is the player’s responsibility to dispatch these waves as quickly as possible.

Various types of enemies will have different movement and behavior patterns. I’ve been messing around with various movement patterns akin to the ones in classic arcade shoot ‘em up games like Galaga and 1942. Sometimes enemies will pester the player and prevent them from defending the buildings, while others will be seeking to capture enemies. We’ve been looking at ways of using both color and form with the robots to identify at a glance what the intent of a robot is at a given point in time. The more we can give the player a quick understanding of the state of the game level, the more immersed they’ll be and the more they can continue enjoying the game.

At the end of the game level, after battling through waves of robots of various and successfully defending all or some of the planet’s citizens (more is bettter, ;) ), the player will have to face a robot boss. We’re still very active in discussions internally about how the boss encounters will work, so I don’t want to get into too many specifics yet. I can tell you that the designs we’ve come up with so far have been really neat and should offer a lot of personality and variety from level to level. The designs we’ve concepted thus far have been really promising and I can’t wait to show them to you when they’re ready. Once we get our first boss concept nailed down, I’ll make a point to post a Backer’s Only update about it and share it with you guys!

This covers a lot of the basic elements of gameplay. I will be posting another update in the coming weeks that covers more about what we’ve planned for how exactly the player will interact with the game. This will include talk about movement around the planet and the player’s “weaponized ice cream treat” selection while in the active “planet defense” portion of the game.

Promotions Update

Becca, myself, and the rest of our team have been hard at work promoting this game around the clock. We are hoping to have a lot of new interest coming in this week. We’ve got many emails, tweets, updates, and phone calls lined up for the coming week to continue to promote the game. We really need your help as well getting the word out and getting people excited and supporting the game project so that we can make it happen. We appreciate your pledges of confidence in us and all of your efforts to get the word out thus far. Your support and your belief in what we’re doing have made this incredible experience even more meaningful. We can’t wait to celebrate the successful funding of this project as something we achieved together.

Thanks,

Burton