It's been a while since our last Devlog. What a time, dear farmers!
A lot has happened since then. We started working with a publisher, expanded our team, and AGRONOM itself became a much more serious project for us.
Thanks for staying tuned, for your messages, questions and concerns! This will not be our usual Devlog. No strict sections about visuals or gameplay this time. Instead, we want to show you what development actually looks like from our side: real tasks, new features, weird bugs, experiments and, of course, some team's memes.
To celebrate the start of our work with Skystone Games, we created our new Re-Announcement Trailer.
Working with the publisher also means that we now work closely with some really experienced people. One of them is David Brevik, one of the creators of Diablo and one of the key members of Skystone Games. He and the publisher team are helping us improve AGRONOM and look at many parts of the game from a different perspective.
The trailer was featured on the IGN and GameTrailers YouTube channels. If you haven't had a chance to watch it yet, you can find it below:
Yeah, you asked about the Playtest. A lot.
And we'd like to thank you for all your interest and support!
For quite a long time we were working on the prologue with Auntie Masha's story. It includes Rusty's first big adventure and a lot of quests. It also uses many of AGRONOM's core mechanics, automation systems, UI and tutorials.
And that became a problem.
At some point we realized that there is just too much stuff for a player who is meeting AGRONOM for the first time. The prologue already uses a big part of the game and expects the player to understand many systems quite early. So we decided to change our approach to the next Playtest and the following Demo.
We want the first experience with AGRONOM to be much easier to understand. The player should have enough time to learn the systems properly instead of getting a lot of them at once.
Auntie Masha's prologue isn't going anywhere. We really like what we've made there, and we'll find the right place and format for it later. Right now our main goal is to make the first hours of AGRONOM comfortable for new players.
We're already working on the new quest flow, interfaces, tutorials and progression. We'll tell you more when we have something good to show!
Another big change happened behind the scenes. There are more of us now!
With the support and confidence our publisher gave us, we happily expanded the AGRONOM team with new farmers and engineers 😃
Our new programmers are working on things you've been asking for and also making existing mechanics more stable. At the same time, they are improving the systems under the hood so it will be easier for us to expand them later.
And our UX designer has a pretty serious job too. AGRONOM is an automation game. We have a lot of systems, and all these systems need interfaces. So, yeah. We have a lot of interfaces.
We know that the game should be as understandable and comfortable to use as possible, especially when you're learning everything for the first time. That's why we're working on the interfaces across the whole game together with tutorials, quests and the general first-time player experience.
You asked for this a lot during our previous Playtests. Now we're doing it properly.
And now to the main reason we made this Devlog a little different.
Game development often looks pretty simple from outside. Then you open the project, fix one thing and suddenly find two new problems somewhere else.
So here are a few completely normal days in AGRONOM development.
This is one of the first sketches for our brand-new promo art.
The final version is already finished. We'll show it a little bit later :)
Here is our new Robot Charging Station! We really like how it looks.
During testing we faced some navigation problems. Sometimes robots entered the station, got confused and simply stayed there forever.
Here you can also see the navigation mesh we're using for robot movement.
Shhh. The Cargo Drone is sleeping...
Let's not wake it up just yet. AgroNova's deadlines can't be that strict.
Yeah. They got stuck like this. Hah.
Here we were trying to understand where the string ATT_Invalid came from.
Why ATT? Who wrote it like that? Why is it here?
Sometimes this is what development looks like.
A small new feature! Every robot now has its own badge with its name and Serial Number. You name it, you see it.
We were also working on something much bigger at the same time: customization for robots and buildings. It turned out really cool. But we'll show you that in the next Devlog.
Maybe. If there are enough comments under this one!!!!!!!
Oh! Anybody remembers this guy? For those who don't, this is our very first Robot Helper. And no, we didn't forget about him. We decided to make his age part of the AGRONOM world itself. This model is now the first generation of Robot Helpers created for Mars. The five Robot Helper types you're familiar with today are newer models that came after it. So this old guy still has a place in AGRONOM :)
Also, fun fact. While improving our electricity system, we were making it more flexible so we can use it for more interactions and add new mechanics later. And during that work we discovered something. We can plug robots directly into the electrical circuit. Technically. No, we're not making this a feature.
Please charge your robots at the Charging Station like a responsible farmer.
When the game designer doesn't send quests to programmers, programmers start making quests for themselves. The employee responsible has been fired.*
*No employees were actually fired because of this dialogues. Probably.
Do you think that's enough Ore Drills in one place? We honestly don't remember what exactly was being tested here. But apparently it required a lot of Ore Drills.
We really don't know how the Gardener Robot got up there.
Apparently, the regular Robot Charging Station wasn't fast enough for him.
That's it for today, farmers!
We're diving back into production and doing our best to make AGRONOM the best automation game with robots we possibly can.
The next Devlog will be our Anniversary Devlog #20, so we'll try to show you a lot of interesting stuff. There will be new pictures and mechanics, more UI work, and of course some things from behind the scenes.
We love you guys. Thank you for staying tuned and following AGRONOM all this time!
Don't forget to join our Discord Server and follow us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and our other social networks.
And, of course, wishlist AGRONOM on Steam here! It really means the world to us! 🧡
With love,
The AGRONOM Team 🧡