MyRobot Development Part 52

Video shows the summary, text shows the technical!
This week:

• Misc Fixes and Improvements

• Dialog Player

• Retractable Bridge

Misc Fixes and Improvements

 Among the mentioned new WASD controls for the robot, I did a lot of code digestion to prepare to populate the rest of the map quickly. What I mean by this is making sure all the new game and story elements work like they are supposed to, especially when saved and loaded. So yes, quests, machines, physics objects, new story elements are all serialized properly now.

To reduce soft locks, I created a behavior that ensures important objects, like the glass fuse capsules, reset back to their position if they ever fall off the map or get thrown far out of reach.

Also I did a small final pass on physics. It's way more stable now! The bug where the robot spins on its head is now gone forever and it's much more difficult to get limbs stuck between thin colliders.

Dialog Player

 This was a partial rework on the way the player communicated with NPCs for the story. In the tech demo you had the mysterious man talking entirely with pre-generated dialog responses and the player likewise had hardcoded dialog choices. This new story dialog player allows the player to jump in with AI and ask his/her own questions to extract information from NPCs.

Because it's AI and the NPCs are driven by system prompts, I can, and do, embed secret pieces of lore in the system prompts to make the NPCs talk about interesting story tidbits that would never be talked about unless directly questioned about. Pretty cool.

But yes AI in this game is 100% OPTIONAL. There won't be dramatically important pieces of information only reachable through AI conversations, but you will most likely learn more about the lore. It's also very important to have both types of dialog (hardcoded/AI) because AI by itself hallucinates WAY too much and it will start talking about ridiculous things. So the hardcoded story choices inject system prompts as you talk to NPCs to guide the AI to stay on the tracks of my story.

Retractable Bridge

This was just a way to block certain regions for important reasons. It's a simple bridge that is enabled or disabled if it has enough power. So yes, some machines will require more than just 1 larva capsule battery.

Stay tuned!