eSports / development

A Turret's Life is a first-person arcade shooter/tower defence game for PC and VR where you are the tower defending an area against the endless onslaught of attacking robots and combining overpowered modules that can be traded as crypto-backed items. Updates In this blog update, I would like to continue addressing a question from a couple weeks about on the topic of the games rewards and challenges. Today I will start detailing the robot types. Robots The main challenge in the game is the attacking enemy robots that the player must destroy. The robots will have different modules on them, like how the player has different modules to make up their turret. Using a modular system for the robot designs allows for creating a variety of different possible behaviors for the robots instead of having to hand-create each individual one. More importantly, it allows players to categorize the type of enemy they are facing so they can plan ahead how to best combat them. Now I am going to talk about some planned robot modules. At first, only the basic types will be implemented, but this leaves room for adding new types of robots in the future as needed. There are four main robot module categories: locomotion, behaviours, attacks, and abilities. Locomotion This module determines how the robot will move in the world, namely affecting its speed and agility, and how well it can get to the player. For starters, robots will move either between flying, wheels, and tracks. Flying robots will be the fastest and most agile. Generally, they will also weaker but more intelligent. Their agile nature allows them to quickly swarm and distract the player while other slower robots move in. Their flying gives them evasion capabilities that ground-based robots just could not have. So, when the player is shooting at them, they could move up and down or side to side to try to dodge the player’s shots. Most annoyingly (for the player), some of them will function as kamikaze or homing missiles and the player will desperately need to focus all their firepower before the robots hit their target with their high-yield damage. One of the things I plan on having in the future is carrier type robots, that hold a few of the smaller flying robots on their back as well. If any of you have played Half-Life 2, think of the poison zombies. Wheeled ground robots will be the standard attack bot, with moderate speed and moderate agility. They can still overwhelm the player if they are not careful, but not as suddenly as the flying bots. The easiest robot enemies will start off as the wheeled type. Their main function is to be the primary attack force. They take the bulk of the shots from the player while the more agile robots go in for the kill. They don’t have any real ability to evade the player’s fire, but have numbers to their advantage. They can be ranged or melee in their attacking. Tracked robots represent the final locomotion type. They are the tanks of the robot army. Very slow in speed, but high in health. They may not be an immediate threat to the player for a while, but if left unchecked they could spell the end to a player’s defense. Their larger size means that will be an easy target for the player, but may also act as a shield for the other robots around them. As mentioned earlier, some of them may even act as carriers for flying robots. Destroying them before they can deploy their load would destroy the smaller robots as well. Now, I have mentioned general behaviours of these locomotion types, but due to the planned modular type system, the hope is that some level of variation and mix-and-matching could occur in the design process, but generally their behaviour would be along these lines. All of the robot locomotion types above have also been chosen because they are easier to animate, but in the future, I would also like to implement legged robots too! These types could have all sorts of movement like jumping or hopping, but from a technical standpoint are much harder to implement. Personal Updates As you may have noticed, I have been silent on Twitter lately and have been struggling to focus on the project as much as I would have liked. In truth, the company of my current job, which is in an indie game studio, is facing some financial difficulties and hours are about to be cut. Admittedly, for the past couple weeks I have been quite stressed from this fact and have been trying to figure out what to do. At first, I viewed this as a negative experience, but now I am starting to see it in a more positive light. Depending on how things are going, I am planning on moving to a smaller location that has more affordable living conditions, but will continue my current job as a remote work position. In theory, this should allow me to financially scrape by but hopefully continue work on A Turret’s Life with extra hours 😊 Join the Community! Website: https://www.aturretslife.com/ Telegram: https://t.me/aturretslife