Despite the lull in developer logs, I have been busy adding new updates to Swarmybots.

A couple weeks ago, I became incredibly frustrated working with the faux-3D isometric 2D tilemaps when trying to create multi-elevation hills for the new "crimson mountain" zone. I committed to the idea of completely redoing the zone terrain meshes in 3D, which also meant redoing the entire physics engine and all collisions/etc. in 3D as well. That work was finished around September 5th and uploaded without a dev log.

Today I also released an update with the new enemy type, the "droid" which hunts and shoots with a built-in laser ability.

Droids are the first entity type I've assembled fully in 3D, using a sprite rasterization trick similar to how the minimap works, to render as a 2D sprite in realtime to match the look and feel of the rest of the game. Because the models themselves are still fully 3D this means they can rotate in full 360 degrees which is a pretty cool effect to see in realtime.

All future enemy types will probably be made this way, and I may also revisit the existing entities including player pods, because I'm so happy with the effect.