sgthale

MyRobot Development Part 78 - Extreme Weather Mechanics!

Added 2025-11-27 00:19:37 +0000 UTC

Video shows the summary, text shows the technical!

This week:

Fun Biome Features
Weather Hazards

Fun Biome Features

So I added 4 new animations for the desert and tundra biomes. I expect to add more but this feels much better now that robot's idle animations change depending on where they are.

Additionally the tundra biome allows the player to create snowballs from anywhere on the floor and throw them! This coming week I will be adding snowball fight behaviors to the robots because, come on, I just have to.

Some smaller changes include less bouncy camera controls, better hoverboard, and more robust following of commands by robots.

Weather Hazards

For a long time the desert was supposed to kill the player but I never got around to it. Until this week! This helps tie up the problem of: "What happens when my robot overheats and I'm stuck in the middle of the desert?". Well the question has now been answered: You die. I did have to buff the sun to ensure it was a bit more difficult to travel, so overall this was a rework of the gameplay mechanics. It feels more complete now.

Using the same concept I extended the hazard to the tundra cold. As shown, you need to be on a robot to survive these extreme weather hazards! Otherwise your player death timer starts. This fosters more cooperation and it just makes a lot more sense from a game perspective, you can't solo this game anymore!

The tundra snow particles are interesting because I designed them with performance in mind. These are GPU particles but rendered in a way that it's just a mesh with tiny tiny evenly distributed quads in a volume where each are resized to face the camera in the vertex pass, no need to have a fancy GPU instancing Unity plugin. There are about 82k particles on screen at any moment and are culled by nearby defined planes. This allowed me to represent walls with culling planes to block out particles from passing through. Then I just popped in a trigger volume to mark them as "temperature safe zones".

Stay tuned!