07 Apr 2025Developer post

Final Update

I said I'll bring this update out in march. I got sick, my pc broke... so here we are a month late. This is the final update for Saikyo Robots. With it comes a brand new level that is packed with new content. This level is more challenging than any other level. It has more upgrad

I said I'll bring this update out in march. I got sick, my pc broke... so here we are a month late.

This is the final update for Saikyo Robots. With it comes a brand new level that is packed with new content. This level is more challenging than any other level. It has more upgrades, more abilities to unlock, new enemy and lots of new stuff!
Let's break it down.

More days

Each day that you survive, you are rewarded with stronger ugprades becoming available. In this level you can survive for up to 16 days. That's five more days than earlier levels which means you will see a lot of new upgrades that will make your army stronger than ever before.

There also are passive abilities hidden in the level that give your swordbots shields and your gunbots can do some devastating damage but I'll not spoiler more. You'll see. All these powers will be needed to survive though, as the enemies are growing stronger every night!

Titan

The enemies so far have been either good at dealing damage or good at taking a lot of hits. The new enemy "Titan" is good at both. It is tanky, deals lots of damage aaaaaand is very slow. Weirdly that wasn't enough to make it strong. With the right upgrades your gunbots will deal max health percentage damage and easily destroy it.

Therefore I gave the Titan the ability to heal. Like a lot! And to make it feel more like a miniboss, I gave it another ability. Once it's health falls below about 30%, it heals a percentage of missing health every second, for five seconds. Good luck beating it!

What took me so long

The final level took quite some time to make but it's not because of all the new content. All that content was already created quite some time ago. The actual reason was that the game was having some heavy fps issues. There was quite a lot of things I was able to change so that the game can run faster. But changing code and how things work leads to bugs and so I ended up having to fix new bugs. The cycle every developer loves.

What now?

For almost three years I've worked on Saikyo Robots but I also was working on my wrist injury. The injury is a lot better now yet not fully healed. It's a long and difficult process but I can work a lot more now than in the last three years! I am very optimistic about the future.

Right now I am working on a brand new game. I hopefully can announce it later this year. But who knows how long it will take me to finish it in the end. What's that game about?

Saikyo Robots is the story about Kohi and his mass produced robot army overthrowing the. He saved everyone from the power hungry king but he is not a good person. In the next game you will fight Kohi as a samurai! Well, he will let his army do the fighting. Physical labour is obviously beneath him.

That's all I'm sharing for now but if you want to be the first to hear more about this game, you can check out my newsletter

Original post

06 Feb 2025Developer post

Death Catalyst

Your robots must die! In Saikyo Robots, building a massive robot army is what you want. That means every robot death feels like a setback. What if we flipped that concept upside down? Introducing Kohi , the new and final character. His passive ability, Death Catalyst turns robot

Your robots must die!

In Saikyo Robots, building a massive robot army is what you want. That means every robot death feels like a setback. What if we flipped that concept upside down?

Introducing Kohi, the new and final character. His passive ability, Death Catalyst turns robot deaths into power. When a robot dies, a timer starts. During this timer, Kohi's factories produce robots faster and cheaper. Each robot death during the timer strengthens the buff and extends its duration. This means you’ll want to keep the Death Catalyst active for as long as possible once it’s triggered.

Death Catalyst doesn't only affect your production of robots, it also enhances your formations. Every robot death increases your attack and defense formation buffs forever, not just during the timer. By the endgame, your robots will be nearly indestructible in defense formations and unstoppable in attack formations.

To make the most of Kohi’s ability, his robots start with less health and gain less health over time, making them easier to lose in combat. You can also sacrifice robots at the Sanctums to trigger or maintain the Death Catalyst.

Actually there is a bit more

Ever wished you could hit all your enemies at once? Say hello to the Rocket Launcher! While it doesn’t gain as much damage as other weapons, it excels at area-of-effect damage. It’s perfect for defending your base against nighttime hordes or stunning large groups of enemies with the Golden Bullet upgrade.

To summarize this update brings you the new character Kohi and the Rocket launcher when it comes to new content. Meanwhile I've been working a lot on getting the FPS up. Some of it has been pushed in the last update, this one does more of that. FPS wasn't an issue so far but that last level ... well you hopefully will never know of any problems with that!

