Hello everyone! It’s been awhile!

So first of all, I apologize that our blog posts haven’t been as frequent this year! Frankly, the type of things we’ve been working on this year don’t really lend themselves well to monthly blog posts because they don’t always have something I can visually represent easily. So I try to just get a lot of stuff done so that I can come around and give a big meaty update instead! So let’s dig in, shall we? Starting with the most important thing first:

Robot Farm is live on Steam!

Yes, the title of this post is true! Today, we finally took Robot Farm live on Steam with a coming soon page. You can now view and read our page and wishlist it! So if you’ve been following this project for a long time, you can finally go on Steam and not only wishlist the store page, but start sharing it properly with your friends! The store page has a good summary of what the game is about, along with a few screenshots.

Assuming it’s possible, we’ll also be releasing DEMO 1 via our Steam page as well, for free! So you’ll be able to download our games through an official and safe platform and it will also handle the installation and technical stuff for you. Of course, if you want to play around with the World Editor and modding, you’ll have to get a little technical. But even then, we’ve made sure to make modding in Robot Farm insanely easy, so even that won’t require much work!

What kind of progress have you made?

The last time we talked, we had been making updates to the World Editor. Since then, the World Editor has been continuing to receive updates. Mostly in the realm of continuing to expand the capabilities of what you can do with Entities, such as new Lua API features and so on. We’ve also continued to work on our Mod Card/Magic Image functionality. Almost the entirety of an Entity’s information is now stored in their cards. In fact, the image to the left is an example of one! This is what we call a Character Card.

This Character Card of the male player character, Forrest. Believe it or not, embedded in the pixels of this image is the player’s sprite sheet, animation data, frame data, model data, and even Lua code containing all of the information on his basic stats, skills, and inventory. The image itself functions as his portrait on the game HUD during gameplay.

That’s right! The entirety of a player’s data can be stored in a card-sized image like this. Not only this, but player’s will be able to easily make their own player cards and use them in-game, giving them endless amounts of customization options for how they want to appear in-game.

We know that in video games, sometimes it can feel like you’re not completely represented by the available characters. That’s why we’ve made it a key point to make player cards like this a customizable focal point. Don’t like our characters? You can easily make one that’s entirely custom and drop their player card in the correct folder to load it into the game.

Introducing our new free, open source program, Corkboard!

As we were working on the game, I began to venture back into having to work on our dialogue code and improving our textboxes. Robot Farm is going to require a powerful Dialogue Editor to support it’s massive branching storylines and quests, and we thought we had that covered when we made tools/wrappers for Arcweave, the popular dialogue editing tool. And while that tool is excellent, it requires a yearly subscription that is steadily increasing over time as its features grow.

We were early adopters of this software back when it was newer and simpler, but unfortunately, Arcweave itself outgrown our needs, and not only that, we’re not exactly drowning in funding either. So we had to make the tough choice to drop support for Arcweave and make our own alternative, a program we’re calling “Corkboard.” Though, credit for the name goes to a friend of mine!

Just remember that this is a program primarily oriented toward other developers, so it doesn’t have the flourishes Arcweave has, which I still highly recommend and even have an open source binding for!

Anyway, let’s have an in-depth look! I’ve embedded a fully usable example below for you to check out directly, but you can also open it in its own window by clicking this link.

Corkboard is a program that almost has a tunnel-vision-like purpose to be a branching narrative editor for video games, specifically ones made with custom game engines. You can edit/format your dialogue in the nodes, connect them to other nodes, assign labels to the connector lines to act as responses, set a node to act as the starting point for the entire dialogue tree, etc etc. You can read it more about it here, on its Github page.

Isn’t it cool? It was made with webcode similarly to Arcweave, so you can run it in your browser or embed it on your site, even though it’s a completely local program. It’s hosted on its own github page, so it can be used for free, from essentially anywhere.

I’m particularly proud of this project, because I built the entirety of Corkboard in a week, without knowing any javascript/typescript/css/html beforehand outside of tooling around with websites like this one. It was my first VueJs project, so I was glad I could get this up and running so well! It’s mostly a testament to how great some of the APIs for Vue are, such I want to include proper credit to VueFlow and VueQuill here. Though, I’m aware that VueQuill is somewhat “deprecated” since it’s not getting updates anymore, I’ll replace it with TipTap down the line. Outside of some bugfixes and minor feature updates, it’s mostly been pretty solid so far!

So, one last thing, I want to look at how Corkboard is used with Robot Farm and what players can expect when it comes to modding:

The screenshot above is capturing the test project I used for debugging the dialogue box in-game. You can see how the basic branching dialogue system is used and how Jumpers can be used to loop back to the beginning node, and so on.
Code can also be embedded in the nodes as well, but isn’t limited to any specific language. For Robot Farm/NNGINE, we allow developers/modders to write Lua code in the Nodes that will be activated when the dialogue is reached in-game, allowing for the ability to do things such as giving player’s dialogue at the end of dialogue, triggering events, and so on.
It additionally supports being able to attach components to each Node as seen above. “Conelle” is a component node representing Conelle, the character- *Wait,* is that a *typo* in the Node? Whoops… I’ll have to fix that when I’m done with this.
Anyway, the component then assigns portrait images of Conelle to various dialogue commands, allowing for the dialogue to activate/show her name and various different pictures/poses of her to help aid the story-telling. Any image can be assigned/used and the game will stream it in, so that will allow for a lot of power over what kind of visual aspects are incorporated. I also built JCorkboard as well, which is an additional open source project that imports Corkboard projects into Java for easy access. If you want to make your own implementation, you can use that project as a resource.
Did I mention it’s free? Feel free to use it in any of your own projects if you wish!
Now, enough about our fancy new tools, lets move forward onto how the demo itself is going.

How about DEMO 1?

In the last few days, the game’s options menu was completed, marking the last of the main engine work that needed to be finished to begin solely focusing on gameplay and specifically, the content that will be in DEMO 1. So far, we have a small explorable area planned and a dungeon for the player to work through. Yes, we know the game is called Robot Farm, but this first demo will be primarily focusing on the exploration and combat of the game, with only minor aspects of the farming/simulation elements present in this first demo. As the game is developed further, more attention will be turned toward the village and farm/factory simulation elements of the game.

This primarily comes from the fact that we’re aware that since the inception of Robot Farm, there’s been a massive influx in Harvest Moon/Rune Factory inspired indie games. So we wanted to instead focus on, in the wise words of CallMeKevin, something a little different to show new players that our focus is wholly on being a fresh take on these beloved genres.

Robot Farm is a game dear to my heart, with a concept that came to me as far back as 2003-2005 when I would play games on my Gameboy Advance as a first/second grader. I would think to myself, “I wish there was a game where I could go on big adventures, but still have a comfy village to come home to!” So Robot Farm was conceived all the way back in 2016 an answer to that right after our release of We Shall Wake DEMO 7. A bit too literally at first, since my original build was 2D.

Reminiscing aside, we’re aiming to have DEMO 1 out before the year is over. We had of course planned to get out earlier than this, I know, but the Steam page was actually quite the challenge to put together, and balancing that with development has been difficult. At the end of the day, we only have two programmers working on NNGINE and Robot Farm, where one of them is solely focused on graphics. So these things take time.

However! For the sake of getting Robot Farm out there and finally being able to get feedback, our deadline of getting the demo out before the year is over is our top priority! That way, we can finally focus on finally getting an early access version of the game out there next year.