Announcing Battledroid Skirmish

What? A new game? What about the old game? Well, these are the emperor's new clothes, baby. We're taking the humongous pile of awesome code that we've so far developed for the horribly ambitious Battledroid MMOG, and using the juiciest bits to make a standalone single-player skirmish experience, with just the bit where you get to blow robots to pieces.

It's still a battle simulation - all hands-off, you just get to place your robots - but it's single player vs. increasingly bad-ass CPU opponents. The objective of the game is to reach the rank of Field Marshall. You score XP towards rising in the ranks according to how close to the odds you can win with - very similar to the MMOG concept.

The Joy of User Interfaces

Most sane developers hate doing user interfaces, and would rather stick pins in their eyes or burn to death or whatever. And with good reason! UIs are horribly fiddly and complicated but most importantly they are boring!Nothing explodes, or tramples off triumphantly into the sunset over a heap of its slain foes. It's dull stuff when it comes to results, not like all the fun bits of games programming where robots blast each other to bits and the particles shower like a New Years' Eve firework party.

Being slightly less sane, this is why we do the UIs first!

There's nothing less fun than making all the cool explosions and robots and scenery and so on for months and months and then right at the end of a project having to spend months on the most boring, tedious part, when you're already knackered and just want to finish and get it out of the door. It's also very useful when you're testing things to have an actually functional UI - not least because it often shows up design flaws in the metagame and all that.

So here's where we were, 2 months ago:

And after extensive fiddling and twiddling, here's where we're at now:

The game screen is just a placeholder image at the moment - that's what I'm up to in August: I'm taking a whole month off of evil contract work so that I can transplant loads of the code we did in Battledroid proper and in the engine demo code and turn it into something that actually plays.

Early access this autumn? Let's hope so!