Trials of Droids

Click the Trials of Droids tab up above! I double dog dare you!

What I've Been Doing

Hey all. Here's the first screenshot from a new game I've been working on called Trials of Droids. It was designed by my could friend Eddie Rogers, and I've been programming on it for the last two weeks or so while he does a lot of the art. It's a platformer / puzzle-game where you switch between two droids trying to escape imprisonment on an alien space craft / planet. It's getting really closed to being "finished," at least in as much as all the parts function. It needs more art an levels, but expect a demo soon!




So... as far as My Robot is Fight is concerned... It's on the back burner for now while I work on Droids. In fact, when I resume work on My Robot is Fight, I may completely overhaul the level generation code and the way much of the interface works, using a lot of the knowledge I'm gain programming Droids.

Things I hope to accomplish:
-Use tilemaps to make the randomly generated levels a lot more RANDOM. That is to say, don't just shuffle the order of several different rooms around within 1 of 6 possible layouts, but actually generate a lot more random content within the rooms. Currently, the levels in My Robot are constructed from large pieces of oddly shaped art which has proved restrictive for a while. Using tile-maps should open things up a lot. Also, I've developed a way of importing bitmaps in as tilemaps for Droids, that should speed up the process of room design and workout a lot better than scripting every room.

-Load everything at once. This may not be possible, but I'm hoping to optimize my collision code enough to load the large zones like Level 1 all at once, so that monsters won't reappear every time you enter a room. I have mixed feelings about that mechanic of the game (monsters reappearing), but among the problems it causes are some big ones, like having the lil' cretins come back after you enter shops or you inventory and making grinding extraordinarily easy and also BORING. I'm still not 100 percent on this idea, but I'll probably try it.

-Separate weapons from the skill tree, and make skills more interesting. Having a rocket launcher isn't much of a skill.... being able to rapid fire your rocket launcher or shoot multiple rockets might be. There's a lot of redundancy in the current skill tree. The Gatling gun is just a shittier, more energy-expensive machine gun and the freeze ray / freeze-thrower is pointless when there are equippables that make your flamethrower or blaster do the same thing. I'm thinking of having weapon categories you can equip energy-types to (acid-thrower, gatling fire-bolts), or maybe just having 4-5 energy type skills you can select that change the function of every weapon.

Also, I'd like to add more interesting non weapon skills like a gun the makes blocks you can step on, a power dash, a mario type stomp attack, space jumping, a portal gun, all sorts of crazy things. More stuff for the option bot.

I'm also considering that in addition to a level requirement, certain quests will unlock skills. Like a quest to rescue Fight Ship 0x....Whatever his name is for robot purgatory will unlock the turn-into-a-jet skill.

I have a lot of big ideas for MRIF, but they're going to take a long time to implement, and I'd rather actually finish a game first before practically restarting a game that's been taking me years.

Look forward to Droids and more updates. And look forward to making custom maps for it too!