I still believe there’s never been a better time to be an indie game developer. The scene is exploding, and the opportunities are opening up like never before. There are more tools to build with than we’ve ever seen, and more avenues to succeed than ever before as well.

We are excited to focus our studio on Multiplayer games of all varieties on mobile devices. We feel that multiplayer gaming is what makes mobile fun, whether it’s turn based asynchronous, real-time session based, hot-seat multiplayer, or even MMO games. And we are excited to be working on 3 new titles, each focusing on a different kind of multiplayer experience on mobile devices!

zTanks

Our next game coming out is going to be called zTanks this March/April (hopefully). It’s a free-to-play massive multiplayer tank arena game in the style of BattleZone and bzFlag. We are huge fans of both of those games, and love the communities that have developed around them. It is our hope that zTanks will develop into a similar kind of community.

We’ll write a better post soon outlining the full feature set the game will launch with. Trust us though, it’s gonna be sweet! We are building it using Unity3D and Photon’s Cloud Servers, and using these tools we already have a fully playable online alpha version. It will be released to the public very soon, and you can sign up to test it out at: signup.zTanks.com. The best part is that it will be available on iOS, Android, and possibly even the Blackberry 10 as well! So there will be a huge opportunity to build a huge player-base.

In addition to this, we have two more top secret projects coming soon that we’ll be talking about as we get closer to releasing them. So stay tuned, this blog is about to get active again with lots of exciting news!

There are a number of very exciting projects in development right now and will be sharing news about them as we get closer to their release.

As a studio we have grown and learned a lot and we are ready to take this to the next level. Stay tuned for exciting announcements in the near future!

This bodes well for the future of Bravado Waffle Studios!

Click: RoboHero App Store Download Link

We’d love it if you could take the time to rate and review the game, and if you wouldn’t mind telling everybody you know/have known/will ever know to do the same… we’d be much obliged!

It’s been a long journey and it’s been an honor to work with such a dedicated team to pull this off. We hope you all love it, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback!

We know that we’ve taken a long time to finish the game, much longer than anybody could have anticipated. The path of indie development is littered with the best wishes, hopes, and dreams of our fallen brethren. After over a year of development, 2 hospital visits, one baby, thousands of man hours, and more than a few setbacks, I am proud to say that RoboHero is FINISHED! We are wrapping it up in a bow and submitting it to the App store as soon as they come back from their end of the year break.

RoboHero Features

RoboHero will feature 30 single player levels where you guide your blue robo to victory over a robotic space station seeking to destroy the Earth. It will also feature an Arena Mode where you can duke it out in 2 different games against 5 different AI players with 3 different difficulty levels across more than a dozen battlefields using over 15 different weapons and armors. It will also feature pass and play multiplayer mode out-of-the-box that lets you play with up to 4 of your friends on a single device. It will run natively on the iPhone and on the iPad with retina style graphics, it features tons of beautifully hand painted scenes, beautifully composed original music, and is packed with more 80’s references and nerd humor than you can shake a stick at.

Oh and it will be Free. Well, free to try. The first 10 levels in Story Mode, Easy difficulty AI players in Arena Mode, and 5 weapons in Multiplayer mode will be available for free. If players like what they see, it will cost $1.99 to unlock all the other features.

Phwew…

What We Learned

“Finished is better than perfect.” Jesse sent that out to us the other day, and it rings very true. Originally we never intended for RoboHero to get this massive. Scope creep is a tricky thing, it sneaks up on you and before you know it takes over your entire project. But at the beginning of this project we were new, bright eyed, and bushy tailed. We were full of hopes and dreams. We had no idea what it would take to actually see a project through to the end. We kept saying “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and each time we said it the game got a little larger. Now we feel like old grizzled workers, we’ve put ourselves through the ringer, we’ve finished a game that really was too big for 3 people to make.

RoboHero is not perfect (though it’s pretty dang close). More importantly though: it’s finished! And finished is better than perfect.

That’s the biggest lesson we learned. The amount of scope creep in RoboHero was out of this world, it would have killed lesser men, and it could have easily meant the end of Bravado Waffle Studios as a team. Thankfully we have a dedicated team of titans who were determined to finish it, but it was close… Too close.

