Developer posts and news about this game.
Bootcamp is twenty levels long, and it's the front door to everything else in Droning On. Puzzle Mode is behind it. Endurance Mode is behind it. So are the feature unlocks — collections, interactables, hazard detection, functions, classes — which the game hands you one chapter at
Droning On ships with a code editor. It has syntax highlighting, error underlines, a console, a run/stop button, and it is a perfectly good place to write a solution. It is also, if you are the kind of person who has opinions about editors like me, somebody else's editor. We deve
Bootcamp teaches you the language one idea at a time. Endurance Mode drops you on a virtual treadmill and speeds it up until you fall off. Puzzle Mode is the thing in the middle, and it's the part of Droning On I've spent the most time actually designing levels. Each level is bui
A Droning On level used to be a quiet place. Walls, hazards, a grid, and Gizmo, who doesn't move until your code tells him to. Good for concentrating. Bad for atmosphere, and worse for the thing I was after, which is the sense that your maze isn't sitting in a vacuum. It's a test
Bootcamp teaches you the language. Puzzle Mode hands you a problem and waits for a solution. Both have a finish line: clear the level, and you are done. Endurance Mode doesn't have one. It is a procedurally generated run that starts easy and gets harder the longer you stay in it,
The Droning On demo is live. It's free, it's the first ten levels of Bootcamp, and it's enough to learn the basics, meet Gizmo, and figure out if Droning On is your idea of a good time. What's In It The demo is Bootcamp, levels 1 through 10. Bootcamp is the teaching mode – it han
Droning On has one core promise: you write code that looks and feels just like Python, and Gizmo does what the code instructs. For most of this project, that code ran on real CPython, embedded in the game and executing your scripts line by line. It worked. It also quietly gave ev
For about two days in May, Droning On could be played without anyone actually playing it. I'd wired up a way for an external AI agent to read a level and drive Gizmo through it. No human, no typing, just a model calling the same functions you would. It worked... too well... then
Most of Droning On is structured. The Bootcamp mode teaches you the language one concept at a time. Puzzle mode hands you a problem that requires unique solutions. Endurance throws the maze-solving problem at you in a way that gives you an endless stream of challenges. All of tha
In Droning On, you write Python to control Gizmo. A script that says move() does what you'd expect: Gizmo walks one tile. Easy and intuitive. Except... not really. That single line of code is doing something a normal Python script never does. It's waiting for a robot to physicall
If two players run the same script on the same level, should they get the same completion time? The answer should obviously be a yes... but getting there is trickier than it sounds. The Problem While working on Droning On, I noticed a discrepancy in the amount of time a script wo
The old UI worked, but it wasn't winning any contests. It got the job done for early development, but it looked like it belonged in a prototype build, and if you were playing on a larger monitor... good luck. This update is a full UI rework across every screen in the game: main m