Hello everyone,
June has passed by and, as usual, we come by bringing you some updates on what we have been working on for the past month. We hope you enjoy it and as usual, if you have any suggestions or feedback please don’t hesitate to contact us!
Better manage your energy and water supply
Farming requires a constant supply of energy and water, otherwise, you would run the risk of losing your plants. So far you had to order it constantly from the store. Now you’ll be able to research additional storage containers and producers to make your life much easier and less stressful.
(Solar panels will follow the sun, but it took some trial and error to get there)
You’ll be able to unlock solar panels to produce some energy during the day and water harvesters that can give you a small supply of water. They won’t probably be enough to fully cover your needs, but at least you’ll reduce your external dependency and optimize your costs. Plus the solar panel looks pretty cool following the sun 😄.
We also added a new utility panel so that you can more efficiently manage your utilities. You can see current statistics, manage current orders, and handle your producers.
A little help to begin your adventure
Starting off for the first time could be tricky. With many things to discover and to know, we thought an interactive tutorial would be the best, to begin with. It will guide you through the first steps to having a factory up and running. It won’t tell you everything. There will still be plenty of things for you to discover on your own, don’t worry!
(We still need to sort a bit more the content and the style but it should do the trick!)
Improving the performance of the game
We did some stress tests on Roboplant to see how many workers you could handle at the same time and for our evil goals (billionsssss of robots 🤖!!!) the performances were not good enough. We then implemented different techniques to reduce the impact on the hardware of the PC and we happily reached a first milestone in improving them.
Technically speaking: we started using CPU instancing to manage the plants growing so that they would still look amazing but a bit less demanding and also we worked on making more advantages of the batching offered by the game engine combining meshes and textures.
We will constantly work to make sure the game will run smoothly on as many PCs as possible. And hopefully, with your help in the coming months, we will be able to test the game on so many types of hardware and keep improving from there.
This is all for June! We hope you liked what you read. For July we are planning to redo the rooms to give them more character and make them unique based on their purpose. Furthermore, we will start working on the ability to receive and fulfill work contracts so that you can grow your business more.
If you fancy knowing more details or just want to have a chat with us please join us on Discord. Here you can see more about us: linktr.ee/roboplant
See you soon!