So for all you indie developers out there making your first game, our biggest piece of advice to you is that Finished is Better than Perfect! Everybody has ideas, very few have the tenacity to see them through. Get your game out there, finish it even if it means pairing it down to the bare minimum features to make it a viable product. You will never have a perfect product but, if you are lucky, you just may have a finished one!

And to all you fans out there who have stuck with us throughout the development of RoboHero, you are gonna love this game! There’s tons of content to delve into, and if you don’t LOL at least once while playing the game, I swear I’ll eat my hat.

Expect to see RoboHero released in the first half of January!

Developing and publishing a game is a learning experience. Trademark law and copyright issues are one of those necessary evils one must figure out. Due to potential trademark issues we are going to have to change the name of RoboArena to RoboHero.

This really is the last thing we wanted to do since we are so close to releasing the game and have spent the past 10 months promoting it under the title RoboArena, but that’s just how it’s going to have to be. Out with the old name, in with the new name!

Really, as this game has evolved over the past months, we feel the new title RoboHero fits it much better now anyway. Instead of what we had planned initially, which was for the game to be a purely arena based game, we now have a back story and 30 single player levels where you pilot the Blue Robo Hero through many different perils to ultimately save the planet.

So from hence forth, our debut masterpiece will be called RoboHero. So say we all.

This ends your public service announcement. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog reading.

Coming soon: RoboHero: The Board Game official announcement, the RoboHero OST, and a sneak peak at the final giant end boss of the game!

There is a light at the end of the tunnel though, and we are in the home stretch of development. Why, just a few days ago, as this post’s title indicates, we got Arena Mode!

Arena Mode

Finally we have the Arena in RoboArena! Before it was just Robo, but now it’s RoboArena! This is where the real fun and replayability of this game comes into play, in my opinion. 6 players will duke it out in a variety of Arena games across an ever growing number of random battlefields! As you can see from the Arena Mode setup screen, there are a few options you can choose from. Choose the AI difficulty, starting cash, and the number of rounds you want to play. You will gear up your Robo in the Store screen and then attempt to stay alive as long as possible and do as much damage as you can! At the end of each round, you will get cash and points based on how well you performed to upgrade your Robo for the next round of competition.

There are two different Arena Modes at this time FFA (Free For All) and RoboHunt. Eventually we plan on adding a Capture The Flag mode as well.
Free For All is self explanatory but Robo Hunt mode is a little different. Instead of a 6 player battle royale, each player is assigned a target to hunt down. Successfully destroying your target nets you cash and a new target. Stay alive as long as you can while avoiding those who are hunting you! At the end of each round you get cash and points to upgrade your Robo for the next round based on your performance.

Mini Bomb Mode

Even if you are destroyed early in the game in either FFA or Hunt, you still get to play. After all, if you gotta go down, why not take some with you? After being destroyed, in mini-bomb mode you get to lay mini bombs on the battlefield to get your revenge! For each turn you are destroyed, you get one additional mini bomb to lay anywhere (up to 4). These bombs will do a little damage to any surrounding units, and it makes the game a lot more treacherous the closer you get to the end since there will be bombs exploding all around you in addition to having to hunt down your targets!

As you can see, we’ve worked hard to make RoboArena a robust and fully featured game. Hence the reason the development is taking so long. For better or worse, we are cutting no corners and perfecting each and ever aspect of the game as we go. We thank you for your patience guys!

A note to our private beta testers: The private beta is still about 1 week away from being released. Expect to be getting an email soon with information on how to get your beta copy. We will be using TestFlight to manage our private beta, so everything should go nice and smoothly.

Here’s a brief look back at the evolution of RoboArena:

1st Proof Of Concept

Since RoboArena is such a unique style that hasn’t been seen before on the App store, we had to make sure that at its core, RoboArena would be fun. The core concept had to be fun even without any graphics or polish. So our first proof of concept featured the most basic of programmer graphics and a little tank.

Needs More Cowbells

Turns out, the game was fun! Programming the little tank to move and then watching him go was actually quite amusing. Initially all we wanted was a very basic game with black walls like you see in the picture above. However, we decided that the game deserved more than that, so we started to build the framework to allow for custom tile sets.

