Solarbots Devlog

🚀 This spaceship is preparing for lift-off: The Solarbots Launcher application is going into its final preparations for public rollout. After the initial feature-set had been locked in and implemented, we have now ensured smooth rollout for macOS computers by implementing code-signing and notarisation (an Apple security feature that also allowed us to ship a macOS release of the game with the last community release). The remaining steps will be setting up a semi-automated release flow, as well as enabling auto-updates for the launcher itself.

😶‍🌫️ New mechanics make the battle gameplay more engaging than before: Evasion, Defense, and Strength entity stats have been added to our battle system and allow for noticeable gameplay differences between the various entities, attacks, and abilities.

🕹️ We're also in the first stages of setting up regular play-testing sessions across family members, friends, and more importantly, community members, which will help us evaluate and gather crucial feedback on new features and changes. Stay tuned for the sign-up form if you're interested and for the first evaluations shared with the team ❤️

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." - while we're not yet there (🤖💦), the team is preparing for the incursion, by setting up a machine learning (ML) training platform for experimenting with neural network-based AIs in our battles that can help us to balance gameplay, explore and evaluate proof of skill concepts, have "smart" computer enemies inside the game, and many more use cases. This is in early experimental stages, but we hope to have the first results on feasibility and usability within only a few weeks.

🏙️ We've been hard at work sketching out capital city gameplay (or how I like to call it the "narrative-driven single-player introduction"). This first release will feature the long awaited story introduction with Ruin, Rosalee, and the "ominous player avatar" and will also help us with implementing several of the required gameplay components for multiplayer gameplay set for 2023.

🙃 And just for good measure, a quick rundown of some more honorable mentions that landed within the past 2 weeks:

- Automated Unity upgrades will support the team going forward, by ensuring timely and hassle-free engine upgrades.

- Player-controllable monsters, bots vs bots, and monster vs monster battles are our first step into more flexible gameplay modes such as hot-seat, PvP, ML trainings, or spectator modes.

- Line of sight blocking allowing for more strategic battle positioning in which you can "hide" your bots behind each other. This allows your frontline to protect your backline from incoming attacks but be careful, this also applies to the opponent!

🚗 Look to both sides before crossing the street or the background team could hit you hard

Assets and pieces of 🌿Arboria and 🛠️Illskagaard are in process, coming alive pixel by pixel.

Small houses, street details, walls and every little piece is being created to make the cities come to life.

🎭 To be or not to be? If you don't want to be you should check all the nice masks we were preparing in the last weeks.

As you may know we are working on our Pilot Avatar project 😶‍🌫️, most of the principal bases are finished, so we have a good foundation, eyes now have their own animations for our Void owners and will be activated by hitting a checkmark on the character creation for Void Mk.I owners. (Not implemented YET)

🗡️ Attack Animations

We try to make them as dynamic as we can, and boy have I been blown away with some, I tend to say we shouldn't over-focus on details, but sometimes it's inevitable once you figure out something awesome to include, such as making the tiny sloth void yawn during their attack.

🧍‍♂ Idle Animations

They are gaining more style by the day! They really have become a way to show certain bot's personalities!

🏃‍♂️ Running Animations

Another seemingly systematic task: we recently started encountering bots which don't comply with a standard running cycle template, such as floating, rolling, propulsion, and will be showing some off as soon as we can!

👾 Monster Variations

In preparation for the Capital City gameplay, we require new enemies and we have already started cooking up some idles up! In addition to including color variations for the existing enemies, this will also include new regional monsters to distinguish each area even more.

All in all, I can't stress enough how pleasantly surprised we’ve been with each passing iteration. The team is improving by the day, and of course any feedback is greatly appreciated.

🎵 Soundtrack

As you have probably noticed, we have started uploading the Solarbots Soundtrack to YouTube!

We will continue to upload a new song every few days until they're all on YouTube so be sure to subscribe to be reminded whenever a new one becomes available!

The playlist can be found here:

Thank you for tuning in for our first Devlog and I hope you're as excited as we are for the coming updates as we aim to ship new Devlogs every few weeks (at least once per month)!

NOTE:

The Devlogs are intended as a transparency courtesy of current developments within the team. They are neither commitment or guarantee that the exact implementations will find their way into the final product.
Solarbots is an evolving work in progress and thus requires the freedom to change and adapt certain features and implementations should these changes prove to be a better path for the game and the community.