Dev Jam - Campaign Mode

21/09/2018

LeftofNever

Dear Robocraft Community, here’s another Dev Jam to keep you up to date on everything that the Robocraft team is working on at the moment and to give you some exciting news about a new work-in-progress feature we hope to release on Steam in the next few weeks.

Firstly I want to take the chance to let you know that we haven’t stopped working on all the things we said we’d do before, namely:

The Big Robocraft Infinity upgrade - This is well on it’s way with several of the programmers working hard to do all the work necessary to make the upgrade possible

Tiers - This is already complete and live in the China version of Robocraft Infinity currently in Closed Beta via Tencent’s WeGame platform, so as soon as we complete the Infinity Upgrade, Tiers will be included with it when it is launched

Login and Display Names - We’re working hard to allow all users to have the Display name they had prior to the launch of the new login system and removing the four digit suffix from names displayed in-game

So, now to discuss something new…

Campaigns

We’ve prototyped a Single Player Campaign system to see if it was fun. We kept it simple so we could get something together quickly so it works a bit like this:

You have 5 ‘lives’

You start the campaign and a ‘wave’ of enemies spawns in

There are anything from 1 to 20 Robots in a wave

All the Robots in a wave are the same design and we built that Robot for our tests

AI controls the enemies (a bit like the AI in Single Player TDM at the moment)

Once you kill all the enemies in a wave you get a new wave of different enemy Robots

When you kill 4 waves the 5th wave is a boss megabot

There are 5 difficulty levels, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond and Protonium

You don’t need to complete a lower level before attempting to beat a higher one - you can jump straight into Protonium if you so wish.

In Gold you get just 3 lives, in Diamond you get 2 and in Protonium you get just 1 life

The different difficulty levels apply different Health Boost and Damage Boost values to the waves as well, so in Protonium enemy Robots are super buffed (like the buff that’s applied to you when everyone on your team has left the battle in BA and you’ve got to win against 5 solo), whereas in Bronze it’s like vanilla Robocraft balance

Each Campaign can have ‘restrictions’ a bit like BRAWL, so perhaps you have to build a Robot with less than 750 CPU to Campaign A and build a Robot with only Thrusters and Lasers to enter Campaign B, and a Tier 1 Robot in Campaign C etc.

The HUD shows how many enemies are left in the wave and how many lives you have left

You get XP and Robit rewards for playing this game mode

You also get to see the highest ‘wave’ you’ve reached in each difficulty level as the Campaign screen shows this

Beating Bronze is easy if you have played a lot of Robocraft but we’d like to balance Protonium so even vets have a tough time getting it complete

When we played it though ourselves we thought it was pretty fun and that you might like to play it, so we have cleaned up the code a bit and added some UI and we’re hoping to release it on Steam in the next few weeks. It’s very early days so I hope you forgive it being a bit basic but thought you’d like to get your hands on it anyway. Especially we wanted to see if it’s something you would enjoy and wanted to get your feedback on how it could be improved.

Here’s a work in progress screenshot of the Campaign Selection Screen:

Here’s a work in progress screenshot of the Campaign Briefing Screen:

Beyond the initial release we’re already working on a few quick improvements. Supporting a few different styles of Campaign like ‘Survival’ and ‘Timed Elimination’ and supporting multiple Robot types in a single wave and more weapons supported by the AI. We’re even adding a ‘Wave intro animation’ which allows you to see the enemies that will appear in the wave and will allow them to have some dialogue too so we can make the campaign have a bit of ‘flavour’ making them funny and light hearted.

Here’s a work in progress GIF of the ‘wave intro’ animation:

UGC Campaigns - The exciting part!

We’ve been thinking that if when released you seem to like it and want us to keep working on it more, we could look at upgrading the whole system to allow you, our fabulous Robocrafters, to make and share their own campaigns.

We’d love you to be able to create sets of Robots, upload them, configure the campaigns, balance them, name them, set the dialogue for the Robots that appear in the weave intro screen, and share them in a CRF style store where other users can play them, rate them, etc etc.

If you really like the campaigns we can keep adding to it, supporting more functionality and co-op campaigns etc.

Anyway, please let us know your thoughts on the idea.

Happy gaming!

Freejam