MyRobot Development Part 61: June Release Approaching!

Video shows the summary, text shows the technical!

This week:

• Tutorials and Bugfixes

• Miscellanea

Tutorials and Bugfixes

So I've been sweeping from the beginning of the game all the way to the end making sure stuff works and there are no soft-locks. The game is shaping up to be very nice and am so excited to finally start throwing in more behaviours and animations after this June update. Once again, the June update is slated to release this coming June 21st.

But anyways there's so much work that was done this week and some that still needs to be complete. When it comes to adding tutorials to games, you have to make sure things get serialized, reset, and restarted properly so that tutorials don't get "stuck" if you save and then load them later on. And well, it can be quite complex.

Miscellanea

Sometimes when I'm sweeping the game (as in figuratively cleaning code and mechanics), I run into things that don't really make sense. For example, the hoverboard ability didn't make any sense. Why is it that they pop out from underneath her feet? I had to come up with a way for it to make sense.

First I thought a new chip you insert into her head would give her the ability. But that just seemed silly plus the head already has the removable processor core.

Then I thought, ok just make it an upgradeable button on the computer editor. But nah that would mean it's a software ability and it's clearly a hardware thing.

So I stuck with shoes. You have to put both shoes on for the ability to pop up, and this worked great.

Lastly, one thing that is rearing its head slowly is MOD SUPPORT. This has huge implications for when I design robot parts. So this entire time I've been making sure that a robot part can have its model swapped out when I add mod support in the July-September months of work. It's not as simple as just swapping out the model! If people can make ANY model, they will have to specify where their links for plugs are and the physics of their objects. It's gonna be great and I've got several ideas to formulate a mod support suite, which will eventually make it into Steam Workshop!

This means I am squeezing in another monthly build for July to release the mod support update and get feedback as soon as I can. More details on this later though. Back to work.

Stay tuned!