Last but not least, I am thrilled that Saikyo Robots has come this far. There is one more update to come for sure next month. It's the final level which is packed with new content! After that I'll either work on an exciting new project that is playing in the same world or I ... I'll let you know if I decide for it or not.

Meanwhile, happy gaming!
- Deniz

Original post

22 Jan 2025Developer post

Did something change?

I did a lot of things that no one will ever notice. At least that's what I tell myself when I stop working and go to sleep. What am I talking about? Well first lets start with the simple gameplay changes I did. The towers deal a lot more damage to give you more reasons to invest

I did a lot of things that no one will ever notice. At least that's what I tell myself when I stop working and go to sleep. What am I talking about?

Well first lets start with the simple gameplay changes I did. The towers deal a lot more damage to give you more reasons to invest into them. They pack a big punch now! The warrior now gets more robots to make early fighting a more viable strategy. There is a lot of these small changes in this update to make the game more enjoyable.

Bunch of nerdy changes

The big thing I changed this update is a bunch of nerdy stuff that makes sure the game will run smoothly without any noticeable frame drops. I have to add "noticeable" here because lets be honest, there is up to 100 robots fighting around 100 enemies and everything is exploding and going crazy. You didn't expect an indie solo dev to code this perfectly, did you?

To my suprise my laptop can handle the game without any problems for most parts. There are some issues though! This update addresses them to make sure there are no sudden frame drops.

For instance when you tell all your 100 robots to attack a bunch of enemies, the game would drop frames for a bit and then run smoothly again. What's the issue? I made sure all the robots immediately get a target to attack. That means 100 robots might run through a list of lets say 100 enemies to see who is in their attack range. I told the computer to do all this in one frame?!? When I coded that, I didn't imagine that the player will be able to control 100 robots. How did I fix this?

I changed the logic from "all robots get a target this frame" to "a few robots get a target this frame, the rest waits". This means there is no huge spike in calculations. Instead it's stretched out over multiple frames. I actually only let two robots get a target per frame. Meaning it takes 50 frames for all 100 robots to get a target. These calls happen every 0.02 seconds, meaning it will take a whole second to get them all to attack an enemy. I initially felt this would be weird as it delays the input of the player. But oddly enough this feels more natural. The positive is that the game won't suddenly drop frames.

The way I solved this issue is how I solved a lot of fps problems, I delayed all the calls to make sure there isn't a sudden spike. The reason I started optimizing the code is that the new level, that I'll release soon, is crazy. There is more enemies, more projectiles, more robots, more everything! And the frame drops had been terrible. With all the changes I did this update I am very close to finishing the final level. Next update will be in February. It features the final character kohi, the final weapon the ... and more optimization nerdy changes.

Thanks for reading,
Deniz

Original post

08 Jan 2025Developer post

Be ready to be challenged

The game is too difficult and too easy at the same time? Yeah... that's the problem I was solving last month. This is a weird update but a really good one. The game seems to be too difficult for people especially around level four. How is it too difficult? There are too many mech

The game is too difficult and too easy at the same time? Yeah... that's the problem I was solving last month. This is a weird update but a really good one.

The game seems to be too difficult for people especially around level four. How is it too difficult? There are too many mechanics the player is not yet accustomed to while the difficulty starts to ramp up.

To tackle this issue I made the game easier by lowering the enemy damage and health points and making them slower. Simple but effective.
I made the game easier in more complicated ways. I changed the level layout, I indicate where and when the enemy base will shoot at you, I made less robots needed for collecting resources so more robots are always with you. This is also just more fun.

Oh, and I created a whole new death mechanic! I saw some people get one hit and I could tell, they did not wanna keep playing. Can't blame them, I would have stopped too! This update you no more loose the game when you die, instead you become a ghost for 10 seconds. You are slow and can't do anything else than move. This means you are punished for dying, but you are not out of the game.

So in a lot of ways I made the game easier. Then how did I make it more difficult?

Challenges

I personally want games to be difficult. I want them to challenge me. But not everyone wants that. To solve this I added challenges to the game. These allow you to make any level more difficult and with that challenge yourself to beat the game when it is at it's hardest. Beginners will be able to beat the game normally while people who love the game will be able to challenge themselves. Enabling the challenges can give you up to 5 times more highscore so be sure to use them to get some insane highscores!

