Blog Post
Rebots Roundup #4
Hello dear Rebots and RebotsFriends 😉
Rebots Roundup #4 is here so let’s get down to business!
We skipped last week’s Rebots Roundup because we’ve been focused on some really core stuff to Rebots in the past 2 weeks: Tutorial and Controls
Tutorial Rework
Now it’s time to talk about how the tutorial was actually redesigned to be more informative as well as more robust, so we ensure that players have all the necessary information to play Rebots on their own.Â
We are achieving this by creating so-called tutorial “modules”, which are standalone parts of the tutorial and they teach skills to the player one at a time. The idea with this modular approach is that if things change down the line or we add new content, we don’t have to change all the modules. We’ll only need to change the ones affected or just create new modules and they won’t break the rest. This was not possible in the previous tutorial iteration.
Another crucial aspect of the tutorial redesign was how we handle errors and players not doing exactly what they are told to do wink wink. We saw 3 options here:
- Prevent: disable actions to ensure order
- Support: modules can take multiple paths
- Discourage: nudge the player to take the right action
We have decided to go with ‘prevent’ as much as we can because it is the easiest to implement and ensures order within a tutorial module. There will be some cases where we will discourage (selecting head/body of a super) to avoid confusion and not to hide mechanics from the player. Support is the most flexible but requires far more implementation effort.
Controls
The second core focus these past two weeks has been controls and reconsidering the general interaction design of Rebots. The goal here is to create a default control scheme as well as rethink how interactions happen with the different tools, talking with aliens, etc. This is still very much work in progress, so I’ll just share a couple of things that we’ve been working on:
- Separate general interactions (talking with aliens, take-off button) and logistics tool interactions (connecting and moving supervisors and workers)
- Improve radial wheel for the crew tool (spawning supervisors) and implement radial wheel for tool selection
- Improve connecting supervisors by making it possible to click anywhere on the target supervisor, not just its head (WIP)
There is a of course a lot of internal playtesting along with trial and error going along with this control & interaction work as well with the tutorial, so we are not quite ready to share.
We are hoping to get this into your hands next week though so keep an eye out 😉
In the meantime, keep it cool!
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