Robo Instructus devblog
Updates on the development of coding puzzler Robo Instructus
Beta-2 Launching The Game Closer To Release
I'm a game developer currently working on robot engineering puzzle game Robo Instructus. For my previous posts look here.
Today’s Robo Instructus update is called beta-2 and it contains the 3rd arc of puzzles & story of the full game’s total 4. Release notes.
Arc-3
If you can complete the difficult levels already available in beta-1.x, ie arc 1 & 2, you’ll be able to progress to the new ones. In arc 3 the star of the show is the “launcher” tile. It presents a whole new way for a robot to traverse a gap in the level that would have been impossible otherwise. However, they won’t be totally trivial to use and present a wholly unique set of problems.
The launchers charge up when the robot is standing on them and launch after a time whether you want them to or not. This is quite different to say calling some function (robo_launch or whatever) to launch. It presents a much more interesting challenge to use them deliberately.
Let’s take a look at the new art and animations:
The launchers were quite a pain for the compute logic, they represent a new moving part and a new set of edge cases. What happens if the launch cuts off the robot in the middle of a move? What happens in the middle of a robo_scan() call? And importantly the answer to these questions has to involve the word “deterministic” and involve it without the preceding word “not”.
I mean I seem to remember it being hard anyway, I did implement this well over a year ago. But doesn’t it look pretty now?
It’s the prettiness that I’ve been much more recently developing. Tom has once again nailed it with the art. Thanks to my previous efforts with texture compression I don’t have to worry about all the new assets causing VRAM or max-size issues either. I think it has come together very nicely.
Translations
Coming along with the new levels the game now supports 9 community reviewed translations for the interface Русский, Nederlands, Português, Polski, 简体中文, 繁體中文, Français, Deutsch & Svenska. These translations only cover vital interface stuff and may require more tweaks, but it’s been really cool to see the amazing people that have contributed to big-ab-games/robo-instructus-translation. Thanks so much guys!
I have more plans for improving the translated game experience, but I’ll go into them another time.
Release plans
It’s getting pretty close to the Q3 release date and even closer to the “review code” release date when the game is sent off to the press. The final arc will be kept for release and still has some art & story work to do. More concrete release info will come later.