Talking about highscores, I made a new little presentation for the score at the end. It's shown more interestingly and it gives you a grade. The grade is the name of a famous tactician. The higher your score, the better your grade is. The grade is suuuuuper subjective but I went on reddit so it's totally 142% accurate!

Thank you for reading and a happy new year
- Deniz

Original post

04 Dec 2024Developer post

No one loved the librarian

Well the librarian was boring so why would anyone love her? It can't be helped... right? Yes it can! The librarian was so weak, I didn't change her. Instead I gave her a new ability to make her stronger. I was told that it's weird how other characters, that don't start with the l

30 Oct 2024Developer post

Granny's Quest Begins!

I love strategy games with genuinely unique characters. Depending on the character you choose, the way you play changes. That was my goal with the characters in Saikyo Robots. I'm proud that with a few of them I managed exactly that. It was very difficult to do, so let me share t

I love strategy games with genuinely unique characters. Depending on the character you choose, the way you play changes. That was my goal with the characters in Saikyo Robots. I'm proud that with a few of them I managed exactly that. It was very difficult to do, so let me share the design of the two new characters with you.

Hacker Granny
She comes with ten sequential quests, each offering rewards upon completion. What to do is simple, but doing it is difficult. The quests give her various buffs but buff her ranged robots the most.

Lumberjack
The lumberjack can build bridges faster aaaaand he starts with no robots. But he does gain robots whenever a building in the base is created. The buildings also give additional buffs to make him stronger but they also cost more.

What makes them unique?

Normally each level has an optimal path for maximizing efficiency. Also there is a certain playstyle you have when playing a level. A character is unique when you no more follow the normally optimal path and when you change the way you play the game.

With the Granny you focus on the quests instead of the optimal path. You will ignore enemies until a quest requires you to fight them, you will pile up scrap around the base as you are anticipating the next quest. If you play normally with her, you won't be able to get all the quests done!

With the Lumberjack you focus on getting scrap. You start of rather weak so you need to build your base to grow stronger. As it's very expensive you will play the game focusing on gathering resources while avoiding fights. Other characters are focusing on fighting as much as possible, especially early on. The Lumberjack is the opposite.

That's all. Well some quality of life changes here and there, some tweaks and bug fixes and oh yeah, a brand new weapon! The weapon is my personal favorite so I hope ya'll enjoy using it as much as I do. It's pretty fun to keep shooting with it if you know what I mean. What does it do? You'll figure it out when playing the game!

Thank you for reading!
- Deniz

Original post

29 Sep 2024Developer post

New Characters and Weapons Update

Welcome everyone to the first Characters and Weapons update which adds two new Characters and Weapons to the game! There will be two more updates like this but let's talk about this update right now. New Characters The Nurse heals robots following her allowing you to be play more

Welcome everyone to the first Characters and Weapons update which adds two new Characters and Weapons to the game! There will be two more updates like this but let's talk about this update right now.

New Characters

The Nurse heals robots following her allowing you to be play more aggressive early on in the game.
She might be the strongest speedrun character as you can rush teleporters with her. Normally those are a fights of nutrition that you will loose without any healing upgrades. This is where the nurse shines!

Her other ability is stacking maximum health. She and her robots gain a stack whenever all robots in an enemy camp are destroyed. This combined with her healing ability makes her robots very tanky in the endgame!

The Warrior is starting with less robots and producing them costs more. Without these debuffs he would overpowered since robots are spawned whenever an enemy camp is destroyed. With the warrior you really want to fight a lot early on to get lots of robots. He and his robots have more maximum health which makes them strong at this.

The warrior is very strong early on but lacks an extra source of scrap for the endgame. Make sure you use all those extra robots wisely to not be left behind in the end!

New Weapons

The heavy pistol is very strong early on in the game with a lot of damage. But it falls of in the endgame as it has a lot of cooldown and slows you down while shooting.
The shotgun on the other hand is weak in the early game. It shoots multiple bullets with each shot that don't deal a lot of damage. If you buff your damage, you buff it multiple times. That means once you upgrade your damage the shotgun really packs a punch. It's perfect to defend your base from enemies at night.

These are the biggest things I did in this update. I also changed some things here and there, fixed some bugs you probably never noticed and some more. But we ain't got time all day! I'm back working on the next update after I get some sleep. Meanwhile you can play the game with the new characters.

Thank you for reading and have a great day
- Deniz

Original post

31 May 2024Developer post

Sanctums Update

Sanctums The game's design has a problem... later levels have 10 or 15 days and you end up with too many robots. But there is nothing to do with them! This is not the type of RTS where you fight with 500 units. I didn't optimize for that so it would turn your PC into a Toaster .

Sanctums

The game's design has a problem... later levels have 10 or 15 days and you end up with too many robots. But there is nothing to do with them! This is not the type of RTS where you fight with 500 units. I didn't optimize for that so it would turn your PC into a Toaster. To fix this toaster issue, I created Sanctums that kind of reduce how many robots you have.

In this game time, scrap, and robots have one thing in common. They are a resource that you can use. Scrap lets you build more robots. Robots can collect more scrap. Both actions cost time. You can also use scrap to get new buildings and upgrades.
That's good but a bit too simple for how long the game goes. Therefore I added the Sanctums to add more complexity to the game.

The Problems the Sanctums solve

Recently I learned that one solution should solve multiple problems. Here is the three problems the Sanctums solve.

Problem 1: "I have too many robots and scrap"
Sanctums let you sacrifice robots or scrap to get a reward. You should no more have too much unless you are really good. In that case you should play for a highscore or speedrun.

Problem 2: "The game's combat isn't complex enough, I just walk around"
There is six different Sanctums which all have three unique choices for you. Some are about getting more scrap/robots/upgrades in one way or another. Others give you powerful abilities. The abilities add a bit more complexity to the combat.

Problem 3: "I get lost in the big levels and I don't want to walk all the way back"
I totally never got lost in the levels, I myself created, and I definitely didn't add a map to help me and the player to not get lost.

Anyways, Sanctums have 2 extra functionalities.
They have a map you can use ~~when you get lost~~ when you want to strategize where to go next.

They act as fast travel points between your base and themselves. In big levels Sanctums are placed in key locations to let you get around easily.

Abilities

The active abilities are pretty simple yet very powerful so they allow you to turn the battle around. They have a cooldown that ranges from 20 to 90 seconds, so you better choose wisely when to activate them!
Active abilities:
1) you and your robots attack a lot faster and have almost no cooldown on their attacks.
2) you and your robots heal a lot immediately and then slowly over time even more.
3) you and your robots move faster and have a higher chance to deal critical hits.

Later upgrades give you special buff on critical hits. For instance "your critical hits reduce enemy healing" does wonders against the mini boss, since he constantly heals. The upgrade combined with the ability at the right time will make you beat the mini boss a lot easier.

Passive abilities:
1) Robot bullets put a stack on enemies hit. When you hit the enemy, you use up the stacks to deal extra damage. If the enemy has 50 stacks you deal extra max health percentage damage.
2) Your swordBots now have a shield that blocks enemy projectiles.
3) Your abilities cooldowns are reduced whenever a robot dies.

Thank you for reading!
- Deniz

Original post

18 May 2024Developer post

Everything is new

Ok, not everything is new BUT since the last update in February I added a lot! So why were there no updates until now? Let me explain! Sometimes adding something to a video game is like a Lego piece. I choose the piece. I put it on some. Done. Sometimes it's like adding to a hous

Ok, not everything is new BUT since the last update in February I added a lot! So why were there no updates until now? Let me explain!

Sometimes adding something to a video game is like a Lego piece. I choose the piece. I put it on some. Done.
Sometimes it's like adding to a house of cards. When adding one piece I need to add another one at the same time. This update was a lot like that. One update lead to another to another. So this is like five updates in one.

Actually this update is so big, I will only give an overview of all the things I did or this will be waaaay too long. The next DevLogs will go into more detail.

Levels

I started out by creating new levels. When I needed more content for them I worked on...

Sanctums

I added places to each level that ask you to sacrifice your robots. As a reward, they give you upgrades, resources, or new powerful abilities. These took really long to make! Not only did I need to make them and the rewards they give you, I also needed to balance them for every level. I worked on the levels, then sanctums, levels... rinse and repeat. During that I also worked on...

