There's a Firestorm coming your way!

More Robot Wars Development!

I made a Firestorm replica! Isn't he looking pretty hot? Firestorm is one of my favourite flipper bots from the old series, alongside everybodys favourites Chaos2! I scratched not only the modelling for bots, but also threw together a simple concrete themed arena to warmup. It may or may not get used in the game, but hey ho, nothing wrong with abit of practice.

Firestorm was quite enjoyable to model, looking through the pictures of him, a basic wedge with a front flipper, it wasn't until shaping the body I noticed that my current shape was a little flat. I then realised Firestorm has some slight bevels on its edges, to prevent it being beached on its side no doubt, and once I added those, the shape looks much better. I quickly mocked up a texture in Photoshop and it fit almost perfectly right off the bat! I feel like it does hide the bevels a little though, oh well, that can be easily fixed.

I also completed a gray box of the Gauntlet arena run! Like the real life version, there are 3 different paths a robot can proceed down after driving out of the turntable. Each path is different and features different hazards to avoid and score points with! I will also be doing the Pinball Warrior arena, as well as a Sumo Basho arena too in the future (hopefully) and with them I can release a playable demo of what I have worked on so far!

Of course everything is still VERY MUCH A WORK IN PROGRESS! There are untextured things, unfinished models and mechanics because I am doing it to further my skills as a developer, and to try my hand at making a robot combat game since we don't really have any of those! I feel its a great project to practice all my skills as a developer, programming as well as design and art, and it seems I have caught the attention of a friend on Twitter, much to my delight.

I must admit, this was amazingly flattering and great motivation to work on the project, and I am still debating whether or not to share some screenshots with some GameDev communities or Robot Wars fans on Reddit. Thanks awesome Twitter friend!

Today was a good day of development on this project, nice to be able to work on something other than my uni projects (which are eating up ALL of my time lately, deadlines, yay) which I will post on when I have a bit more on them to talk about! Firestorm came out great, and its flipper is successfully emulating physics, something I was worried about my game using, Firestorm tossed those thoughts out of my head, literally!

Life can be dark, wandering without a cause.

But theres lots of fun to be had, on Robot Wars!

Goodnight.

3...2...1...Activate!

The Robot Wars inspired game is FINALLY shaping up and after losing myself in development today, parts of it are starting to look rather pretty if I do say so myself!

For fun I made a rough version of the 2016 Robot Wars arena, complete with a fully textured prototype Hypnodisc to replace the boring grey box version I was using. I also threw in Shunt and got him working to wreck some destruction on some poor robo souls.

In terms of progress, I accidentally deleted the Canvas gameobject without realising... So I need to redo the HP bars and other minor text I had done. Shouldn't be too hard. in terms of gameplay, I also imported the first version of the old Gauntlet arena! I'll more than likely be adding a point system to it, so theres something to actually play, and would also like to do the Pinball Warrior stuff from Series 4+ just to give some more singleplayer-ability. I'd love to flesh out the arenas some more so they look like they're in studios or indoors, would be a good opportunity to practice with the lighting too. All the while making some more bots of course! I'm unsure whether to use more 'real' bots as I don't know what the effects of that are if they ever reaches a releasable stage, or mix in some of my own designs with some of my favourites.

Either way, I'll continue gray boxing for now, as uni work is definitely keeping me busy. More on that stuff as it develops!