December 2021: New Years, NOKORIWARE's birthday, and finally, the Tech Demo
Happy new year!
Hey everyone! I hope you enjoyed the holidays. We have a lot to share in this blog post and we got a lot done, so buckle up and enjoy the ride!
The Tech Demo is out!
So first of all, here it is! We’ve finally released our first tech demo showing off Robot Farm’s new 3D rendering systems, along with our World Editor (tools that you will be able to use the mod the game as well)! Without further adieu, here is a link to the video if you haven’t already seen it:
Despite the length of only two minutes, this demo is jam-packed with features that are going to be available in the editor for all of us. How about I break it down? In this video, you’ll see:
Customizable lighting systems: including customization for day & night ambient lighting, time of day, sun & moon color, and much more!
Customizable graphics settings: such as SSAO and Depth of Field
Customizable fogs and clouds: you can add up to four fog parameters to give the map numerous different aesthetic feelings - such as adding spooky fog in the dark forest, fog that obscures the ground on maps that are to appear high up in the air, clouds that give the feeling of a rainy day - or you can add just a light subtle fog for days that are clear and sunny!
Weather conditions: We showcased our rain this video, but that’s only the start of the kind of weather conditions we’re hoping to have in the final game. Another goal we have is to make it as customizable as possible to allow for custom weather conditions on modded maps.
Day & Night cycles: the game can seamlessly transition between day and night, using custom ambient lighting settings that you choose to determine what the various times of day look like on your map
Celestial bodies: you can add stars to the sky now! Using a seed and a generator, we’ve built a star generator that will ensure that the stars on the world area always consistent. Something in the pipeline we’d like to add eventually is having the world rotate over the ingame year to help give the stars some movement over time.
World Editing: build your map using custom loaded assets and blocks. There are little to no hardcoded assets in the game, meaning you can completely reskin the game however you want!
And this is just an overview - our World Editor is already quite the powerful beast and these are just the basic tools. As the game grows, we’ll begin adding gameplay-centric features as well to help control how the game plays. Even going as far as adding custom Lua code to the world to allow for any type of gameplay interactions you can think of.
Join our Discord community!
As we’ve said in the past - one of our goals was to open our Discord up to everyone interested in the game! Well, we kept our promise, and with the release of this tech demo we’ve officially opened it up to the general public. You can find the link on our main page and footer, or you can just click this link below:
Join the Robot Farm Discord Community!
People in our community will not only see the latest dev-updates, but will also have the chance to participate in beta tests, and even possibly obtain a free code for Robot Farm once it’s out! So be sure to hop in, everyone is welcome!
Why did the Tech Demo take so long?
When we originally announced we wanted to do a tech demo months ago in our blog posts, and we had planned to show it as is at the time (which wasn’t very feature complete). However as we developed it further and brought more systems online, we decided we wanted to wait until the game really looked stunning before we showed it off. As it turned out, we were able to release the video on January 1st, which was NOKORIWARE’s fourth anniversary since its founding! So it worked out well - a new years present for you guys, and a birthday present for NOKORIWARE.
Welcome back We Shall Wake players!
For a lot of our subscribers on YouTube, they subscribed back when we were working on We Shall Wake and haven’t kept up with most of our recent developments since we started on Robot Farm. For those of you that ended up here from our tech demo - welcome back!
I hope Robot Farm’s new look is appealing to you - especially since our new graphics engine, Voxoid, is somewhat of a spiritual successor to the original NNGINEGraphics API we used with We Shall Wake. It uses a lot of the same techniques and API structure, and was partially written by the same graphics programmer, which is why it’s been so easy to get Robot Farm up to this level so fast.
Please stay tuned! Robot Farm is going to share a lot of lore with We Shall Wake, so I think you’ll find the experience to be enjoyable if you read the data logs in We Shall Wake DEMO 7 back in the day. In a way, Robot Farm is a sequel when it comes to the timeline of our universe.
And of course - We Shall Wake will be completed someday as long as we can secure the capital for it. Don’t think I’ve forgotten about it! I still think about that game every day and dream of one day building it to reach its full potential. In fact - I still take notes of various ideas I have for it regularly. I have a full list of ideas that date back all the way to 2015. So bear with us, and if you’d like to see it come to fruition, support us when you can!
For those of you not aware, We Shall Wake was the first original game I ever made. I worked on it in highschool between the ages of 15-17 before moving to Robot Farm. Here’s an old video if you’d like to see how it evolved over that time! I can’t believe it’s been so long - I was essentially a baby when I wrote it!
Where to next?
This is only the start of our grand journey in 2022. The completion of the tech demo also marks the completion of the graphics systems and basic world editor foundationally. From here, we’ll begin to build the foundations for gameplay next. Plus there is still a bit of optimizing to be done on the performance, but it’ll be mostly a quick pass until more of the game is put together and we start optimizing it proper for a release.
Additionally, we need to also do some minor cleaning on the engine and restructure some things, which is going to invalidate our maps - so we wanted to get this tech demo out first before beginning those structural changes. There’s a lot we’re going to have to do to get the assets ready for use in an actual gameplay scenario, since so far we’ve been focused on the level editing and graphics by themselves up until now.
Luckily, this new Robot Farm is being built in an upgraded version of the same game engine (NNGINE), so we should be able to port quite a bit of gameplay code from the old version of the game into this one, making the process faster. So a lot of our actual jRPG mechanics and formulas will be ported 1:1. We’re still following the same design document we’ve always had, with the exception of the game being 3D now.
Lastly, we’re looking into hopefully gaining a development partner to help get our game out there, and that will be one of our priorities this month.
What’s the gameplay going to be like?
The gameplay is going to be the same as it always was! But let me go ahead and explain for all of our new friends.
Robot Farm is a jRPG adventure and farming game. You build a home for yourself, and use your mechanical Aokobot companions to help run and expand the farm. This in turn funds and supplies your adventures across the world as you go on a journey of rediscovering yourself and meeting a variety of new characters, some being romanceable and recruitable into your party.
Three Aokobots can be taken with you to assist you in combat and support you on your adventure - as you fight enemies, you will gain the resources to build even more powerful Aokobots to help you along the way! And as you explore the world, more land will become available for you to expand your farming operation. When the adventure is over - you can finally find somewhere to settle down anywhere in the world.
However there is no permanent rest for the adventurous: explore new worlds that you can either create yourself, or download them from friends! Robot Farm has extremely in-depth modding tools that will allow you to transform the game in a multitude of ways. In the mood for a chill farming-only game with romanceable characters? Build a world that excludes combat. Want to play a classical jRPG without any farming elements? Exclude the farming. Or use all the mechanics at once and make your very own expansion pack to Robot Farm! The possibilities will be endless.
Not only that - but NOKORIWARE will keep an eye on the modding community, and even offer to officially support certain mods to help the creator make money off of their creations in rare cases.
Build homes. Farm the land. Explore the world. Save it, then make your own!
Let the games begin!
That covers about everything! Time for us to go kick ass and chew bubble game, and I’m all out of ass!
Wait… Did I say that right?
Anyway! Off we go to start on our gameplay. As always, we’ll keep you posted with our monthly blog posts, so be sure to check in! We post our blog posts on here, twitter, and I also always link them our Discord - so choose your poison in terms of keeping updated. We’re just getting started - and hopefully you’ll accompany us on this grand adventure!
Happy new year and please stay safe! See you next month,
♥ NOKORIWARE
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