sgthale

MyRobot Development Part 55

Added 2025-04-17 01:11:24 +0000 UTC

Video shows the summary, text shows the technical!

This week:

The Splat
Map Expansion

The Splat

The splat are these nasty ball of tentacles that are completely blind and rely on hearing to find enemies. They spawn from splat hives and don't like intruders!

All of the sounds in MyRobot have special functionality to be heard by these splats and depending on the volume of the sound, the splat may become aggressive.

The shader of the splat is a squash vertex displacement effect I made that makes it look like a soft body physics blob as it rolls around. Internally it's just a sphere collider rolling around. The tentacles vibrate whenever they hear sound as well as emit a spooky green.

They do kill the player with their explosion regardless of being on the robot or not. As for the robot, they could potentially kill it if they send it flying down a crevice. They also detach whatever robot limb they explode on, but you can always put it back on afterwards.

Map Expansion

I've added splats to a bunch of new caves as well as positioned them as obstacles for new puzzles to unlock more areas. There is also a new flammable brush that can be burned away with your laser arm to open shortcuts. As I said before, you will be able to play MyRobot with two types of arm tools (laser/grapple/hand) to modify the way you play the game.

There's also a new gusty wind object that pushes all physics objects into its direction when objects come near it. This was useful for creating turbo boosts to close gaps between large surfboard jumps.

So the canyon biome is just about done minus some decorations here and there. The next thing on the list is to add:

15 new animations and 5 new clothing accessories, these are Kickstarter backer rewards but I'll still show them off in these development posts.

I really want to start the desert biome because I think there's a lot of cool things I can still do. On the list of todo is making clothing block the sun from overheating the robot. It isn't going to be an empty desert like in the old build! There will be small caves/dungeons as well with loot (clothing/tools/blueprints).

Stay tuned!