The factories are where robots are created and deployed from. There are currently three scattered throughout the map. Robots will communicate with their respective factories and share information about the player. These factories have their own ‘aggression levels’ - a more aggressive factory will produce more aggresive robots and in higher quantities. The factories derive their aggression levels from the way the player interacts with it’s robots - attacking a robot will not only raise it’s individual aggression but also the aggression of the factory it came from.

Nerd stuff

The robots are fully physically simulated - no hard restraints are placed on it’s motion. A simple PID controller is used to keep robots hovering upright at a specific height. As for navigation, Unity’s navigation system is used. Each robot has it’s own invisible ‘guidance agent’ which handles pathfinding through the use of a NavMeshAgent. The robot applies a force every FixedUpdate to push it towards it’s guidance agent. It’s a fairly simple system, but it works quite well.

Defense

A large part of Mechanica is defending yourself against the robots as they get increasingly hostile. Here’s a quick look at the recently added ‘EMP Bomb’: