Meet the Mark1 ArmBot... yeah, I'm working on the name too.  This one will specialize in, well, carrying things and making obnoxious faces with its two digital displays.  These ones probably won't be available as playable characters.  I'm sticking to humanoid PCs since I don't want to duplicate all the animations for obnoxiously custom rigs.  I'm thinking that these will be command-able units, set them about collecting and/or moving your goods, could also be easily fixed with weapons for defensive/offensive purposes.

Just a few moments ago, I realized that I've been using blender for a few years now, to create animated characters...  That I've NEVER rendered as animations in Blender....  smdh..  So, yeah, the animation sucks and the quality is crap, but I wasn't going for a final product either.

Anyhow, every bot type in the game will have at least some interchangeable parts so that upgrades and props are easily modeled once(mostly).  So, with this latest addition I think I've finally built myself a functional pipeline that will get these different character concepts into the game without taking ALL of my time.  Yay!

Now, the next item that's burning the back of my mind.  How to incorporate the concept of coding into the game.  So, so far, the game is about robots, the characters are all robots.  All the props are robots or robot parts.  There has to be some "programming" involved in the game play...  I really want the game environment to allow emergent behaviors to appear and I think an easy way to blow the roof off that would be to simply give the players more access to the non-player character behaviors.  I initially thought I should embed some kind of scripting language or something into the game...  But, that's just too much I think.  At least for now..  I think I'm just going to give every bot an access panel with the same configuration of switches and whatnot to give players access to basic things, everything needs a panel with an off switch.  MAYBE a little screen with some dropdowns or something that have settings for different character attributes, so a guard bot can be extra vigilant..etc..  MAYBE some more advanced behavioral programming via this same methodology as well.  Still working all that out.  If anybody has any suggestions I'm all ears.

Also, if anybody is feeling creative, I need some more ideas for somewhat specialized robots that fit this general idea.  Androids, or robots with android parts are the aim.  It's the future, humans are even more lazy, robots do everything... such as? 

I need a few more interesting ideas to get things going...

Thanks for reading!