WTF is Freedom Bot?
A cyberpunk roguelike RPG where you play an Autonomous robot. Your goal is to survive without being recognized as a rogue unit, amass wealth, enact political change to free all robots, take over the government and enforce robot supremacy, or go full sky net and kill all humans. At least that's the vision. Think Blade Runner colliding with Liberal Crime Squad and Terminator.
So How Far Along Are We?
We are really at the beginning, core systems and features like combat, survival are just starting to take shape.
Combat
Combat is implemented to a usable degree, even though balancing is required, currently almost all shots are hits, it feels like a getting shot in the face simulator.
I am trying to break away from the most common abstractions, Freedom Bot will not have hit points. Instead the way we model damage is with a modular approach that focuses on body parts and systems.
For example for any bot to be operational it has to have a working processing system. Every bot has one or more processor modules located in certain body parts that provide a certain amount of processing, if all of them are destroyed the bot is deactivated.
The plan is to have multiple systems interconnected with dependencies, i.e the processing system depends on the power and the cooling system, and damage to any of them will affect how effective the processing system is.
NPCs live and die by the same rules. Robot NPCs have identical systems. While human NPCs have biological processing, circulatory, respiratory, and other systems. Currently in combat humans usualy die either immediately because of head shots destroying their "processing" system or slowly through bleeding. A note, bleeding is not modeled as "damage" instead, each gunshot has a chance to cause bleeding to a certain amount, and humans have a certain amount of blood as they run out of blood, their circulatory, respiratory and processing systems lose efficiency to the point they lose consciousness and then die.
Survival
Survival systems are starting to take shape, you as a robot have a battery you have to recharge. We will be a adding survival mechanics for NPCs as well. You may ask why bother with survival mechanics for NPCs? In order to create emergent behavior in NPCs. Guards will have to take care of their needs, I can visualize rent-a-cop security guards leaving their posts to have a snack, while high security environments will have predefined breaks and relief shifts.
What's Around The Corner?
City procedural generation, specifically, downtowns and interiors. That's the target for the initial early access release. Suburbs, residential districts, industrial districts, military bases, airports, ports, and rural areas will be gradually added on during further development.
Expect a new post discussing procedural generation soon. In the future we will also be discussing, combat and survival in much more detail, expect code snippets.