Hello all! I'm very excited to announce the upcoming release of
Return All Robots!, an action-puzzle game by
Space Whale Studios (Philadelphia, PA).
Background: This game started out as an entry into the 2009 Philly Gamejam at GameX, where teams of local developers (typically hobbyists) were given 48 hours to produce a game from scratch. Our entry, "The Shovelnose Screamer", was a pretty simple game with only a handful of levels, simple cartoony graphics and music atop spaghetti Flash code. However, it took Best In Show and inspired us to create a new game in XNA based on Shovelnose's central gameplay mechanic of moving around a single character who can loosely 'control' both good and bad units by calling them over to him.
Overview + Mechanics: Return All Robots! is influenced by classic retro titles like Lemmings, Bomberman and Chip's Challenge. The setting places the player in the role of "The Intern", a green-haired intern on his first day at a major robotics corporation. Not long after he arrives, all hell breaks loose in the facility as it becomes full of deadly hazards like fire, acid, ice blocks, liquid nitrogen, lava and mutated tentacles. The Intern's task is to use a remote control to rescue all the 'good' (blue) robots that were vital to the company's research, while avoiding or destroying the 'bad' (red) robots that have malfunctioned. To do this, the Intern travels to dozens of levels in 6 different worlds (labs), each of which is basically its own puzzle with a number of robots, obstacles and hazards. The goal of each is to lead the good robots into a teleporter square. Sounds simple, but there are a few catches:
1. Robots only move in cardinal directions. If you're diagonal from a robot, they won't know what to do and won't move at all.
2. ALL robots - good and bad - respond to the player's call at the same time.
3. You can't call robots while they're moving - in other words, you can't change their direction at all. Only when they've stopped (hitting a barrier) can you call them again. Of course, the remote has its own energy meter meaning you can't make a series of extremely rapid calls, either.
4. Bad robots can't touch good robots, the teleporter or the player, or the level ends. The player must also avoid (and help the good robots to avoid) hazardous tiles, as those will end the level as well.
Furthermore, as the game progresses, new mechanics are unlocked. In Lab 2, the Cryogenics Lab, ice blocks can be found in all of the levels. The player can melt these objects, but once melted, they can't be recreated. In some situations, the player might want (or
need) to melt a series of ice blocks to clear a path, while in others they want to leave particular ice blocks frozen to block bad robots. In Lab 4, the Weapons Research Lab, turret robots are introduced that can move like normal robots, but also have a constantly-firing laser cannon that can make any one direction very deadly.
The idea here was to set up a style of addictive, puzzle-based gameplay that also integrates some action elements (in some cases, quick reflexes and calls are needed to move robots in the right manner) while also encouraging creativity. There are a variety of ways to solve any given level. In our testing, we noticed some players worked to destroy all bad robots first before rescuing the good ones. While this is a good strategy, the game does track individual level statistics - # of calls used to beat the level, # of red robots destroyed, and clear time. Thus, a 'safe' strategy might be effective, but result in poor overall stats. More advanced players may try to destroy none of the bad robots while maneuvering the good ones through them carefully. RAR! is a game that definitely encourages multiple approaches to problem-solving.
Gameplay Depth: The game has a total of 28 levels in the normal game. Once you beat the game, you unlock an additional 12 levels, and there are 6 hidden levels scattered throughout the game world, accessible one at a time much like the Star Road levels in Super Mario World. Based on our playtests so far, even the normal game takes hours to complete, and our very best internal speedrun for the entire game is just under 60 minutes. So, Return All Robots! is not a walk in the park
Many of the later puzzles require you to use multiple mechanics, look several moves in advance, position and move the Intern properly, and keep your eye on 5 or 6 parts of the screen simultaneously.
We've sought to give the game solid replay value by opening up each puzzle to a myriad of possible solutions. There is no "right" way to beat any given level, and while some solutions are more efficient than others, the player can weigh their desire to win with getting the perfect time/efficiency/robo-destruction score. Additionally, there is essentially an overworld map for the game - you are not just shunted from level to level. If you're not solving a puzzle, you can walk around the corporate building of Ethical Robotics and Experimentation, inspecting objects and talking to NPCs much like old-school adventure games. Most of this dialog is pure flavor text, but if our testers' experiences are any indication, it's fun to see what everyone has to say.
There's also a basic multiplayer mode, which is a head-to-head battle where each player gets a remote control and must try to call constantly-respawning bad robots to try to destroy the other player while avoiding destruction themselves. It's a little mindless, but very entertaining!
Art + Music: As you can see by the screenshots + videos, the aesthetic is basically a mix of 50s kitsch and 16-bit retro-style combined with our lead artist Zachary Brooks' bizarre taste (which only partially shows through in the brief previews posted here.) Musically, the soundtrack is basically pure retro style, but not in the chiptune/8-bit sense. Instead, myself and composer Mike Worth went back to 80s pop and rock to design the electro-pop soundscape, along with catchy hooks, SNES-style sound effects and a synthetic sheen on everything.
Within the next few weeks we will be making the entire soundtrack available for free via
OC ReMix - it will feature over a dozen tracks plus an entire CD of remixes. There will also be a 'deluxe' version with some bonus + extended tracks/remixes available as a physical disc and on iTunes. So, if music is your thing, get ready to check that out!
As of late October, we're just adding some final polish to the game in the form of cut scenes that will help guide the player and advance the story. We hope to have the game in the XBIG review process within a week, with both that and the PC version being available in early November at a price of 240MSP / $3.We've showcased the game a couple times already (once at a
and earlier at
Artscape in Baltimore) and gathered some great feedback from that, but we'd love to hear from fellow indie developers + enthusiasts here.
So, on behalf of the whole Space Whale team, we look forward to reading your feedback!
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