June 2022: Next stop, gameplay! The World Editor is finally ready!
Hey there girls and guys! Your robot samurai friends are back with some cool updates this month!
First of all, I hope you all had a pleasant June. For those of you that this applies to - how’s your summer been? Have you been enjoying the weather? I know these questions always seem rhetorical, but we actually do want to hear how it’s been! Feel free to always shout us out on Twitter and let us know.
Now, onto the progress report…
The completion of the World Editor
This past month, I finally put the finishing touches on the World Editor. Just to clarify, what I mean by “completed,” is that it’s now fully feature complete with all of the current features that were used in the tech demo from January.
You may be thinking, “It took you this long just to make all of this?” But you have to remember, when we posted the footage of that tech demo, Robot Farm and NNGINE-L had no modern UI solution whatsoever. We’ve written a 2D rendering solution (one so powerful that you could use it for 2D games and render five or more 2D Robot Farms with it at the same performance cost), a whole new UI solution, and then finally a UI for Robot Farm that hooks it all together.
A screenshot of the World Editor and some of its various menu. The UI color scheme still needs some tweaks to help give it more contrast.
As of this post, the World Editor has the following features with the associated UI created for each one:
Terrain/Block Editing; editing the terrain of a map with blocks. Loading “Magic Image” assets automatically, being able to select which ones to use via a dedicated menu
Construct Editing; placing “props” and 3D voxel models on the world. Also has Magic Image support.
Brush Editing; “painting” the world and placing objects/blocks in patterns. Automatically loads “.brush” files which define them.
World Settings Menu: edit the “core” settings of the world, such as name/size/what folders it loads resources from by default. Along with creating new worlds/saving them.
Map Settings: a comprehensive menu that lets you edit all facets of a map, including: Metadata (name/size/etc), Day & Night Cycle settings, customizing the Map Generator (for building the base map to begin editing with), and more!
Various hotkeys necessary for an easier editing experience (wireframes/map bounding lines/camera modes/etc!)
And a ton more
The World Editor by itself is a massive undertaking because not only does it include the tools that we’ll be using as the developers to build the game, but we’re also making them accessible to our players so that they can create custom content for the game when it’s released.
What’s next for the World Editor? The Flag Editor!
We’ll be developing the World Editor with features being made “as needed” beside the gameplay programming at this point. The next thing on the to-do with the World Editor will be our “Flag Editor.” You can see the mode as selectable in these screenshots, but we’re keeping it mostly under wraps for now. It’ll likely be one of the most powerful features of the World Editor in the end.
The Flag Editor will be for placing markers on the map that help define ingame events and code triggers. Additionally, it’ll be what allows you create prefabs from groups of objects and place them, and help you create entities that have AI code attached.
What is going to make this fun however… Is that all of this is going to be connected via Lua code. Robot Farm will have its own “Lua API” built into the game that content creators can use to customize their unique Robot Farm experiences, and also how we’re going to build our own stories into the game.
But more on that later!
It’s finally time to begin on Robot Farm’s gameplay!
From here, we can finally start on Robot Farm’s gameplay. This is going to be the fun part - and hopefully it’s going to allow us to finally start making more YouTube videos showcasing our progress. The thing about building the World Editor, is that it doesn’t make for very interesting game footage - and on top of that, no one is really going to care about what you can make with it if we can’t show off the end result.
That said, there are many gameplay elements in Robot Farm: the game centers around exploring, farming, and combat. Which one of these will we do first? We’re leaning towards combat, but we’re going to try and take player input on this as well. So stay glued to our Twitter and Discord! We’ll be making polls on this topic soon.
Time to hit the ol’ dusty trail!
Thanks for reading our monthly blog post covering June’s progress! We’ll see you next month and hopefully start having way cooler stuff to show off. I also intend on potentially making a YouTube video soon to show off the World Editor in-depth, so we hope you find that interesting too when it’s out!
See you then, and we hope you continue to enjoy summer!
♥ NOKORIWARE
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