Feb 2025: Happy (Late) New Year! Plans for 2025 and Beyond
Introduction
It’s 2025, and we’re finally back with some news about development! I’ve been making progress on the game (albeit a little slowly), but we’re closer than ever to releasing. I’ve taken care of the last of the non-combat things we need for our first demo, and I’ve been working on tuning and polishing combat since. In the post, I’ll go over those non-combat tidbits and give you an update on how things were going.
I unfortunately didn’t intend for things to take this long, but I’ve been going through some difficulties with my illness that caught me off guard. Thankfully, I think I’ve got the bulk of it tucked away for now, and I’m going to be continuing to tackle that stuff as I go forward through this year.
But enough of that, let’s talk about the fun stuff! Keep in mind, I’ll only being going over some of the bigger things we’ve finished, but there’s a lot of combat stuff I’ve been working on as well that’s not quite ready to show off. But rest assured, I’ve got a lot of goodies to show you today:
Updated Party Menu
First off, I’ve been updating the UI a little bit to show all of the proper information on your party that’ll need to keep track of your stats while your journey through the world:
As you can see, the menu is connected by “connectors” and menus that go from left to right, showcasing how each aspect of the character affects each other part. On the left, you can see a character’s base stats, and then on the right, you can see their current stats. When you equip an item, it makes it a lot easier to see how it’s directly affecting your abilities. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve always found it a little annoying in RPGs when the game throws a bunch of numbers at you, but it’s not clear what they’re doing. So I try to communicate everything as well as possible here.
Speaking of equipping items, let’s move onto the big changes I’ve made in that department:
Item Manipulation, Combining, Breaking Down
I’m a big fan of immersive sims, especially ones like Arx Fatalis. I always thought that game was really cool in how you could fluidly pick up and manipulate items in the game world. Similarly, in the Elder Scrolls series, you can manipulate items as well. I don’t know if it was just my cousin and I, but we’d always play interior decorator by laying items around the house as trophies and so on. When we’d visit in the summer, we could load our saves and show off our houses and get an idea of what the other had been up to. I have especially fond memories of the Waterfront House in Oblivion.
This was definitely a feature I’ve had in the back of my head for awhile now and wanted to make sure I got into Robot Farm. I intend to make it more user friendly in the future by adding a hotbar, but for now you can drop items from your inventory and manipulate them in the game world. Additionally, it’s how you pick up items as well. And of course, alt-clicking them will automatically grab them for you.
Not only with this play a role in how you decorate your personal in-game spaces later in development, but I want it to play a key role in how you interact with the world as well. There’s just something about the tactile feel of it, that makes a game more immersive to me.
We also have item combining and breaking down too. Any combinable item can be broken back down into its components, and items can be combined into usable items as well. This will also play a role in how you interact with the game and world- and what the eventual namesake of the game will build upon.
We’ve also added easier item placement to the World Editor, so we’ll be able to fill the world with little interactable baubles like you’d find in other immersive sims. So it’ll be fun! I’m looking forward to picking up all the things!
Jumping / Improved Collision Detection
While you could already do jumps while riding a Hover-bike, I’ve also decided to implement basic jumping regardless of riding anything. So I hope to add some minor platforming elements to our worlds as well, which will open up some fun avenues for level design. I want to work with as much real estate as possible when building explorable areas.
We’ve also got entity collision detection working finally too, which was one of the steps needed to get combat working fully as intended, since it includes a lot of slamming and mobility.
Plans for 2025
God willing, I’ll be able to get a demo out soon. This big goal of course is Early Access for now so that players can start trying out the game proper, but there’s a few things left to do first. I have to get combat working and put out this demo, but then of course, we need to start actually developing the game’s actual content using all of the tools we’ve developed over the years. NNGINE is basically complete in terms of what we need for this game, and Robot Farm’s gameplay engine is about 70% done. That’s enough to start building the game itself soon.
Game design isn’t a joke! So we’ll be learning a lot about level design and balancing as we go, hopefully with the feedback of our players!
So, TL;DR;
Get the game’s combat programming ready
Build/release DEMO 1 (for free!)
Use feedback from that to get the game ready for Early Access and hopefully get it out sometime this year
So, finger’s crossed! Keep us in your prayers if that’s your thing, and if not, hey, good wishes/happy thoughts are great too!
Be seeing you!
My track record has been a little spotty on blog posts lately due to my health- but rest assured, I’m alive, and I’m out here working on this thing with the rest of the team! I’m hoping that the next time I see you guys, I’ll have some combat to show. We’re working toward a video that will summarize the entirety of our work so far for the Steam page, so sit tight!
We’ve also got some cool ideas baking for the first demo. It’s taking awhile, but I want to make sure we make a good first impression with this thing since we’ve been working on it for so long.
If you’d like to keep up to date on a more regular basis, I often post progress immediately when it’s done on our Discord. It has a dedicated dev-log channel where I basically post all of the above in more detail when it’s done; so if you want to keep a closer eye on things, join up on there and stay in touch!
See you later!
♥ NOKORIWARE