Robo Instructus devblog

Updates on the development of coding puzzler Robo Instructus


A Window To The Stack

I'm that guy who quit his job to sit in his house making games. I'm currently working on robot engineering game Robo Instructus. For my previous weekly posts look here.

Robo Instructus alpha-1.4 is hot from the oven filling the room with the delicious smells of lovely new features. Two new major features arrive in this version and one of them is a biggun rendering live stack values inline with code.

Live inline stack values

Look at the code side of that image you’ll see the the scan variable that robo_scan() returned is being shown inline scan: -999. This isn’t part of the code that the player wrote, it’s populated as the code runs. That’s because it’s really a live view onto the stack, that is the programmatic memory of the robot.

It might not look like much right away, but you’ll quickly find out this is a massive visibility boon for players and the more complex the player’s solution the more helpful this becomes! I think it’s going to be hard to imagine this not being there after everyone gets used to it.

Lets see it in action in a more complex later level, shall we?

Windowed & fullscreen

Until now the game has only offered fullscreen rendering, from alpha-1.4 Robo Instructus supports windowed and fullscreen. You can toggle this in the menu. The window is fully re-sizable and all aspects of the game resize to suit the window size. However, the design is really meant for a large window compared to monitor size. Currently a small windows is treated exactly the same as fullscreen on a very small resolution monitor in term of scaling, and actually this makes it easy to test low resolutions.

I think the game will be a good fit for windowed as I often go for maximized-windowed mode when playing puzzle games. Of course, the fullscreen option is still there. I may investigate moving that to windowed-fullscreen later, as it may provide benefits we’ll see.

If you fancy being a part of Robo Instructus’ alpha testing get into contact with me using one of the methods on the front page.

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