By George, There’s A Game Here!

So, telling your little Robo to move around and then watching it obey you is fun and all… but that’s not really a game. So the next step in our development was to add a second player to the game. This was a second human controlled Robo so that the game could be played in pass-and-play mode with a friend. The idea was that you would both pre-program your moves in and attempt to anticipate where your opponent would be, then you’d both watch the outcome together. We spent many good hours at the office chasing each other around levels and trying to destroy each other.

UI? What UI?

The next step was implementing a user interface. Since this was our first video game as a team, this was an adventure into the unknown. The UI we developed looked pretty cool though and it worked for quite a while. It had a weapons drawer on the side that you could open to switch weapons, it showed your cash and health on the top, and the astute observer might notice that we had a secondary red firing button next to the larger blue one. We had some grand plans of allowing for special weapons to be purchased with in-game currency that would give players unique abilities… in the end though, we decided against it.

A Game Is Born!

At this point we decided on an industrial theme, some kind of factory where the robos would duke it out. I got to work on the tile set, and you can see some of the fruits of my labors below. Eventually this theme led us to develop the little back story of the Blue Robo saving the planet. We  could have stopped here. This was a great game. It was a blast. At this point we had no plans for making a single player story mode for the game. At least… we didn’t have any plans until Chris put in the AI and we could finally play against 5 other computer players! Turns out, the game was practically BEGGING for more depth and story! So being the perfectionists we are… we took the game back to the drawing board to do more work on it.

It’s ALIVE!!!

Months pass. As our chief level designer, Jesse has been pretty much in charge of Story Mode. Initially he was all for it, but in the end he has started to curse the day the idea was born.  Story Mode turns into a giant project in and of itself involving level designs, bad guys, unique game mechanics, new graphics, and tons of behind the scenes framework changes. But we persevered, play tested, tweaked, edited, play tested some more, argued over minute details, passionately debated almost every aspect of the game, and then finally when we were done… RoboArena was a game that was truly worth playing! Here’s a shot of level 7 and what the game looks like in its current state. Note we added the ‘prediction cam’ which was a true stroke of genius on our collective parts.

The Story Continues…

So now that takes us to where we are today. In truth, RoboArena has evolved from an initial simple game concept into a giant, fully featured, high quality 3-in-1 magnum opus. We’ve now got Story Mode fully functional and almost entirely complete. Single player Arena Mode is in the process of getting developed and we will have screenshots and videos for you shortly showing it off. And Multiplayer will follow shortly.

It’s been a wild ride, and we have learned a lot along the way! Our team is amazing. Chris takes every idea we throw at him and sculpts it into something amazing. Developing games is what we love to do. Who knows… if RoboArena turns out to be a hit, we could might even be able to turn this into a full time gig!

Hope you have enjoyed seeing the evolution of RoboArena so far! Onward and upward as the story continues to unfold…

• Turrets: Fire a variety of weapons in a pre-programmed pattern. Learn the pattern and you can slip past them. Beware though, they have been known to develop intelligence in the later levels of the game and will track your movements… also they come in a variety of flavors and with a variety of weapons from laser turrets to flame turrets to machine gun nests, and more!
• Sentry Drones: Dumb as bricks, but they pack a giant wallop. Their AI circuits were removed and replaced with TNT! They follow pre-programmed paths, but if they hit you then you’re in for a world of hurt… beware, some of these guys have a pretty thick skin too and can take a real beating!
• Spider Walker: A step up in intelligence from the Sentry Drones. These guys follow a preprogrammed route, but if they spot you with one of their eyes they will give chase. Since they are semi-intelligent, the designers couldn’t pack as much TNT into them, but they still sting when hit! Watch out too because these guys a generally found en mass. The last thing you want is to find yourself in the middle of a Spider Walker swarm!
• Firefly: Fast and furious, a FireFly lives its life a quarter mile at a time… these bots zip around the level way faster than anything else. They love going fast and will explode with quite a boom if they hit you! You had better plan your moves carefully, and don’t get in their way!
• Hover Bots: These guys are intelligent guards that will hunt you down across the level. They generally only fire a cannon, but don’t underestimate them! Also, they are able to hover over gaps, so just because you are far away, don’t expect to stay safe!

