5 posts tagged unity3d

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

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

Well, we’ve passed the $1000 mark, which means we’re not far from reaching the milestone of 10% funding after just 3 days on Kickstarter. If you’re one of the fabulous people who made an early pledge to Robots Love Ice Cream, THANK YOU! We truly can’t thank you enough for getting us off to a great start.

If you haven’t yet pledged to Robots Love Ice Cream on Kickstarter, we hope you’re inspired by what you’ve seen and will want to become a part of this project, too. We would love to make it to 10% by Tuesday, so just know that you still have the power to help make our dreams come true.

The point of this update is to remind you to take advantage of the FREE music download that we’re offering as part of our Kickstarter promotion. You don’t even have to give anything or wait until the project ends. We’re so proud of the creativity that’s going into Robots Love Ice Cream, we couldn’t wait until the end of the project to start sharing the rewards with you. 

So here’s a little taste of what you’ll get if you pledge $25, $100, or more: the original theme song for Robots Love Ice Cream composed by Disasterpeace and MisfitChris, from the Robots Love Ice Cream soundtrack. Download it, share the link with friends, play it over and over again. We dare you to listen to this catchy, exuberant song without totally grooving in your seat. 

More updates coming soon. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback about anything related to this project. Take care and stay awesome.

After a lot of hard work, we’re ready to show the world the game we’ve been working on. Today we’re launching a Kickstarter project for our new game, Robots Love Ice Cream. The game will be available for the iPad and iPad2.

This game is a bottled-up concoction of one part childhood nostalgia, one part modern creative inspiration, and at least two parts of the absolute best we can offer.

We’ll be posting a lot of details, new concept art, and video blog entries from here on out.

Check out the project page here.

As the players of our game and customers of our product, you deserve to be part of the dialog. So drop comments here or on the KickStarter page about ideas for the game, what you’d like to see, or just tell us about your favorite games. It’s our goal to add Robots Love Ice Cream to that list.