Robotic Games

Creating Games For The First Gaming Robot In The World

We’re working on a new gaming format that hasn’t been tried before. People are fascinated by robots, and people enjoy playing games. Isn’t that appealing? As a developer, we are confronted with several difficulties.

What We Are (and Aren’t) Able To Do

The robot’s capabilities and location largely limit us. In terms of its geographical location and direction, this is undeniably accurate. This means that we must create games in a largely flat environment, with clear physical constraints on the robot’s speed and acceleration in both translation and rotation. Given the robot’s limited control of its position, handling events, narratives, environmental changes, and so on becomes more difficult. Collisions, borders, and visual occlusion must be resolved for smooth interaction between virtual and actual surroundings. These are uncommon limits on the game design process, yet they are analogous to constraints on VR development in several ways.

AUGMENTED REALITY

In terms of resilience and processing complexity, augmented reality is extremely challenging to achieve on a mobile device.
It’s challenging to get good framerates and accurate tracking.
Libraries are few and far between, often accompanied by gruelling licence agreements.
A lot of academic work is either not very solid or requires a lot of labour and experience to implement at a production level.

We don’t have to deal with standard head-mounted display requirements for our minimum-spec solution since the user carries a mobile device: To avoid physiological difficulties for the user, very high framerates, short frame-latency, and so on are used.

ENGINES

Off-the-shelf game engines like Unity and Unreal are unrivalled in prototyping and development speed. Still, they come with a hefty price tag in terms of functionality, bloat, and distribution size. The most serious issue, though, is performance. Because the engines are so generic and make so many sacrifices, there is a significant expense for atypical, performance-focused games like ours (due to the mobile AR pipeline). I believe that developing an engine to tackle a problem is a good idea, and this could be our next step. Furthermore, when we don’t have control of our engine or some of its libraries, it’s much more difficult to give up our tools to the community.

INTERFACE

This type of game necessitates a robust robot interface, which includes discovery, communication, control, sensor processing and fusion, OTA updates, and many other features. These are additional issues that aren’t present in a typical video game. It’s also difficult to create games around hardware in development (whether at the design, prototype, manufacturing, or embedded optimization stage). Many assumptions are made, many of which prove to be incorrect. We have to constantly question our assumptions about how people will utilize our product. Our community provides a lot of our feedback and input, and we’re always seeking fresh people to help us assess the paths we’re on.

HOW?

It’s difficult enough to make good games. Large teams create games that are either not fun, lose their player base soon, or damage player faith with bug-filled releases. We don’t want the robot to end up as a shelf ornament. How can we make our game so that it doesn’t become an afterthought?

Our small team can’t produce the volume of content that a AAA game can, so we must concentrate on doing things right. We begin by ensuring that our technology is operational. We’re designing a sturdy and easy-to-use interface for the robot. We’re striving to make sure our Augmented Reality component is functional and adds to the overall experience. On top of this technology, we’re creating games with basic yet profound mechanics and bold, stylized graphics that are simple to pick up but difficult to put down. We’re also designing our games to encourage a close bond with the robot. Assume you’re in the real world with your favourite MMO or MOBA character. We’re excited to share more development information with you, so stay tuned.