MyRobot Development Part 68 - MORE BEHAVIOURS

Video shows the summary, text shows the technical!

This week. I got a lot done:

• Crawling & Self-Repair

• Handholding

• Carrying

Crawling & Self-Repair

So crawling has been on the todo list for a while and I figured it was a good time to start it now since I needed to add behaviours for multiple robots. Why is that relevant? Because I imagined lots of shenanigans happening with multiple robots causing some to lose their limbs, and the last thing I want is a bunch of dead lifeless bodies scattered waiting for you to put them back together.

So I implemented crawling so that any robot can at least move around by itself even if it's missing legs.

Then this snowballed into its ultimate form: self-repair. This was actually not hard at all to implement since I already had the vast majority of the code already written (pickup/locomotion/logic tree interruptions) to handle it. So after adding 4 new animations, the robot can now seek out (by itself at the moment) and put it on itself if appropriate. Currently there is no command to force it to repair itself but if you let it idle for a few seconds it will start looking around for parts. This does bring up the question of how to prevent it from repairing itself if you are doing something with the parts, more on that later though.

Handholding

Self-explanatory, you can grab the robot by the hand and walk around. It will match the side you are walking so it can accompany you. This was originally in the game but after a year of work it became buried in new refactors. Basic and cute.

Carrying

This was implemented to address the issue of having a more elegant way to carry your robot if it's tired or out of battery.....actually I did it because it's cute, duh.

So now you can walk around and princess carry it OR you can carry it on your shoulder if you pick it up from behind. It's very useful as a temporary solution to navigate locations that have iffy pathfinding (as opposed to you driving and controlling her). Will evolve over time.

There are about 2 weeks left of this month's batch of work as the beach update is scheduled to be released at the end of the first week of September! I'm excited to release this update. Still have lots of work to do for the beach update.

Stay tuned!