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[burtonposey]

Hey guys,

I wanted to start posting on here about a game I'm working on. It's my first independent game release and it's planned to come out for the iPad and I'm using the Unity 3d engine to develop it.

The game is called Robots Love Ice Cream. The premise of the game is as follows. You play the role of an ice cream truck drive, traveling across the galaxy, defending planets from robotic invaders. To defeat the invasion, you have to employ an arsenal of weaponized ice cream treats.

You can find out a lot more about the game in our Kickstarter project we have going on through July 30th. The gameplay in the pitch video is from our mechanics prototype, that shows the basic movement mechanic for the game. The final look will be a layered parallax world, with 3d vinyl toy-like characters.

Robots Love Ice Cream game for the iPad

I'd like to continue to use this forum as a place where I can get into the nitty gritty details about what I'm making and how I'm going about it. I haven't posted much at all here, but TIGForums & TIGSource has been an enormous source of inspiration for a long time. For several years, I've been scraping money away to help fund my game company and I've just been able to make a move at releasing something commercial and have the time to be able to develop, coordinate, and promote it all the way I'd like to.

So I hope you guys will accept me and I look forward to telling you more about what I'm doing. We'd appreciate any consideration supporting the project. I'd ask that you considering spreading the word about the game.

If you live in Atlanta, I'll be giving a presentation on my game's progress and some of my processes at a Unity 3d (the engine I'm using) meetup at Georgia Tech Research Institute on July 26th.

One last thing, we're working with Disasterpeace MisfitChris for the music. As a lot of you might already know, Disasterpeace is the guy doing the music for Fez as well. You can download the title track for free from our Kickstarter project page for the duration of the project.

Thanks so much!

[Edited on Jul 1 2012 to reflect current game state - 50%]
[Trying to drop the "we all know this" from the subject of the thread]

Update, Jun 18 2014 to show game has been completed - Also need to post a post-mortem. This all could have gone much, much better 

[BomberTREE]

That link wont load for me?
I really want to see what this looks like lol

btw

[burtonposey]

Looks like all of kickstarter.com is down at the moment. That's a bit unsettling, lol.

Thanks for the Tearjerker clip! Might have to fit a milk proof robot into the game somewhere,

[SirNiko]

Name made me initially think of Robot Wants Ice Cream, but your pitch is obviously something different. I'm not sure how popular the Robot Wants game series was outside of JayisGames, though, so maybe that's not a problem.

[burtonposey]

Yea, I saw that name too. I don't believe there's a conflict of interest in the naming. That series is "Robot Wants <something>" and "Wants" is key to the namesake, and family of titles. Also, there's no collision between markets as this game is, as of right now, solely mobile and their game is web based. So, I think we're fine.

I'm gonna get back to coding, hope the site is back up soon. Be nice if people could support the game if they wanted to, .

Take care.

[burtonposey]

That link wont load for me?
I really want to see what this looks like lol

btw

It appears to be back up and here's the full link, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/addogames/robots-love-ice-cream-game-for-the-ipad

[BomberTREE]

I wasn't expecting something that cool!
love the concept art 

[sabajt]

It looks great, best of luck with the fundraising!

[burtonposey]

Hey guys, I want to post an update on my development as well as some new images that I've put together this morning. We're going to be shopping these to a lot of game blogs this week to try and drum up more interest and support for our Kickstarter project. Feel free to share these as well with any leads you might have if you would like to. We really do need all of the help we can get. We've got 12 days left and we're about 26% funded. Thank you in advance!

Development/Gameplay

Enemy Waves
Waves now consecutively launching. Once the player eliminates all of the robots in the last wave, the next wave spawns. Originally this was set up in my testing to be timed in that once a group of enemies had launched, the next wave would launch. I started to worry about how much stuff could potentially be on the screen with that approach. Ultimately, I plan on having multiple "flights" of robots inside of each wave, almost like a mini Shmup stage. The mechanic would be a bit similar to Super Stardust, where you've got enemies coming down and eventually, you come to the end of a wave.

