u/groato

Hi all!

Botlings has entered its' first playtest. Steam link

For those who haven't followed, Botlings is a factory automation game with no conveyor belts. Drones? No. Everything is done by tiny robots that can only move forward. Buildings are made of them, they carry all the resources and they even do all the work in the buildings!

There is one catch though, if you make them work too hard or make them invent too many new things, they will start to develop a sentience and begin to rebel in your service. So keep them happy!

We're just gathering feedback on the first 30 mins of the game, but it's playable until the almost-very-end (because there are some end game mechanics that are toggled off for the build, like end game structures). Some of the sentience development logic has been left on, but the more complex systems are still off due to being a bit unstable...So in its' current for the Botlings will just annoy you rather than make you cry when they walk of with your factory.

If you have an interest in a game like this and want to playtest, go ahead and give it a whirl! Also very much looking for feedback either through the feedback system or on here.

(P.S. Those of you who don't know Lemmings from the 90s should go look it up!)

tldr: I made a system that changes the update framerate of movement to allow way more moving actors -> from 300 actors to 1K+.

I'm building a factory automation game with little robots that move around. They turn into buildings and do all the production tasks (and finally become evil reaching AI sentience). I'm at the stage of my development where my next step is to turn them inton an ISM.

However, I wanted to test how far I can push the limit. The little robots (Botlings) move with a SetActorLocationAndRotation function. I've nativized it to C++, but the main movement function is still in blueprints (check here if interested https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/ix3tuoeg/ ). I'm obviously going to nativize the whole code if I'll end up using this for the long haul.

How it works: you can set a target FPS for the botlings and it interps (constant) their location vector with a speed that keeps their movement speed on the screen regular. It's that simple!

Once the system goes below 20 FPS you can see the steps a bit more clearly, but even if your game is running 60 fps and the movement is only at 40 FPS you can't tell the difference. The system gets real janky (obviously) when the update rate of the Botlings goes above the FPS of the game -> to automate this you can detect the framerate over a longer period of time (say, 1 second) and adjust the update framerate of the actors down if overall FPS drops below 30.

You can see the performance and stats on the video I made while playing in a PIE window. That already has massive overhead, so in a packaged game this system allows a lot more actors.

In fact, the performance was so good with this setup that I'm reconsidering using ISMs altogether. Moving all botlings that work off screen to work with 10 frames per second would enable a massive increase in actors. Unfortunately you can't stop them altogether or set it to once per second, because the game relies on collisions between botlings (I guess you could turn collisions off off-screen and just calculate the collisions manually?). Any other tricks that come to mind to do with actors?

I've had a friend make trailers for my previous games and now I tried it myself. Man, this stuff is hard.

Any help and feedback is much appreciated!

Really curious to know what do you think the game is about based on nothing but the trailer?

Based on Evans Bohl's amazing toon outline shader video, I made a color edge detect shader. As you can see from the images, it detects changes in color from one pixel to the next and gives the game a cartoony look. In the first example image the shader is ONLY on the building and not the little robot. (the robot is sporting a cel-shader and an edge detect shader).

Blueprint link for material function to detect color edges. The graph doesn't have green differentiation but you can add it if you wish, I found leaving one or two colors out gives my game a better look, but it depends a lot on what types of textures you use and how you have your parameters set up. If you wish to use it, follow Evans Bohl's tutorial on the toon outline and just replace the material function for depth detect with my color edge detection. If you are AT all into post process shaders, Evans' videos are a total gold mine and should be viewed by everyone, because they have so much important information.

I run it alongside two different other shaders (said outline shader with a few mods) and a cel-shader) and you can see the complete results in the game pics I posted. I use shaders only on some objects and nothing uses all three shaders. Mainly because cel-shader naturally destroys any effects the color edge detect shader has. I've got stencils that I apply to objects that the shaders read and only work on those with certain stencils - for ex. stencil 2 applies cel-shader and outline shader detect, stencil 1 only color edge detect shader etc.

As you can see from the last two images that displays the whole game, the effects at long range are quite subtle (the color edge detect shader is used on the buildings mostly) - but they give a distinct "feel" to the look even at a very long range (camera spring arm length is 2000 units in the "close up" and 100000 units in the zoom out). Or at least I think so :D

(Here's a link to my game Botlings the images are from: Steam )

If you have any questions or comments, super happy to explain further! And also eager to know what you all think of the look?

Edit: And also very keen to know if anyone has a similar look with a different approach as using multiple post process shaders is always not ideal from a GPU utilization perspective.

DEMO OUT NOW NOW!

We've (by we, I mean I, because I'm doing this pretty much solo) just released our demo and hoping to get as many people to break it as possible. Here's a link: Steam

Wishlists are also much appreciated, but hoping people would play the demo and tell how they feel! Honestly too, no sugar coating please.

Botlings - from swarm to buildings

Build and automate a factory using small robots that can only move forward. Route them through turners and splitters, make do research for you and have them mine and refine resources - and also have them carry all that stuff! But watch out, the more your factory develops, the more independence the little Botlings get and might just rebel...

But what is it, like really?

I think the demo plays more like a base building game with RTS elements rather than a pure factory automation game. There are no conveyor belts for starters, and while the Botlings might seem like conveyor belts -replacements, they are much more as they also create the buildings and do all the work.

You can also enter a first person view and check the world through a botling's eyes. Combined with the fact that there are catapults that throw the botlings around, it's quite fun to tour the base with one.

Demo is soft locked to a fairly short tech tree, but you can still get the base game play experience and produce even more botlings. There isn't much iron on the map and you can't build bridges, so you can't build 1000s of botlings in it. 100s though, yes.

Future plans

My current timetable is to release on Early Access this summer, but let's see where we're at when we get there. Base game is darn fun already, but I'm still a few weeks from getting the Botling awakening logic fine tuned to a level where players will enjoy it (and not just get frustrated).

I'm also working on additional models for the environment because it's quite bare at the moment. But they are gonna be ludicrously awesome and spacey!

The base game has multitier building already, but it's a bit finicky and not user-friendly so I left it out of the demo. It is quite fun though (at least now since I toggled botling death off for when they fall from heights).

Some Links

Botling jumping around on Youtube

Discord - join us to keep up to date!