Designer Blog #4

Hello hello everyone! I'm Marisa Moreno, and I'm back again to bring you guys an update on our game, Robot Riot. As always, the game is made by our very own team at Sparkplug Studios, led by our very own Miciah Coley, who will be talking about the production process over on his blog.

In this blog, I will be diving into the playtest data we received at the top of the sprint as well as our focus pivoting towards the end goal of the game's production.

As I had mentioned in the previous blog, there was mention of level four having a wild west type atmosphere, kitted out with a saloon, trading post, and outhouse that lies in theme with the level. Since then, our resident level designer Alex Rico has brought in the idea to involve a wild west themed bank and mining shaft with an explorable cave system. The former is to add more playable areas to the level, and the latter follows the same reasoning but with an added focus on using bot mode in more areas of the map.

To keep on the bot mode train, I would like to quickly pivot to the playtest data as well as the feedback our team received from our executive producers for the course.

Since our playtest was early on in the sprint, most of the feedback we had received was fixed by the time the sprint ended. This included the projectile weapons becoming softlocked at times and certain weapons injuring the player if they moved in tandem with the launched projectile. Others such as the UI clipping on surfaces with the camera and the overall camera sensitivity are still needing some fine tuning and polishing to be up to our game's standards.

On top of this playtest data, our executive producers also noted a few areas of development to keep in mind as we pivot to polishing and fine tuning the game. Robot Riot has been advertised and pushed to be a "combat" or "fighting" game, though, in the game's current state, that portrayed aspect is a bit lacking. We hope to give players better feedback as to who wins each round when a life is lost and what effects are active on a player when they use or are hit by an item.

Another aspect to highlight as we continue with production is to have a better balance between the bot character's bot mode and combat mode. We have since pivoted for half of the collectable items to be available within each respective mode, with the health items and other power-ups remaining across both modes. This paired with the aforementioned areas in levels to utilize bot mode's compact size will hopefully balance out the need to switch between both modes.

As the team continues to make progress on our up-and-coming level four, we are also revisiting our previously built levels for polishing and cleanup with newly added props. With level one being complete as our unofficial tutorial level, our other level designer Carl Moreno focused on lighting rendering and other level tweaks. This involved the addition of floor two on level one, adding more play area as well as an opportunity for a verticality aspect that was not yet achieved in the game.

As we continue on into the last half of our production timeline, I cannot be any more proud of our team here at Sparkplug Studios and the effort that has been put into the game thus far. With our level count capping at four playable areas, our creative drive and motivation in production can only move up from here.

Catch you in the next update!