A Droning On level used to be a quiet place. Walls, hazards, a grid, and Gizmo, who doesn't move until your code tells him to. Good for concentrating. Bad for atmosphere, and worse for the thing I was after, which is the sense that your maze isn't sitting in a vacuum. It's a test. Something built it, something is watching how you do, and you are not the only robot in the building. So I added dr…
Bootcamp teaches you the language. Puzzle Mode hands you a problem and waits for a solution. Both have a finish line: clear the level, and you are done. Endurance Mode doesn't have one. It is a procedurally generated run that starts easy and gets harder the longer you stay in it, and it is built on purpose to end eventually. The only question Endurance asks is how long your code can keep Gizmo…
The Droning On demo is live. It's free, it's the first ten levels of Bootcamp, and it's enough to learn the basics, meet Gizmo, and figure out if Droning On is your idea of a good time. What's In It The demo is Bootcamp, levels 1 through 10. Bootcamp is the teaching mode – it hands you the language one concept at a time instead of dropping you straight into the deep end. You write code that loo…
Droning On has one core promise: you write code that looks and feels just like Python, and Gizmo does what the code instructs. For most of this project, that code ran on real CPython, embedded in the game and executing your scripts line by line. It worked. It also quietly gave every player a way to run code that could reach out and interact with their machine. Doesn't sound too bad until you st…
For about two days in May, Droning On could be played without anyone actually playing it. I'd wired up a way for an external AI agent to read a level and drive Gizmo through it. No human, no typing, just a model calling the same functions you would. It worked... too well... then I deleted it. So before anyone panics, that capability is not in the game and isn't coming back. The short detour was…
Most of Droning On is structured. The Bootcamp mode teaches you the language one concept at a time. Puzzle mode hands you a problem that requires unique solutions. Endurance throws the maze-solving problem at you in a way that gives you an endless stream of challenges. All of that is great, but none of it is the kind of space where you can just... try things. The Sandbox The Sandbox is a single…
In Droning On, you write Python to control Gizmo. A script that says move() does what you'd expect: Gizmo walks one tile. Easy and intuitive. Except... not really. That single line of code is doing something a normal Python script never does. It's waiting for a robot to physically walk across a tile in a Unity scene before the next line of your code runs. And while it's waiting, the game still…
If two players run the same script on the same level, should they get the same completion time? The answer should obviously be a yes... but getting there is trickier than it sounds. The Problem While working on Droning On, I noticed a discrepancy in the amount of time a script would be recorded during a run. I further noticed that the same script on a higher execution speed resulted in a substa…
The old UI worked, but it wasn't winning any contests. It got the job done for early development, but it looked like it belonged in a prototype build, and if you were playing on a larger monitor... good luck. This update is a full UI rework across every screen in the game: main menu, level selectors, code editor, HUD, customizations, unlockables—all of it. What Changed The old UI had a flat loo…
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