Upgrades

With the changes above the balance of the game kept changing. That lead to changes with the upgrades. If possible I left them until everything else was done.

At that point I got to make the non basic ugrades. Basic upgrades give you more health, damage and so on. The other ones change the game in a more interesting way. Like "Every 5th shot stuns the target for 3 seconds" or "when a gate is destroyed, the other gates become invincible for 6 seconds". I made quite a few of them which was a lot of fun but also a lot of work. There is a reason basic upgrades are so common in games.

Invasion

The default win condition is to survive for a certain number of days. I created a few levels with a huge final wave that makes it almost impossible to survive. But they give you the choice to "escape." A special area has lets you charge up a teleporter. While you do that, enemies will constantly spawn around you, making it no easy task!

I did more but those things are not "big" enough to make it to this list. For instance I won't mention how I created a new enemy, how I worked over the other enemies, how I updated the gate destruction logic the combat logic, how I added a bit of dialogue, how there are now abilities or how I made a brand new level with an easy invasion and a simple sanctum and and and lots of new things!

This is the perfect time to check out the game!

Original post

07 Jan 2024Developer post

Meaningful Choices

In Saikyo Robots you use robots to fight, to collect resources and to produce more robots. They are your most scarce resource. Figuring out where to best use them isn’t always simple and that makes strategy games fun. While Saikyo Robots gives you lots of interesting choices ther

In Saikyo Robots you use robots to fight, to collect resources and to produce more robots. They are your most scarce resource. Figuring out where to best use them isn’t always simple and that makes strategy games fun. While Saikyo Robots gives you lots of interesting choices there was one choice that was boring

One Robot into each Building

If you put robots into a building it produces something. For instance the library produces upgrades, the green factory produces swordbots and so on. The more robots you put into a building, the faster it produces. My idea was that the player would have to make an interesting decision → where to best use their robots to produce what they want the most. No one cared though. Instead they put one robot into every building… me included.

The root of all evil

A year ago I planned out the upgrades. Since the game should let you end with not too many or too few upgrades I ended up with the following:
The library takes 80 seconds to finish one upgrade if you put 1 robot in.
The library takes 30 seconds to finish one upgrade if you put 50 robots in.

That means each robot increases the production by only about 1 second. That’s just not that much! But how could I change this? If I lower the 30 seconds, you end up with too many upgrades. If I raise the 80 seconds you end up with too few upgrades.

Creating Problems

Lately I realized that in my games I often give the player some power. That power makes the game easy / boring so I give them an obstacle that they can only overcome with the power I gave them.

In general I often create solutions without problems which isn’t good. But now that I know, I try to give every solution a problem. You’re probably thinking that this is backwards isn’t it? But that is how my brain works!

What’s the solution / power I give you? You put more robots into a building to raise its production speed.
What problem can this solution solve? The default production speed is insanely high unless you put lots of robots into the building! What means putting just 1 robot into each building doesn’t do that much.

Simple? Well to be fair the code behind it is a bit more complicated since there is a robot limit. At the begining you can only put 5 robots into the library. Other buildings work in the same way. Upgrades let you put more robots into the buildings. This complicateded things a lot but here is the final version I created:

Library can have 5 robots. Production takes
200 seconds with 1 robot
90 seconds with 5 robots
→ Each robot raises production by about 27 seconds

Library can have 50 robots. Production takes
140 seconds with 1 robot
30 seconds with 50 robots
→ Each robot raises production by about 2 seconds

As you can see the robots now raise the production speed a lot at the start of the game. Producing in the library with just 1 robot is still an option but not really worth it too much. In the future I might make this even more extreme to completely discourage people from having only 1 robot in each building. But for now I created a good problem.

Thank you for reading
- Deniz

Original post

30 Nov 2023Developer post

Background Creation

The old backgrounds looked boring because ... I never spent any time with them, yet! It was about time I made new ones. I sketched my ideas out on paper until I liked one. In the end, I liked using a simple background color with some shapes in different sizes and shades on top of

The old backgrounds looked boring because ... I never spent any time with them, yet! It was about time I made new ones.
I sketched my ideas out on paper until I liked one. In the end, I liked using a simple background color with some shapes in different sizes and shades on top of that.

