The Final Devblog of 2022!
It’s holiday time everyone! It’s that time of year where it’s chilly yet comfy; everyone huddles up near the fireplace to enjoy some hot cocoa (with marshmallows in them if you’re a patrician), and reminisces on the year and makes plans for the next. Santa comes to town as always, and somehow finds a way to miraculously fit down your chimney without getting caught.
We’re closing out another year of documenting Robot Farm and NNGINE-L’s development through these blog-posts. First, I’ll be covering our progress for October and November (I took a raincheck for last months post). And lastly, I’m going to give a general status report on current working plan. Having these dev-blogs as “notes” serve as a great way to look back but plan forward.
Originally, I made this blog to keep myself accountable about pushing forward with Robot Farm, so that it would inspire myself to keep moving forward with the game, and also prove to myself that I am actually making progress. So these posts serve a multi-function for me: they keep you guys informed, and they’re a way for me to look behind me say, “Wow, I actually managed to do a lot this month!” I’ve been doing that, and wow, we’re coming up on my third year doing this soon.
So firstly, thank you. It means a lot to know that we have some people sticking it out with us and slowly watching this thing shape up. When you guys reach out, it’s actually really cool for me! So when you can, send me a tweet, or a question about the game. I’m happy to oblige! It’s also a good way to make requests for features.
Okay, okay, okay, that’s enough rambling. Let’s get down to business as usual.
World Exploration
So, once I made builds available to our patrons and testers on Discord, we had some people build some really cool maps. We mentioned and went over this in the September blog post if you want to go check out the results of that.
However, after that, I finally did what I said I would and turned my eye to gameplay. We now have fully functioning movement for both the player AND party members. Additionally, we’ve implemented the Hover-Bike as well! The Hover-Bike in Robot Farm is going to have a lot of utility and be a fun way to get around:
So you have your basic walking and your sprinting implemented, and then you have the Hover-Bike. When you’re on the Hover-Bike, not only is your base speed faster, but it also has a boost on top of that. You’ll notice when you’re riding it that there’s some momentum to it: it doesn’t start or stop on a dime, so you have to be aware of this when platforming with it.
“Platforming with it?” It has a jump button as well, that will let you clear some obstacles and jump over large gaps. When you obtain it in-game, it’ll open up tons of new areas for you to explore! Broken bridge? No problem.
“Dude it’s just a jump button!”
The big take away is that walking and riding a Hover-Bike feel and work a lot differently, and there’s a lot we can do those differences to make for some interesting gameplay segments. It won’t always be viable for getting around! So it’s not necessarily a direct upgrade to your movement speed.
Last thing: this is a bit experimental. So as we begin releasing some of these features into Patreon builds, so once we do that, you’re welcome to grab the download and let us know what you think. There’s a chance we’ll adjust how the jump works during tests.
MORE MENUS! As if jRPGs didn’t have enough of those already!
Every jRPG needs a menu system, they’re like peas and carrots. So now, we have a glorious functioning gameplay HUD, and a pause menu that contains a skeleton to easily build menus onto (inventory, party, map, etc). Personally, I really like when menus are animated, or at least have a flow to them. This of course makes it take way longer to make, but it’s worth it, at least to me!
Here’s a look at are in-game HUD, and our work-in-progress Party menu:
This is probably going to seem sort of random to point out considering all of the stuff I’m showing you, but what I really like here is the circuit lines I added that connect menus together.
Here’s a cute thing about them: when I was young, I used to pretend I was “making” circuit boards and I would draw them just like this all over paper with green crayons/markers. I thought it fitting to put them in my game. I’m pretty sure it came from the way circuit boards were drawn in early 2000s cartoons like Dexter or Batman Beyond, which of course was 5-year-old me’s jam.
One last neat thing, I initially made the status displays of characters on the right horizontal in old builds of Robot Farm, and then tried vertical to save space. They ended up reminding me of how cRPG games do it, so I thought it looked cool and went with that.
Status Report!
Basically, what I’m now aiming to do is complete the basic functionality of every piece of Robot Farm’s gameplay. Robot Farm is a sum of its parts, and I try to intertwine every mechanic with another, so that everything is hopefully serving a purpose in the game, and the player always finds uses in our mechanics. It takes a lot of fine tuning to accomplish, but luckily I’ve had a design doc finished for a long time now and it’s just a matter of coding it in. This in itself isn’t a guarantee, but I can always iterate until I like it.
I’d say our progress is something like this, we’ve been going in this order so far:
World Editor
Exploration
Game UI
Combat
Farming & NPC interaction
So right now, I’m going through each and adding the foundations. We just finished the UI basics, and from here I’ll be moving to combat basics. We’ll take it easy at a nice pace and start building each one up further and further over time. At some point during these passes, we’ll be able to release our first early access version! But for now, we’ll stick with a new Patreon build every now and then, when there’s demand.
About our funding:
Robot Farm has had a few publisher offers this year, but we couldn’t find one that quite fit our situation. We’ve decided to go our own way for now, but that comes with a lot of caveats, such as obtaining assets with essentially no monetary resources available. Fortunately, we have plenty of existing assets and resources to keep working just fine for the moment, but if you have the spare money, helping us build up the Patreon would be insanely helpful.
Oh, also, another thing:
So how is the farming in Robot Farm going to work anyway?
So unfortunately, since I started working on this years ago, it seems that farming RPGs have become a sort of trend, and there’s a lot of them out there with the same basic mechanics that came from Harvest Moon series in particular.
Robot Farm isn’t aiming to to really be traditional farming game, where you till the dirt, plant the seeds, run errands, then return home to sleep and repeat. I mean, it can be, but it’s not what we’re aiming for.
This game is more centered around managing large groups of Aokobots and directing them to tasks; and of course making sure those tasks get done. The twist here is that a lot of your Aokobots will be ones that you’ve found out in the field while exploring, rather than generating them on the farm itself. This is just one basic example of how I want Robot Farm’s systems to flow together.
That said, yes, you’ll be able manually farm in the game. You’ll have to do some initial work on it to show the Aokobots what to do, and if you really want, you could keep a personal garden/farmland to yourself too. You’ll start small and help out yourself, to then become larger and larger, and more industrialized, in a sense.
Lastly, because of our powerful modding tools - if you want an experience similar to something like a classical farming game, you could probably build a similar mode in Robot Farm. A single town full of cute villagers that you get to know over a realtime year? Yeah, you can probably make that - custom sprites, models, and scripts included. This is why I look forward to getting it all working and getting it out there.
If there’s interest someday, I can happily add all the pieces you’d need for your cool custom modes in the World Editor if they aren’t already there.
Happy Holidays!
Alright guys, that about does it for this post! It was a long one for sure. I had to make up for last month somehow, right?! There’s still more goodies in store! In the mean time, you guys have a wonderful month, holiday celebration, and new year (where applicable).
And hey, if you have some time - drop by our Twitter and say hi!
♥ NOKORIWARE