I'm very proud for Metal Heads to be part of the ANZ (Australian and New Zealand) IndieFest 2025!

I have been so busy that I only JUST found out about it a few days ago and was late to the party (pun intended), but thankfully the awesome folks over at The Indie Brew were kind enough to take the time to add Metal Heads to the event at the last minute.
I can't begin to express how amazing the feeling is as a game developer to see my work posted/advertised as part of a sale or event, especially being part of an event where there's so many other awesome games that I play (Dredge especially).

BOT SUPPORT PROGRESS
I've been pretty quiet, as you all know it's because I work a full time job and outside of that, I don't get a lot of time to do much else, so in the last 2 months, I've only managed to get maybe 0-2hrs of game dev squeezed in maybe 3-5 days a week. It's not much.

On top of that, making bots behave like players in the board game has been both very frustrating, but also very rewarding.
The bots are in the classroom, getting smarter every day though, and now, having showed people footage of 8 players (1 player, 7 bots), the question asked was "How did you get so many people together to play?", to which I answered "Oh, they aren't people, they are bots"...to see their surprised look, especially as gamers, especially gamers who are also AI enthusiasts, other game developers or programmers, that was a nice feeling, they could not differentiate bot from player, which is exactly what I'm aiming for!

Before I continue, I'd love to show something that took 3 weeks to resolve.
The hardest part of the Slime Factory board game map so far, is the jumping section at the very top of the map, it's difficult for players....and just as difficult to program bots for this section too.

Sometimes, the AI would just...stop....this was due to navmesh area's that had too high a cost to go through, that was my lack of knowledge of navmeshes in Unreal Engine 4.
Then the bots would try to long jump this section of the board, rather than landing on the safe spot in between...as you can see by the little coloured sphere's, there wasn't one in the safe spot. This was due to not understanding my own programming...
Then there is a nice colourful sphere in the right place, the green sphere's represent an AI navigation point before a gap is detected, but as you can see, the sphere is a long way away from the edge, so the AI would jump too early.
The cause of this? The plectrums....I won't begin to explain this one, but thankfully I fixed this yesterday after a long day at work at my day job and figured I'd try something random....it worked.
Now as you can see, after the fix, our little Metal Heads can now traverse this gap very majestically!
Aside from these problems, there were a bunch of other problems too, such as the AI continuously jumping like a maniac once they got across the gap, or sometimes they'd get half way across, then float backwards and fall into the slime (this took about 2.5 weeks to fix), there was also the issue of frame rates dropping significantly, the AI only making it across the first 2 gaps, then failing 9/10 at the 2nd gap, and that one bot that made it past, would somehow fall into the slime at the 3rd gap or 4th gap....
This was an exercise in frustration to say the least.

WHY ARE BOTS SO DIFFICULT TO ADD? OTHER GAMES ADDED BOT SUPPORT SUPER QUICK!
The bot support for Metal Heads is far more complex. The reason being that the board game has player controlled movement.

For comparison, games that automate movement (every other party game), the AI programming is simple, they need to stop the dice block, select a the location that takes them to the objective, maybe with a slight chance of choosing another route, choose the route and then the movement is pre-defined/on rails.
AI actually controls player movement in other party games, you roll, you select a destination, and the AI does the rest. I'd even say that AI has no part in the movement, it's a simple sequence of events; the player needs to move 4 spaces, they picked a particular route, the game figured out what tiles to traverse, plays a run animation on the player whilst moving them from one tile to the next, and if there's a jump point, animate the player to jump, if there's an event, bring up the UI or play a camera sequence and let the player hit the A button...simple.

To clarify, I'm not hating on bots in other games, this is purely a comparison to clarify the difficulties.

In Metal Heads, it's all manually controlled, so that means AI MUST be programmed, and it should be programmed in a way that behaves like a player, otherwise it feels empty, it feels like you are playing against dumb bots. There simply is no way for me to make player movement like every other party game unless I add a customization option for movement mode that automates it, but then that breaks so many other features of the Metal Heads board game mode (in particular, placing hazards to stop/slow other players).

