December 2023 - Happy Holidays!

Hey! It’s been awhile…

We’ve been working hard toward our first small demo of all of the game’s core systems, and wanted to release it by the end of this month. But unfortunately, I personally came down with COVID at the beginning of December. I’ve been resting and trying to get back to 100% in the meantime, and thankfully I’ve mostly pulled through outside of still not being able to smell or taste anything. Which is pure suffering during the holidays when your family is cooking such amazing meals. 🥹

Frankly, this entire year has been a rollercoaster for me. But thankfully, I think I’m starting to figure things out and I’m going to be able to finally move forward in a positive way. So, send a prayer if you’re religious, and if not, your thoughts and good vibes are appreciated just as much. I need all the help I can get!

Onto business! So our last update was in July, so what have we done since then? Honestly, quite a bit. I’ll go over a bit of what will be in this upcoming demo:

• Combat System & basic combat AI

• Interactable NPCs & objects

• Items/Equipment/Containers

• Hover-bike

• A small explorable world

• World Editor

What you’re looking at above are the systems that make up 2/3rds of game’s gameplay loop. The features above combined with the World Editor means that not only will we be able to start assembling the game, but you will have full access to the same tools we use via the World Editor. We’ll include what we have so far with the demo for you to play with, so that you can get a glimpse into what the moddability of Robot Farm will be like.

Anyway, that’s enough about the demo for now. We’re going to try and get it out hopefully next month. It’s going to be fairly simple though! It’ll act as our starting place for getting feedback hopefully.

Plans going forward & why this is so slow

This game is a pretty hefty piece of code, let me tell you. As of writing this right now, there are two coders: me, and our graphics programmer. He does all of the work on the graphics systems of the engine, and also helps with a myriad of other technical stuff like serialization systems, collision testing, and so on. I on the other hand, work on the entirety of Robot Farm as well as integrating the tools he builds into NNGINE.

So what I’m saying here is that we’re building our game engine, and Robot Farm’s engine at the same time. This is the biggest project I’ve ever worked on. Additionally, as of right now, we’re not making any money from this, so we also can’t work on it full time. Hopefully that changes someday.

And yes, we know we could always use a pre-made engine, but frankly we just like doing it ourselves. It gives us more freedom with how we develop the game. Plus, this engine is going to be reusable for further projects in the future, such as possibly finally finishing We Shall Wake.

Okay, so!

The next step: release a small playable demo.

From there, we’ll figure out what the next demo will be. And we’ll keep making demos until we can get this thing into early access on Steam. And just keep going from there.

Happy holidays!

We hope you’ve all had happy holidays, and we’re wishing you a happy new year from us to you! See you around!

♥ NOKORIWARE