MyRobot Development Part 25 (Patreon)

Video shows the summary, text shows the technical!
This week:

• Formal Map Design

• Brain Rework

• Ambience Graphics

• Laser

Formal Map Design

 The map you've played will be going away (though assets and related will be carried over). The purpose of the old map was just to make a quick pilot version of the game's future.

This new map is the map I intend to work on for the rest of the game's development. The first thing I did was to optimize my work flow, previously I was manually placing rock assets into cave shapes. This was boring and burdensome so I opted to instead buy an asset called Digger that allows me to dig into the terrain to super easily sculpt caves and holes. I will place the rocks later when the gameplay around the new cave systems settles. So in short, gameplay first!

The map also has a small elevator that will be used for the tutorial area. It is made of grey boxes so that I can worry about the art pass later. Map development must at the moment be as fast and iterative as possible.

Brain Rework

 There were changes to how the robot changes between tasks. It is far more robust and uses a system I called tree context switching. A long time ago when I was first starting out gamedev, I used to settle with using lots of if statements and changing a target class to update. This new tree context switching allows the robot to simultaneously use different actions if the actions allow it. It also automagically cleans up and starts new actions without as many bugs as before! So far less "freezing in place not answering commands".

Ambience Graphics

I'm a graphics junkie by trade so I spent a couple hours designing a simple system to capture light and environment changes when you go underground. This system blends between different ambience zones and propagates shader uniforms to all robot parts and objects in its volume.

Laser

 The laser will be multi-purpose not just for setting bugs on fire but also to mine rare earth minerals! More on this in the next development post.

The laser consumes more battery so be careful when using it.

Stay tuned!