January 2024: Game engine completed!

Heya! Welcome back!

The first month of 2024 is said and done! And boy did we get a lot done this last month:

New World saving/loading system
Massive optimizations to loading the game
Loading screens!
Dialogue TextBox completed
Terrain system optimized
And much more!

With the completion of these systems, Robot Farm’s game engine is now feature complete. Meaning that from here on out, we can finally begin to focus on gameplay and content programming and creation. We’ll be finally releasing Robot Farm DEMO 1 in February.

Anyway, let’s elaborate a little!

World Saving System

This has been coming for a long time, and was finally addressed. Previously, Worlds made in the World Editor were saving all of the Maps made with the World Editor internally in itself. This became a problem when we began to consider how we’re going to collaborate with our team on making maps, and not only that, ensure that World files are completely future proof and won’t break down from future updates.

So now, the World saves itself inside of a ZIP archive with the rest of the worlds, and is able to manage that archive in the game seamlessly. This means that not only will we be able to collaborate better with our level designs and smoothly import their Map files into Worlds through its Map Manager, but modders will have much easier access to the Maps in Worlds too, for remixing/editing.

Loading Screen & Optimizations

Building a loading screen has been on our todo list since we first started this project years ago, and it’s been a daunting concept. This is because when we started, we kept the loading system simple and just loaded it all at startup, but because of the way it was made, it made the whole game freeze up while it waited for this process. What was at first only a second long freeze became 30 seconds to a minute, which is obviously unacceptable to us. NOKORIWARE prides itself on trying to keep its loading screens as short as possible.

We’ve been able to get the loading screen down to around less than ~5 seconds at most now, so we’re happy the outcome.

As for the rest…

We’ll let you see it all firsthand in the upcoming demo! Right now, we’re going to finally build a Steam page for Robot Farm, and make DEMO 1 available for free via that page. We truly hope you’ll give it a try, and come let us know what you think on our Discord server!

Thank you everyone for your patience! We’re excited to finally get something playable out there and let you guys try it.

And one last thing! Don’t think we forgot our tradition of making art every New Years!

Please, take this postcard, from us to you, formally inviting you to Robot Farm DEMO 1!