But Wait There’s More!

We’re almost 75% finished with adding all the various weapons and armors to the game. Most recently we added the things that make big booms: Nukes and Bombs. The bomb works similar to a bomberman bomb, you fire it and in a few seconds it explodes in all directions. These guys pack a hefty punch, and make a great trap for the unwary opponent!

Nukes are where the real fun is though… this is the biggest boom in the game. It causes damage over a huge radius and damages units for multiple turns. A well timed nuke can win the game for you, but mistime it even a little bit and you’ll end up blowing yourself to smithereens!

We’re also working on adding armor to the game. Weapons have 3 different damage types: Ballistic, Explosive, and Special. That means 3 different kinds of armor to fully defend yourself from everything. Additionally, we will have some special armors like mirror armors that reflect laser blasts, fireproofing that makes you immune to flame throwers, and armored treads that will make you immune to slime bombs.

The key to winning games will be balancing what you spend on ammo and weapons, and what you spend on armor as well.

An Exciting New Feature: The Preview Cam!

In endeavoring to make the game more accessible and approachable, we have added what we feel is an awesome new feature: The prediction cam! Your Robo now comes equipped with the ability to calculate movements and see a little ways into the future! If you approach a particularly tricky part of a level and don’t know which way you should go, you can now fire up your prediction cam and see the next 15 moves play out so you can plan appropriately. But be careful, you only have a few of these to use per level, so use them wisely!

UI Tweaks and Cold Turkey Testing

As any designer can tell you, any game on the App store will live or die by its UI. It’s probably one of the most important features and most hated parts of developing a game. See, when you’ve spent the better part of a year playing and developing a game, you start to become blinded to ways you can improve the user interface. You get used to the way things are and it’s hard to think outside the box.

Enter the “Cold Turkey Test.” Yes I made that term up, but I like it, so I’m going to keep using it in hopes that it will catch on. A cold turkey test (CTT form here on out) is performed by giving your game in it’s current form to somebody who’s never played it before and watching them try and figure it out. It is essential that it be a fresh set of eyes and that you offer no assistance. Even if you have to sit on your hands and gag yourself, you must remain an observer and do nothing but watch and listen. You’d be amazed at what you can learn.

By listening and watching just a few CTTs, we were able to almost totally overhaul our in-game UI to become more streamlined and intuitive with a few simple changes. We were able to take a ‘decent’ UI and turn it into a minimalist masterpiece of design and intuition complete with bouncing icons (a la OS X), particle effects, and a whole gallon of polish.

Sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes to give you a whole new perspective. The trick is finding fresh cold turkeys to test your game out on throughout it’s development!

The Devil Is In The Tutorials

A good game MUST have a good tutorial. And a good tutorial must be enjoyable. Portal is of course the epitome of a good game, and in fact it is mostly tutorial.

We’ve been working hard integrating the tutorial into RoboArena. The first 3 levels are essentially tutorial levels introducing the core concepts of the game. Since RoboArena is in a genre all its own, and has a totally unique control scheme and game mechanic that hasn’t been seen on the App store to date (that we know of), it’s important that we nail these. The CTTs have helped us improve these tutorials immensely, and we still may have some tweaking left to do. The trick is making the tutorials engaging enough that the players still feel like they are playing the game and having fun while learning about the mechanics at the same time.

Taking a page from Angry Birds, we introduce new game mechanics slowly over the course of the levels. First teaching the player with plenty of hand holding, then letting them solve some simple problems on their own using what they learned, and finally we present them with a challenge that makes them use this new mechanic in conjunction with what they’ve already learned in the past.

It ain’t easy, but it’s well worth it!

Once we pull it off, you can prepare to be engrossed in the game and on the edge of your seat from beginning to end! Oh, and if you thought getting 3 stars on Angry Birds was hard… you are in for a bit of a surprise in the later levels of RoboArena. It’s gonna get downright devious.

Next up: new enemies, new weapons, and an exciting “New Feature”
Stay tuned!