Rebots is an automation adventure which sees the player trying to save their sector of the asteroid belt in the face of mass alien migration, galactic climate catastrophes and ruthless weather vampires. While other games in the genre may focus on terraforming, Rebots deals with the concept of clima-forming. The player, with the help of their robot crew, can raise and lower the temperature, pollution, radiation levels, gravity, biodiversity and many more aspects. This affects the aliens and ecosystems with consequences the player has to mange. Through it’s gameplay, it seeks to provoke questions in the player about climate change, robotics, our food and energy supply.
I joined FlatPonies to work on Rebots about half a year into the game’s development cycle, and worked on it for 3 years. Initially I worked on every part of the game, building things like the contextual interaction system, implementing many iterations of UI for the game as well as working extensively on the procedural generation of the asteroids, aliens and quests in the game. Over time the team working on the game expanded to include designers as well as more programmers, and in the later years I specialized more in developing tools for the designers and backend systems of the game.
Some of my bigger responsibilities and tasks from the last year:
Implemented a sabing system to save the procedurally generated levels and game‑progress data to JSON. Biggest challenge was in handling references to scriptable objects, which we use in abundance.
reworking our procedural generation pipeline into a graph‑based editor, so our designers have more control and insight.
Profiling and optimizing the scene‑loading.
supervising an intern.
Introducing code reviews.
Introducing documentation for the project.
Rebots is slated to release in 2024!
