— PROJECT NAME
This Game is About Robots
— ROLE
Game Designer,
Backend Developer
— DATE
Aug. 2025 – Present
This Game Is About Robots is a 3D Metroidvania about a battery robot named S04R attempting to make his way back home using the only resource at his disposal: Energy. This element is what allows S04R to activate powerful abilities, but it also serves as his only protection against attacks. It is up to you to make good use of your single resource to help S04R escape the hidden lower levels of Cog Springs, a fully robotic society that unknowingly serves a long-forgotten humanity.
Ruled by the manipulative robot leader C30, Cog Springs hides dark truths beneath its utopian facade, established through relentless propaganda. Using his unique ability to absorb and redirect energy into his surroundings, S04R must fight enemies, navigate dangerous environments, and uncover the truth about what society has been made to forget.
Other Links:
Terminals
Terminals are the Points of Interest in the world that grants the key/upgrades to the player in order to continue their progress.
The first obstacle when designing these terminals was figuring out a way for the player to interact with them without making a new keyboard or controller input to do so. and to do this I challenged this idea by linking the inputs and outputs required to interact with this item to use the same resource that we use for everything in this game, energy.
The players health, ammo, armor all revolve around the players energy. While the player should get this item for free, as these rooms are safe zones for the player and vital to their progress, understanding how a battery robot would interact with this item, but the rest of the world helps to build a sense of depth to the world.
This also has the added benefit to reset the player, as these zones will refill the players energy levels to the base levels as well as their health.
Find more information about terminals here:
Save System
The save system follows a straightforward set of principles. The users progress is not saved until they interact with a save point which saves the player’s location, Unlocked Abilities, and other information.
However, as development continued, there was a need to save other relevant objects states for when a player unlocked a shortcut, which was decided should always be saved as soon as it was unlocked. This meant the implementation of a different type of save that wouldn't require us to save all of the players information every time this event occurred.
The inclusion of a temporary slot that would be created/saved when interacting with an object that should be saved. However, this information is also saved in the main save slot, and is added to the save slot once the player interacts with it, at which time the temporary slot is removed.
This ensures that saving isn’t getting complicated between parts while allowing us to be more flexible with how we save data.
Credits:
R. Tucker Koepp: Combat Designer, Game Designer, Gameplay Programmer
Zoe Radinski: Level Designer
https://zoeradinski.carbonmade.com/
Matthew Vroman: 3D Art, Technical Art, Lighting, VFX
https://www.artstation.com/mvroman
Caleb Wilson: Level Designer
https://calebwilson319.wixsite.com/my-site-1