Super simple right? This suits the game's minimalistic art style well. The background with it’s colors and shapes shouldn’t take the players attention, they are supposed to be background.

Random generation

As a basis for the background I use a flat background color with a gradient on top. The gradient is just a small shader effect that is barely visible, but you do feel it!

How did I place the shapes? By hand? Ain't nobody got the time for that!
Instead, totally time-effective, I spent a whole day writing some code that would automate the process for me. I saved a lot of time... in the long run since I can reuse this code for future projects.

On top of the background the code spawns shapes. The shape, its color, and other values are different each level.

To place the shapes the code first checks how big the area is.
It spawns the big shapes in a grid with a bit of randomness.
Then the medium shapes are spawned around each big shape’s center position with random distance.
The small shapes have a random position within the entire area.
I generate the placement until I feel it looks good and move them around until I'm satisfied.

The invisible hand

Once I had finished the backgrounds, I played the game to see how it feels. When I made them, I just wanted backgrounds for the sake of having backgrounds that are maybe pretty. But while playing, I realized that I had created more than just backgrounds! These big shapes are areas within an area.
There are real areas that have colliders that show where the player can and can't go. But within those real areas, the background has created smaller areas. While they have absolutely no gameplay meaning, these smaller areas make the player feel different about the space they move within. Without real meaning the background gives space meaning.

I will use this more in future games to guide the player towards specific areas or evoke certain feelings about a space This is so interesting! They won't realize what drives their actions or shapes their emotions.

Thank you for reading
- Deniz

Original post

24 Oct 2023Developer post

Demo Release

Welcome to Saikyo Robot’s Demo release! We've gotten lots of feedback from the Prologue which we used to make the game better. Now it's time to finish the game with its final content! Well that's what's yet to come. But what happened so far? If you’ve read older Devlogs I posted

Welcome to Saikyo Robot’s Demo release! We've gotten lots of feedback from the Prologue which we used to make the game better. Now it's time to finish the game with its final content! Well that's what's yet to come. But what happened so far?

If you’ve read older Devlogs I posted on the prologue, you know that I’ve worked a lot on the tutorial. This time I did it again but it’s different

A new level

We released a new level with ... less content! I call it level 0.

Strategy games often have difficult and text heavy tutorials because there is just too much to explain to the player. So I thought, let's split it up. There is no base with walls and towers in level 0. Nothing to build no scrap to collect. Just combat, upgrades and enemies.

Why?

By removing a lot, the player can focus on the few things left. I want the tutorial to be as simple and fun as possible. In level 0 we only teach the player the basic controls. Then they get right into the action until they die. I mean you can win in level 0 too but its ehhh almost impossible. You are meant to lose which sends you to level 1 in which you learn more about the games mechanics.

What's next?

In future updates we will add still quite a bit. The biggest is attacking the Cloud King's castle. That's the evil guy that keeps sending killer robots to your base.

Other than that I've been wrapping my brain around unity's remappable input system. I won't add it to Saikyo Robots but I want to put it into Saikyo Samurai. It's a project we paused for a while but since we are finishing Saikyo Robots soon we will be back at it in no time!

The remappable input finally works inside the new secret project I've … Ehhh did I talk too much? Well this secret stays between you and me ok? The news about it will come out when I get more than concepts done. But I can share that my wrists are getting healthier. Because of that that I'm able to speed up production of all the games I want to make. I want to make a lot of games!!!

Anyways we just released the demo for Saikyo Robots so give it a try and let me know what you think!

We will soon take down the Saikyo Robots prologue as it's no more needed. It was always meant as an early demo or beta. Thank you for playing it and leaving reviews. I always love to improve and you made that possible. Thank you!

Original post

Updates & announcements

More days

Titan

What took me so long

What now?

Your robots must die!

Actually there is a bit more

Bunch of nerdy changes

Challenges

What makes them unique?

New Characters

New Weapons

Sanctums

The Problems the Sanctums solve

Abilities

Levels

Sanctums

Upgrades

Invasion

One Robot into each Building

The root of all evil

Creating Problems

Random generation

The invisible hand

A new level

Why?

What's next?