Buildings
I've got buildings spawning around the planet (albeit with a fixed radius of a planet). I can enter a value and spawn that many buildings around the planet. Each building in Robots Love Ice Cream houses a citizen at the start of a level. A citizen is the game's health and the target of the robots wrath. They'll try to capture citizens. When there are no more citizens left on a level, the game is over.

Citizens
Unimplemented. Considering whether or not a citizen could conceivably be walking along the planet towards a building. If a Robot were to get shot down with a citizen aboard (not sure how I'd show that possession) could the citizen fall and then look for a building to occupy. I've got mental visions of the soldiers running to and from a building in Choplifter in my head, 

Enemies
Enemies are now able to report their destruction to the EnemyWave, which can then ascertain whether or not the wave is completely gone.

Weapons
Not a lot of new development here, but I noticed in my latest build I've got some logic that causes slower firing at targets closer to the Hero, so I need to fix that.

Hero
Got the truck animated and coded in logic for controlling those animations based on a speed value. The faster the truck is moving forwards and backwards, the faster the animation for the chasis rocking and the suspension bouncing will play. I think it looks pretty good for so little effort. Unity made it simple with an easy to follow article for controlling, layering, and blending animations.

Creative
Koi Fish
Got our Koi Fish model modeled, textured, rigging, and animated. I think it looks pretty sweet, but we might need to re-approach later and ask whether or not it really evokes a robot much in the texturing. I think the form suggests it, but we'll see if that's enough.


Hero/Ice Cream Truck
Got the Truck modeled and implemented in the game. The texture is probably not final and we need to make the ice cream lump on top of the truck a bit bigger so it fills it out. It's a good start though. Also managed to rig and animate the truck for suspension and chasis rocking. Bones are also in place for the turret base (for rotating the turret to aim at where the user is touching) and the tip (for launching a projectile from that point).


Buildings
Got some 3d models in there with quick unwrapping and an ambient occlusion bake just to see what the forced perspective stuff would look like and start thinking about the readability and scale of the forms.


I guess that's about all I have. I'll leave you guys with a shot from the current build of I guess what is essentially a pre-alpha. Love to hear your feedback!

[JasonPickering]

I would love to see the animations. what program are you using?

[burtonposey]

Using Maya 2012.

Sorry I don't have this very "presentation ready" but for the Koi Fish, you can check out this animation. It doesn't loop. If you have some presentation tips (I didn't want to use a Flash video player) for showing that off, let me know.

Koi Swim Animation - M4V
Koi Swim Animation - MOV

[JasonPickering]

Love it. that's pretty much exactly as I imagined it

[burtonposey]

Hey guys, haven't been able to get too much done on the game on account of all of our promoting our Kickstarter. We've got less than 48 hours left and we still need a good deal more support. We'd appreciate it if you'd consider supporting the game and helping us get it made! We'd appreciate if you could at least share with your friends and help us get the word out. We got some coverage from Destructoid last night and as far as I know, IGN is about to post something on the game our our (me + my wife) company. We need all of the help we can get!

DevLog Update:
Enemy movement patterns:
Managed to get a new system in place using C# System.Serializable to help expose some properties and set up a system of "stops" for the enemy. You can chain together these stops and get behaviors like a Space Invaders movement (right, down, left, down, repeat). The system is currently designed to only repeat, but I'll be adding some more granularity in there soon. Each stop has a type (left, down, etc.), a duration, and a place for a callback value that will execute a function in the Enemy.

The system is basic, but I'm happy with the results so far. The main thing I needed to get from it is being able to issue a command relative to where they are. I can't exactly lay out a bunch of cool movement curves around a planet. I've created some cool patterns in a 2d, side scrolling context and have simulated another object (cube) along that path and take it's information and convey that to the actual enemy. It's a neat way to do it, but I was using iTween and wasn't liking how it would hiccup in between transitions.