WHAT IS PLANNED FOR THE BOTS?
For the board game, the idea behind bot movement and behaviour is that they can figure out their own path and routes, navigate complex obstacles on their own without me needing to put down pre-defined jump locations like every other game out there. Bots should be able to detect where gaps are, where hazards are, where pickups are, and should be able to plan a route based on a wide variety of factors.

The bot programming is done with the human brain in mind of course.

What do we do before we walk somewhere? We create a goal in our minds.
What do we do once we have a goal? We try to figure out what we need to do to achieve that goal.
But what if there are things stopping us? We figure out ways through, or around those obstacles.
What if there are things we'd like to do along the way? We allow the freedom to deviate from our goal, and plan to come back to that goal.
What if the goal changes or the plan needs to change? We re-evaluate the situation, create a new goal, start again.

These are just a few things to factor in when creating AI.

The plan eventually is to create AI personalities, and to allow customization of these bot personalities and behaviours to tailor the bots to your needs, maybe you want to play with AI that are purely random, there is no reasoning behind their actions, or maybe you want to play with AI that target the winning player, or the losing player, or a random player...
Perhaps you want AI that is easy going, they aren't trying to pick on other players or do things to annoy other players, but they are still difficult to beat...
That is the future plan, so that you can make a custom experience that doesn't make you want to throw your controller at the screen.

There are even more plans beyond that to really fine tune the bot behaviour, but this will be revealed at a later date.

WHAT IS THE CURRENT STATUS OF BOT IMPLEMENTATION? AND WHEN CAN WE PLAY WITH BOTS?
Right now, the first priority is getting bots to be able to play the board game, on their own without any intervention.
Once they can play the board game from start to finish, I will continue implementing bot AI for all of the mini-games.
I have already got bots working for some mini-games, but other mini-games have no bot AI just yet.
Once bots are working in all of the mini-games, I need to add an easy to use method of adding bots to the game at any point; In the lobby, for controller users, this will be done more than likely by using LB and RB (for xbox controllers), for keyboard users, there will simply by a + and - button for adding or removing bots.
Additionally, there will be a "BOT CONTROL" option added to either the pause menu itself, or the options menu. This will allow customization of the bots. At first, the customization will simply be the bot names, colours and heads. But later on, the plan is to add an "Advanced" button to allow personality customization and other options.

There is also the issue of allowing bots to take control of players who disconnect, or allowing players to take over bot player slots.
The adding/removing of players has always been problematic in Metal Heads, mainly due to my lack of knowledge of using Unreal Engine 4 for this type of game.
I am confident that I will resolve this issue however, and have mostly already resolved it.

Once there is a sufficient way to add/remove bots, allow bot/player slot overriding, and bots can play the board game with random choices, and they can play all of the mini-games, I will release an experimental build with bot support.

How far away is this? I really don't know, it rests heavily on how much time I get to work on Metal Heads, and rests heavily on the obstacles I face along the way.

But rest assured, this is the plan.

WHAT ABOUT AFTER THE BOTS ARE RELEASED, WILL YOU MAKE THEM MORE ADVANCED, OR WORK ON OTHER THINGS FIRST?
This is yet to be determined.
I may burn out from working on the bots, and want to change my priority to something else at the time.
I think so long as the minimum functionality of bots is implemented into the game, I would like to create some pre-defined personalities and behaviours, I think this will be fairly quick and simple to do, as it would just change the weight of decisions based on a personality type, goal, sub-goals etc.
But beyond that, I really want to bring you all the long awaited Deadly Dunes, and Trembling Tropics board game maps, and perhaps some other board game maps after that.

After I have added 1 or 2 more board game maps, I'll decide if I keep adding more, or if I add more mini-games that I started long ago, but never finished, such as Metal Ball Z, Roller Raceway, Buzz Kill, Colourful Chaos, Make A Move and many more.



THANK YOU!
Thank you all for your patience, and thank you to the newest players who have purchased Metal Heads.
All of your wishlists, demo downloads, purchases and positive reviews go towards helping shape Metal Heads into the "go to" party game on PC.
It's not quite there yet, and it's slow going, as I work a full time job and the game makes almost no revenue, minimum wage employee's make more money in 1 week than Metal Heads has made in the last 12 months to put things into perspective.

Your support is what keeps this game going, so thank you all.

YOU ROCK!