April 2024: Steam verified! DEMO 1 coming soon!

Oh boy, Summer is upon us! I hope you all are ready to kick back and enjoy the warm weather as much as I am! But before we can do that, we need to kick in gear and finally get this long overdue demo out the door! How about a quick update on how that’s going?

So first of all, I just realized that our February blog post was never pushed out and was left as a draft this entire time! I’m kind of embarrassed now, but at the same time, I can’t help but laugh. So, I’m just going to go ahead and merge that blog post into this one. 😂

Okay, pleasantries aside, let’s get down to business!

Coming soon to Steam!

To kick things off, we have great news! NOKORIWARE is now a Steamworks Partner, meaning that we’ll be able to put Robot Farm up on Steam soon! Right now we’re developing all of the assets we’ll need to properly set up, which includes things such as the banner art, and preparing the game itself so that we can get a lot of cool screenshots and footage of it for the page. Additionally, we’re hard at work at DEMO 1 as well, which we hope to release for free via Steam!

These things take time- especially on the art side. Our artist is hard at work on illustrating a massive banner to be used on the page according to Valve’s information on the Steamworks website. In fact, please enjoy a small preview of it!

Upgrades to the World Editor

Next up, we’ve deployed our World Editor to another one of our artists who will be assisting with the creation of levels and their assets. One of the biggest changes is that we’ve further optimized how our Magic Images work, and have been able to include even more data in them. For those of you who aren’t familiar with what I’m talking about, the World Editor is our inhouse tool we use for Robot Farm to develop entire worlds and levels. It’ll also eventually act as modding tools for the players as well!

It works based on a drag-n-drop system, where to add assets to the game, you need only drop them in the relevant folders. So, to give a small example of what I’m discussing above, take a look at this:

This simple “Magic Image, “ or Block Card, contains four different blocks inside of it. If you drop it in the game folder, those blocks are loaded into the game! What’s new about it is just that, they used to only store one block at a time. So if you wanted to place different grass blocks in 2x2 patterns, you had to do it by hand. But now, you can load all of them in at once and the game will automatically know to always place them in patterns! It’ll make more sense once you try it someday.

The World Editor also has this cool Decal system now! It’s primary use of course will be for things like carving dirt roads into the ground and so on. But it can be used for other things as well, such as making craters in the ground and blowing holes in walls. NNGINE is primarily a voxel-based engine right now, so that enables us to do a lot of cool stuff with the maps.

With these kind of upgrades and bugfixes added per the artist’s requests, we’re now finally putting some work into creating levels for the demo… Which at this point, is essentially our last step! Due to all of our optimizations, the World Editor is able to support fairly large maps (as seen above), while at the same time, being able to load into them in less than five seconds, typically. So for the demo, we’re really wanting to put in some cool areas for you to explore, and eventually, live in!