MyRobot Development Part 59

JUNE BUILD IS APPROACHING! Read below for more info.

Video shows the summary, text shows the technical!

This week:

• Water Dynamics

• Eels

Water Dynamics

I love water in games and I love them more when they really feel like real interactive bodies of water. So for MyRobot I made sure to keep a toony aesthetic while adding lots of fun in-game functionality. There are 3 cool features of the water:

1) Depending on the volume displaced by an object and its speed, physics objects spawn a splash animation with variable size (as shown in the image above).

2) Physics bodies realistically float to the surface, including the player. This prompted a new swim controller so the player can swim and easily transition from land to water. Also it includes behaviours for the robot to NOT fall in as they will malfunction.

3) Cool shaders make the water look like it has depth, fog, blur, distortion, and other screen effects as you come out of the water surface and see your screen drying out.

Pretty much all of these new features are going to be used for the beach biome (in a few months). I will also be implementing mechanics to have upgradeable boots for the robot so that it can sink to the bottom instead of always floating. But only if I have time and think of how to make the robot waterproof. If you have any ideas comment below!

Eels

Eels are a passive creature that only go after the player if they get to close and stay too close. They outswim the player so just stay away or use the human fishing hook technique to quickly fish yourself out of the water.

I want to give the player options to complete tasks hence me talking about adding super heavy boots for underwater. I think it would be really cool I just need to figure out how to add waterproofing in a simple and reasonably timely manner.

JUNE RELEASE

SO, June release is the first of 3 big big releases for MyRobot. It is a release with 5 months of work! They will be available to all Supporter tiers and above here and will be free for everyone who backed the Kickstarter a few months ago. I am furiously finishing the story mode by June so that I can use June 1st-June 20th to hook up the AI to all these new features, polish, and make sure everything works, then I will release June 21st.

Stay tuned!