About the Game

About the Game


'Steam Punk Robots' will be an immersive 3D game designed to run on Mac/PC platforms. It will be compiled in Unity and coded using C# and a Plugin called Playmaker.

The theme of the game is steam punk; it features a playable character called 'Rusty', who is a Foreman in charge of the worker robots working on the space station. While working one day, small objects start to land on the station. They turn out to be transmitters transmitting a signal that turns the workers against Rusty so they can take over station. The only chance Rusty has of saving the space station and himself is to find and decommission the various transmitters controlling the worker robots, and find out who is sending the transmitters and stop them.
As the player, you take control of 'Rusty' and must work your way through a multitude of engaging levels and tasks whilst avoiding various obstacles, and the worker robots. Each level will feature three different routes of difficulty and levels can be completed by finishing any one of the routes. This gives players of all abilities the chance to play through and complete the game, whilst not impacting on their enjoyment.
Each level will have items to pick up that will aid you on your mission to complete the game. Some of these will give the player a performance boost, whilst others will be crucial to completing the level.
All the characters within the game will be created to be appealing to players of all ages. Our aim for the game is to be able to get children and adults to play it and enjoy it equally. Great care will be taken in designing characters and levels that are complicated enough to engage adults whilst simple enough to encourage children to play.

Saturday, 17 November 2012

Weekly Update

This week I have continued work on the AI as well as thinking about the best way to implement difficulty into the first level. With the initial level having three different difficulty levels, it is going to be important to change how the AI interacts with the player to allow for experienced players and new players to enjoy the game.

A few ideas I have come up with that can vary between difficulty levels are:


  • The number of enemies
  • The speed of the enemies
  • The sight range and vision of the enemies
  • The damage dealt by each enemy
These points can all be tweaked in the game code to change how easy or hard a level is to play. As with the other games I am currently working on, it will be imperative to play test each difficulty level to find the right balance of the above points.

As stated in previous posts on this blog, I have already figured out how to code the line of sight, vision, player detection and enemy movement. The part I am now focusing on is laying out paths on the levels so that the AI finds routes around objects, rather than just floating through them.

Unfortunately, after numerous hours of research and tutorials, it seems apparent that this will require a complex piece of coding to achieve. The program that is being used for this project does not support the navigation routes that we require. Because of this, I am setting out more time for this part of the project to allow me to learn it. I have already begun and have looked at online tutorials and visited numerous forums and blogs that give different examples.

The difficult part here will be to adapt what I am learning to our game. I am however already making progress with this and I believe it is a good thing that I am being forced into learning yet another new skill on this module.

The outline for the this coming week will be to set aside a lot of time to improve my knowledge in this area and to try and get some of the enemy navigation sorted.

Written by Phil
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