September 2022: Robot Farm Gameplay Foundations
Hey there again, guys! As always, I hope you all had a nice month. I’m excited to share this month’s progress report with you!
Movement
The first thing we did was finally nail down basic player movement on maps. You have your basic walking/sprinting, and we also programmed in the Hover-Bike. Check out the footage below:
In the original 2D version of Robot Farm, the Hover-Bike was a way to get around faster, and with upgrades, glide above water. In this newer version, we’ve also added the ability to hop around on it. We think this is going to make for interesting level design where you can use the Hover-Bike and get to places you might not have been able to reach before, and additionally allow for us to be more creative with how we map out areas.
Additionally, we have some cool plans for down the line of taking advantage of the Hover-Bike in other ways during critical story moments - think the Warthog Run from Halo. We’ll leave it at that for now.
Laying the foundations for combat
When we made our first build of Robot Farm, we first decided to build up the farming gameplay and show that off. This time we’re going to approach it a little differently and aim for showing off combat first this time. We have some very interesting ideas in mind with how we can make turn based jRPG combat new and fresh. We don’t want Robot Farm to be another indie game where it feels like a port of an older classic game to modern systems; instead, we want to take our roots in classic games and propel them forward in new ways.
Currently, we’ve been porting most of the basic combat and battle code from our older builds of Robot Farm, which is essentially all of the code and algorithms that we intend to continue to use. But from there, we’re going to build up on it and add some new things that are only possible now that we’ve made the jump to 3D.
Specifically, we’re aiming to create and show off Robot Farm’s first boss - which is a massive machine that’s several stories high. Here’s an early concept, but keep in mind that it’s subject to change and we’re very early in its development right now. Don’t worry about spoilers - I’d like to stress again that this will be an early game boss:
Beginning work on the in-game HUD and menus
Now that this code is ported over, next we’ll be starting on laying the foundations for the HUD and various menus that every game has to have. So this includes the pause menu, and the basic ingame HUD such as party/health/stamina indicators, and so on.
Additionally, part of the code that was ported over was our old tools for localization. We plan for Robot Farm to not only support multiple languages, but we’ll also be making these files open for players to modify. This means that you’ll be able to create mods that are able to be localized much easier, but in cases where Robot Farm doesn’t support a specific language, players can create these files themselves and share them freely.
New content for Patrons coming soon!
So as we continue developing all of the content we mentioned above, but we also hope to release a newer build of Robot Farm on Patreon for you all to try as well. It will include upgraded World Editor tools that we’re already using internally, but also the basic movement systems we’ve showcased here too. You can try out all of these things in maps that you create, and the maps that are included with the build.
We’re also hoping to release some new neat footage on our YouTube channel when we get the chance, so keep your eyes out for that!
See you later!
That about does it for this update! We’ve got a lot of things cooking that we didn’t even mention in this blogpost (it’s top sekrit!!11!") that we think is going to be pretty exciting if it goes through. Please have a good spooky October everyone! We’ll see you next time!
Sincerely, yours truly,
♥ NOKORIWARE