A Day of Maintenance
So how does Orby work?
So waaaaaaay back in the long-forgotten past of
*checks notes*
err. a month-and-a-couple-days-ago
I ran a poll for what folks wanted my next dev article on MDay would be - and they picked Orby! So here's a write-up of how his character came about, and some snippets of how his body/emotes/eyes all work. Enjoy:
https://medium.com/@bighandinsky/a-day-of-maintence-orby-76dea8f92cc4
Anyways, happy fixing, as always.
🤖💘🤖
Build 47
- Fix platinum trophy not unlocking
- Fix "Robot-mantic" achievement not persisting progress
- (and a behind-the-scenes fix for how stories are persisted, the tracking will now be reset if you press "Reset All")
You should now (rightfully!) earn the Robo-mantic achievement for telling Orby you love him 🥰
Happy fixing folks.
🤖💘🤖
Build 45
This is a minor patch to fix a couple minor issues, typos, and introduce a new feature to the menu to help track your progress:
- Fix a minor UI bug in Act 2, where the final site's fix zones would show in the UI before they're enabled
- Another fix attempt at the OnFoot camera, where if you used a terminal, sometimes it would gimbal-lock and flip around before returning to normal up/down look behaviour
- Fix an IK/Visual bug in Act 3
- Added Stories button to main menu, which has a list of all the chats you can encounter in each Act, with a hint on how to encounter them (this is here mainly to help track which ones you haven't got for certain achievements)
- Typo fix
- Fix an Ink issue in Act 2
That's all for now, see you later for a devlog on how Orby's character controller & Emotes are scripted!
🤖💘🤖
A Day of Maintenance is now live!
It's out!
And boy, I'm real proud of what we made here. I've taken the time to write up my thoughts in slightly more detail here on medium; but the gist? Is that it's taken a lot to get to this point, but for me... it was all worth it.
I hope y'all enjoy what we've made.
I've updated the demo build to reflect the latest version, and will be keeping my ears open these next few weeks for any issues - here's hoping y'all don't find any eh? 😏
Happy fixing!
🤖💘🤖
"Robotic Ruins" Music Trailer
The second of 2 singles we'll be dropping, this track appears in your truck radio as you drive around Act 2 of the game - the moon overhead, pillars carrying railroads, and an empty quarry to worm your way through...
Interested in getting the whole soundtrack? Well have a lookie here on bandcamp!
https://mooncircuit.bandcamp.com/album/a-day-of-maintenance-ost?from=embed
See you on saturday for the album release!
Who are the Truck Gang?
Now then: who are the truck gang?
Let’s start with GC-53AN, or “Ground”, the player character - who’s a stoic, pretty direct guy-robot. He inherited an MSSIRT from a human operator, and parts of that may have rubbed off on this deadpan fella. You somehow struck lucky when waiting for a routine check-up by meeting OA-R8YE (Orby), and then... well you just kept in touch, then kept chatting, and now you two are close boyfriends 🤖💌🤖
But what about the other robots?
Well, starting with (my favourite):
Who is usually kept in line (but in a gentle way) by:
Now Jamie-Jane is a pretty old lady. But she isn't the oldest 'bot on the crew, that mantle goes to:
But who's the 'youngest' of the lot?
One interesting idea we toy with in-game is the idea of "Fascinations", where robots develop a thing they get extremely interested in. This can sometimes be lost, or dulled, or plain switched after a routine refurbishment occurs. These 'refurbs' occur every 5 years - the healthy lifetime of a normal robot's wetware. Garamond is a crew-member who recently went through that:
And finally, we have one last member:
~
And that’s it! It’s been long enough that I genuinely don’t recall when we brought in the truck gang characters, but you can thank spdrcstl for that. I know I had fun drawing their portraits.
Anyways. That's another blip in the timeline leading up to release (on APRIL 22ND), hope you all are hype!
Happy fixing.
🚒🤖💘🤖📡
"Desert Moon" Music Trailer
The first of 2 singles we'll be dropping, this track appears in your truck radio as you drive around Act 1 of the game - the sun looming over, the dust rolling past.
Interested in getting the whole soundtrack? Well have a lookie here on bandcamp!
https://mooncircuit.bandcamp.com/album/a-day-of-maintenance-ost?from=embed
See you next wednesday for the next single!
Release Date Announcement
December 2020: The Prototype
From December 2020, where this thing was merely a whole bunch of cubes trundling around a golden landscape, I accidentally(?) set in motion something which would become my biggest personal project ever (and hopefully not the last!)
June 2021: The Demo
Then, in June 2021, we released our first build: a demo of the 1st Act in it's entirety (...which you may notice has been updated with all the latest goodies & changes!). This was for the Melbourne Queer Games Fest, where we somehow managed to make it to the shortlist! From there the game got a slew of interest and some bug reports, but overall was one of those major milestones I needed: the game has a build, it's playable, and it's good. The 1st Act is good. So now? we just gotta do the last 3.
March 2022: The Release Candidate
And now, 1 year and almost 4 months later, we're here. At a point where the game is content complete, has an OST, has almost 80,000 words of writing to explore, and a nice curve of gameplay (all with Orby, the cutest boy-bot, chatting with you across the story):
This is, to me, (and I say this as a completely biased voice:) a piece of beautiful work. Across the disciplines of design, writing, music, everyone involved has really contributed something special. I listen to Rowan's soundtrack & I'm in a trance. I read Freya and Elliott's writing & I laugh 'n tear up all over again. (I won't be so vain to mention my work here, but rest assured I'm proud)
A truck-sim. crane-puzzle, interactive-fiction game. What was just a weird little idea, that I nonchalantly talked Freya into working on, has now manifested itself into a thing that I know; right here, right now, will be one of my proudest achievements.
