July 2023: We're back! And working towards a DEMO!
Salutations! We have a lot of explaining to do.
First off, I’m sorry we’ve been radio silent so long. Frankly, there’s been a lot of going on in my life, and it’s just slipped my mind many times. I didn’t realize how long it had really been until I looked at our blog history. I haven’t posted since Feburary - whew.
Anyway, we have a lot to discuss!
Where’ve you been?
A lot’s been happening personally this year health and family-wise, so I haven’t really been able to dedicate as much time to the game as usual. That said, we’ve been still making some good progress in the meantime and we have a good amount to show in this post. So, I can say confidently that we aren’t dead!
Something you may find disappointing however is that we’re still working on the combat system.
Why has combat taken you so long?
It’s been a number of factors.
Primarily, I’ve really wrestled with the system to make sure it’s something I personally find somewhat new and refreshing jRPG-wise. jRPGs were essentially my bread and butter growing up, along with third person action games like our other project, We Shall Wake. So I’ve played a great deal of them and experienced a lot of different turn-based systems, and don’t really want to make another one that just falls into the typical trappings of a jRPG. We have enough of those.
Secondly, I also don’t want it to feel slow. A lot of jRPG battles move at a glacial pace and it makes you dread even getting into a fight through the mid and endgame because you just want to keep moving. So I wanted to make a system that feels fast paced and rewards you for speed. My general philosophy was to make a true turned based game (not an action jRPG), that still feels as responsive and exciting as an action game. Of course, it’ll be up to you guys to tell me if I pull that off though.
Now the good news here is that I think I’ve landed on a system I think is fun and interesting. It has enough unique facets that I either haven’t seen done before, or at least, not in this combination. So we’ll go over a little bit of what I’ve been doing these past few months, but I think I’ll be keeping a lot of the combat advancements under wraps for now until we can show it off fully in a proper video.
To really talk about our combat advancements, I think I need to discuss our cool new animation tools first:
Robot Farm animation systems
So while I’ve been developing Robot Farm’s combat, it’s also required some tech upgrades to the engine, which has taken some time. There’s still a lot of upgrades we have in mind, primarily on the optimization side of worlds to make them load in really snappily, but we’ve also been upgrading certain parts of it to make new animations possible.
We’ve made it possible to load our voxel models into Blender and rig them, so that we can actually animate them ingame. This will make it possible to animate groups of voxel models as well, so we’ll be able to make pretty advanced world objects and even characters/bosses with them. Specifically the bosses. If you’ve kept up with our past blogposts, you definitely know what we have in mind for those.
The Blender files are exported as custom “VXA” files (Voxel Animations) that can then be dropped into our content folder like any other piece of content/mod in the game, and it’ll be usable by the game.
Robot Farm swords and equipment
Now that you’re aware of our new animation code, I can show off some of what we’ve made with it and what we’re working on. For example, check this out:
So here it is: you’ll be use a telekinetic sword in Robot Farm. As part of the abilities of an Operator, or one that can communicate with Aokobots, they also have basic abilities of telekinesis and prefer to use their weapons in this way. They can be used to start battles, or even end them before they begin, depending on how much of a strength difference there is in you and an enemy.
Swords are going to play an important role in Robot Farm and will be heavily customizable. They will be the source of the player’s own stats, since Aokobots are governed by their own progression system. I can’t give anymore detail yet, since it’s a bit up in the air since the swords being used in this way is a pretty late addition to our design document.
This functionality of “click and use” will likely extend to tools as well, so I believe that a lot of activities in Robot Farm will be a lot more smooth and less time consuming because of it. It’s changed how combat starts and operates in a lot of ways, and I’m excited to get more stuff working with it and showing it off more in the future.
Other miscellaneous things
On top of all this, I’ve spent some time working on small misc. things too, such as adding back some systems from Robot Farm 2D and prepping them for use in our new 3D version. This is under the hood stuff usually, but here’s one I’ve always enjoyed seeing in action. I call it the “swivel” system:
I find it interesting that we need this in both Robot Farm 3D as much as we did in 2D. Both times, it was used to keep bigger Aokobots/monsters/whatever from clipping through walls. In the case of the 2D version, it’s because the bigger Aokobot’s arms would actually draw OVER walls, which looked wonky and messed with the perspective. In this case above, it’s to avoid clipping with surfaces.
The system is perfect, but it still gets the job done usually which is good enough for me, considering the absolute quantity of environmental combinations the world will have in this game due to the World Editor and level design, along with any generated level design as well for future dungeons.
Anyway, I digress. Let’s move onto our plans for the game:
Robot Farm DEMOs
We’ll be taking the same approach we had with We Shall Wake, and start releasing some demos and letting players send us feedback on how it plays, bugs, and so on. The first one is going to cover exploration and combat, and we’ll hopefully see if all of this work on combat is sticking its landing or not.
Our plan is to release a video showcasing the demo and its features, and releasing it not so long after. Then, we’ll begin work on Robot Farm’s farming system (the third branch of the game), and release a demo showcasing that.
Then of course finally, we’ll be releasing the game into Early Access on Steam, and building the game up from there. We’ll go into detail about how that’ll work when we cross that bridge.
Moving forward & resuming Devlogs
Again, I apologize for losing track of time. I really didn’t realize how long it had been until I looked on here. Now, some people may tell me that it’s okay to ease up on the blogs - which I suppose is reasonable. But these blog posts are more to me than just updating prospective players on the game, but they’re also how I keep myself accountable and move forward.
To those of you who follow Robot Farm: as always I appreciate you. I can assure you guys at least that farming shouldn’t take this long, since I’ve had a firm idea of how I want it to be for awhile now. It’s combat that was always a bit iffy. There’s so many systems out there, and yet they all tend to feel somewhat samey (at least to me), and I’ve been trying hard to find a way to make ours feel different while still capturing what makes them so satisfying.
I hope it turns out fun for everyone! And hey, if it doesn’t - it’s not like I can’t reprogram it. So we’ll get there!
P.S. I had intended to get this blog out earlier this week, but I seem to have come down with a cold. My apologies!
♥ NOKORIWARE