The next steps for this system is to get some curvilinear movements back in the game in my new system.

Probably the next month we'll be spending on concept art, aesthetic design, environment proportions, documenting the game out a bit more, and building some more of the core gameplay mechanics.

Until next time

[burtonposey]

We made it and our funding was successful on Kickstarter!

Just wanted to give you guys an update, .

We'll be focusing on concept art and the scale of assets with respect to one another this week. My hope is that we can use this first level to build a size chart for assets of varying levels of importance. I think that having this sort of scale lock down will allow things to read as important/not important at a glance, which is great for a game that should have you moving rather quickly.

[BomberTREE]

Congrats! Cant wait to see more in the future 

[burtonposey]

It's been a really long time since I've posted. The game is still on-going and we've been pouring any time we have into it since August. A lot of our team members have full time jobs and I'm pretty much no exception. I've been doing a lot of contract work and "storing up nuts" to afford several months off to work exclusively on the game. It was just proving to difficult to just keep floating from contract gig to contract gig and I didn't want to take a salary job and be required to sit in a chair for 8hours a day and more if they needed me.

So, as of this Friday, I'm on Robots Love Ice Cream until at least July, when we hope to have the game finished up.

We're about 3-4 weeks from the first milestone, where we'll have a nice vertical slice ready to show off and the first level will be, for the most part, a complete experience. A lot of our approaches have changed and the visual look and feel is a bit more refined (at least I think so). The Kickstarter campaign proved to be a very reactionary experience. We made decisions because we needed to show more and keep interest peaked and not because we felt they were the right decisions. We just didn't have time to think. So we've been building the game up and tearing it down trying to figure out what we want to make and what we feel like people will enjoy.

Here's some images of some of the stuff we've been working on since my last post ages ago.


First guy's name is Spinston. He captures the Citizens in the game, at least in the first level.

The second fella's name is Scrambles. He's more of a stationary turret sort of robot. He hovers and fires from his two side-oriented cannons and then his base rotates 90 degrees and then he fires from those.

The last image is a WIP of the "hero" of the game, the ice cream truck. It has the default weapon, that we're currently calling "Plain Vanilla", attached. The truck will keep it's same core form intact when the player switches weapons, but the mount/turret will change to make it easy for the player to see which weapon they've equipped.

What's in store for the week:
A lot of what I'll be working on this week is just taking stock again of where we're at, organizing our project folders a bit better. I'll also be working on creating many more movement patterns for the robots and trying to find some great combinations of them to use in the enemy waves. I'm really gunning to create some nice patterns like Galaga and I've rebuilt my movement system three times now just to keep getting closer to the point where I can easily tweak the parameters for movement and rapidly iterate on the flow of enemies.

Our main artist is working on the UI design and building out the environment for the first level.

That's about all for now. Now that I have time to think (in general) I'm looking forward to posting regular updates here once again. Take care.

[laxwolf]

wow, I'm so happy to see this again.

if only that $18,000 could of gone to someone working full time on the game.

[brettchalupa]

This looks really promising! I didn't know about it when it was kickstarted, but I am excited to follow development.

[burtonposey]

wow, I'm so happy to see this again.

if only that $18,000 could of gone to someone working full time on the game.

Yea, we've had many different expenses for stuff for things that we couldn't quite anticipate. But we've managed about as well as we can and we just try to have a great time working on it each and every day for as long as we could afford to. But I'm in a great position now, not having to take any work until August and just focus on making the game awesome.

Edit: Also, to break down the numbers 7% of that amount is gone from the start with fees from Amazon Payments and Kickstarter. Then you have costs of fulfilling rewards. We asked for an amount we felt like we could conceivably get through Kickstarter, but I think we anticipated putting a lot of our own resources into it as well and that's where we're at,  .

[Franklin's Ghost]

Hadn't seen this project before but just went through the posts and like the different character designs