Hello everyone!
I enjoy getting together with friends and spending an evening or two playing games like R.E.P.O., Lethal Company, Mimesis, and a bunch of others. I've been developing my new game, ROMUL, for a year now. I want to combine everything I loved about the Friendslop games you all know and add more classic gameplay elements.
So, I decided to take the physics of the objects in R.E.P.O. and expand on that idea. In ROMUL, to lift a heavy object, you need to apply several anti-gravity spheres evenly across its surface (to keep it from flipping over and keep it hovering) and levitate the object to yourself.
Since the game takes place in space, I've definitely decided to include zero-gravity and inverted gravity mechanics, where the player will have to walk on the ceiling. I might also implement a 90-degree gravity rotation to allow for wall walking, but that's just an idea for now. Besides being a fertile ground for a ton of gameplay mechanics, it's also incredibly fun to fly around the station surrounded by tons of levitating objects and monsters.
Players will be able to choose classes before setting out on a mission, which could create unequal abilities among players in terms of how they use objects and the environment. This will give players a real need for co-op, unlike R.E.P.O. or Lethal Company, where several players simply act as backups.
I decided to expand on the voice chat idea and added webcam support to the game. You can display your face on the characters' heads. I think this could potentially generate some funny moments, especially considering you'll be able to make all sorts of obscene gestures at the camera. 🙂
AND THE FUNNIEST THING: I added a robot assistant to the game that listens to your voice commands and can respond with its AI voice. For this, I used several local AI models for voice recognition in several languages and text reproduction with an AI voice. This is already working well, but I want to do more. I want to implement AI in the robot with a local model on Ollama. I already tried running a local GPT model in it, but due to RAM limitations, it doesn't feel at all like the paid model from OpenAI. Dialogue is possible, but it's clearly a bit slow. In the future, I'm thinking of implementing it in the game, but to do that, it needs to be used not just as a voice assistant, but also so that its responses can somehow influence gameplay. I have some ideas, but I'll write about them later 🙂
All these mechanics are ready, and now I'm putting the game together. As it turns out, getting it all to work together isn't such a simple task 🙂
The plan is to release early access to Steam Festival on October 26, 2026, and the full release in the fall of 2027 (that is, next year). In any case, I will release (or at least try my best) a demo for the "NextFest" festival. There, I'll gauge player reaction, fix any bugs that are sure to appear 😡, and make adjustments based on community (that is, you 💛) feedback, and then I'll finally decide when to release the game. 
