Solarbots Devlog #2
Hello Pilots!
We’re back from the Abyss with another iteration of the Solarbots Devlog, giving you some new insights on what’s currently going on behind the scenes!
Manga
Unfortunately our Mangaka Hal-san has been delayed due to a cervical spine injury, however he has since slowly recovered and is back on track!
Rest assured that the production of the first manga episode is still ongoing. A few months ago, Hal-san expressed the wish to utilise a novel method in his creation, plotting scenes in 3d before turning them into 2d illustrations. Understandably, this process does take longer but results in beautiful, lively scenes which we can keep and reference forever while maintaining full integrity over years. Let me show you a quick WIP example:
We’re looking forward to releasing the fully finished first episode as soon as it’s done!
Dev-Team
Our Dev-Team is currently hard at work on multiple fronts:
Finalising the Solarbots Launcher
Capital City Gameplay
Combat Depth: Abilities/Mechanics
Machine Learning AI
Let me briefly address each individually with updates, recent blockers, difficulties and solutions!
Launcher
The Solarbots Launcher is coming along nicely and is currently in the last stage before thorough internal testing and subsequent public release.
Releasing a Launcher is certainly nothing to rush since by its nature, a Launcher is dealing with file storage permissions and therefore needs to be reliable and secure. As you can likely recall, we’ve announced the development of the Launcher quite a while ago, so you can rest assured that we take this responsibility very seriously.
The use-case for the launcher is to supply a streamlined mechanism to roll-out updates to the Solarbots game client without forcing the user to manually download the newest version, as well as being able to update itself should the functionality of the launcher need to be extended.
Capital City Gameplay
Our task-force for the capital city gameplay is moving along nicely and a lot has moved since our last Devlog.
We have developed most of the required scene foundations for the player to be able to freely move in and around capital city levels as well as a majority of the conversation tooling required for NPC interactions both in directed scenes as well as in free-roaming.
In addition, since the initial release of the Capital City Gameplay functions as a story introduction, we’re also working on two cutscenes of different nature - in-game as well as pre-rendered.
The release for this new gameplay update is still scheduled for EOY.
Combat Depth: Abilities/Mechanics
Arguably the most important aspects of combat in Solarbots are depth and strategy. Given the importance, we wanted to take a bit of extra time to thoroughly establish internal milestones for these as well as prioritising individual mechanics.
In the coming weeks, we will release an update for the Solarbots Combat MVP which features two new major mechanics, as well as foundational implementations for the machine learning AI, localisation, and much more.
Meanwhile as well as after the update, our Combat Depth task force is working on new abilities to utilise our system of Status Effects and Faction based abilities.
The addition of new abilities will be an ongoing process and likely won’t stop for the foreseeable future.
Machine Learning AI
The Machine Learning AI is certainly still a new development which wasn’t planned in the early drafting of our Milestones/Roadmap. Understandably it’s a large and complicated undertaking that requires a lot of effort to be diverted to it.
However, we believe establishing this as early as possible outweighs the negative aspect of delaying other features within Solarbots in the long-term.
The sooner the model can begin learning, and the more it is allowed to ease into the future complexity of combat, the more robust and reliable this model will end up being, offering a multitude of benefits, some of which are:
Dynamic difficulty scaling of fights
In many games difficulty changes nothing but numbers: Enemies deal more damage and have more HP. While this certainly does increase the difficulty of a fight, it often turns combat into a battle of attrition which isn’t the most rewarding sort of challenge, especially if this drags throughout the entire game.
PvP Reviews
Having a robust and intelligent ML AI will allow us to introduce a mode in which players can save and review their PvP battles, receiving suggestions from the AI for certain turns. Allowing every player to be “coached” for more optimal choices in certain battles.
In order for this to be reliable, the AI needs to thoroughly understand both your lineup and resulting strategy possibilities, as well as your opponent’s.
Animation & Illustration
Both our Animation and Illustration teams are heavily involved in the Capital City Gameplay update. We’ve already gone over tens of iterations of intermittent Player Models, several NPCs, new parallax backgrounds as well as drafts for more elaborate level-designs based on the free-roam movement introduced in the Capital City Gameplay update.
Since the Capital City Gameplay update will be the first story introduction, sharing too much artwork would be major spoilers. We’d like the experience of your first play-through to be exciting and new.
Thank you so much for understanding!
Music
The OST uploads will continue soon, however a fair number of, as of yet unreleased, tracks are being revised.
With the finalisation of the Capital City Story Introduction at the end of the year, we will also be planning the roadmap for 2023 after an internal 2022 post-mortem. This may take a bit since we want to accurately determine where we’ve made mistakes to be able to learn from them.
Do note, however, that Roadmaps are loose plans and always subject to change. As seen with the ML-AI Project, some changes and ideas come rather unexpected and keeping the freedom to re-prioritise is essential to a fruitful long-term delivery.
I’ve said it once and I will say it again: This is a marathon, not a sprint and it makes me infinitely proud to have you and your support with us.
Live the word!