With a slew of characters, voices, stories and puzzles, this thing has become a "real" project for me, in that I've invested so much of myself into it. And I say that purely for myself - this isn't to diminish the 2 writers, 3 musicians, 4 artists, a design consultant, and all the folks who helped test it. And because of that - that contribution of voices - this thing is so much more than what I initially set out to make.
The final mile
And because of that, I am truly delighted to announce:
The game will release on April 22nd, 2022
Priced at $20, it'll be available for PC
Not just that, but there will be a short-story tie-in to read, written by Julian K. Jarboe. This will hopefully be the first of a few of these side-projects for the game, where I have further ideas to explore in the future!
~
Now, in the run-up y'all should book into your calendars the following dates!
- Over the next week I'll be posting a couple trailers for Rowan's Soundtrack
- 9th: Rowan's Soundtrack will drop, with a tonne of desert-y blues to tide you over for a bit
- 16th: the Logs from Iapetus will be downloadable, a short story from the world of the game
- 22nd: that's it! The game is out.
I really look forward to seeing what you all think of it.
🤖💘🤖
THE SILVER APOCOLYPSE IS COMING
THE SILVER APOCOLYPSE IS COMING
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
It will arrive in steps
not
the fracture that has been proposed, where God will throw down his revenge on us.
It will change our ways,
not
by eliminating us,
but
by eradicating the truth that all men know:
LABOUR.
by losing our work, our sweat, the thing that makes us strong, we will
LOSE.
OUR
.SOULS.
MADNESS is coming.
if we lose the ability to USE our day for good, for the promise of reward; I guarantee you reader that we will lose. our.
SOULS.
if we lose the hard LABOUR that cuases our sweat. it will be gone for good. Our strength as a species will drop, and our ability to fend off the mental attacks of these computers will falter.
These "creative! industries that supposedly will be our new order, our new source of muscle, are instead our demise.
our collective loss of masculinity will destroy us.
our inability to fight for our hunger will leave us open to fiends.
To fiends? Who are these?
Who will own this silver tide? Is it us? Us who come to church willingly? no.
Is it the governments that say "help us, help us, we can't tax, no no we can't do what is necessary"? NO.
It's the BILLIONAIRES that will own this future.
They are the manufacturers of this silver bloat. this eradication, this erosion of our muscle. The removal, of, our
SOULS
and they will own the land which we feed on, count on that. They buy it foot by foot, or even at a discount bulk price. Then, with grace, let us pay for access to it. To OUR LAND.
What happens if we rent our water? our earth, our soil that we've lived on for generations? do you think it'll just blow over? life continues?
NO
our sense of body and mind will drain, filling the void of ANGER.
OF HATRED.
and we will be RENTING
OUR
SOULS to the manufacturer class.
There will be pain in our future. Some say in the stars is where our new labour will emerge.
but who works better in space? A fleshy, pale, weak, food-hungry man like me?
or a machine that can toil until it needs new oil? All it wanting be direction from some man with a tie?
They say space is where our water, our minerals will come from. but this is
A LIE.
TO UNDERMINE US.
they are establishing a CONTROL NETWORK over the solar system.
To control us. the world, the SOULS of US.
HUMANS.
FEAR the silver tide.
SEE what it is:
a portal through which our loss of work will ruin us
a highway for the manufacturers to purchase our planet along
a step towards controlling the solar system, for them to control US
Live what lives you have left, we have pain in our future.
And we will be renting our bodies for the virtue of it.
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[ 89/89 ]
[ < 88, "REVISION OF OUR MANHOOD" ]
posted on December 29th, 2023
3800 shares, 188 likes
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Highlighted comments:
"this! The rapture won't be like we thought, it will be this!!! A slow growth tumour on society"
"The control network exists already, i get hives when i commute past the west M6. The chemicals in the air get through the car filters, must be stopped or we get corralled. sheep!"
"SOULS FOR THE SOUL THRONE"
"First orbital repair by Robot worker completed successfully"
Science Editor, News Network Website
August 9th, 2052
The International Space Station has had it's first repair done entirely unmanned by a Robot worker, "OC-10LHF".
The task assigned to OC-10LHF was to investigate then replace a broken solar panel with a new section.
It started at 12:01 BST, then finished at 13:06 BST.
The work was overseen by astronauts nearby, but the task was performed entirely without their help for the first time in history.
This is in contrast to the past 8 attempts over the past year, each requiring human intervention in some form.
"We've just witnessed a great step towards human life in space - the ability to maintain ourselves in orbit without risking human life" says a spokesperson for the ground control staff at Kennedy Space Center.
The staff was made up of employees from both GravTech & The Adam Project, with NASA technicians handling communication with ISS astronauts in case of a failure.
"We've had a few tries at this, so of course we were bound to do it, but damn it feels good to actually see it!" remarked Adam Project technician Robert Smith.
Part of the procedure was recording the process from start-to-finish, for further analysis of the Robot's steps.
"We gave [OC-10LHF] the manual to read through first, and plenty of video footage from human expeditions in the past, so it had plenty to go off. What we're looking for now is how closely it matched it, or how much it deviated to do it's own method" stated Robert in a statement following the event.
This and previous attempts are part of a shared venture from both companies: Adam Project being responsible for the Robot worker, GravTech for transporting the worker & materials to space.
In a recent statement from GravTech: "[Transporting the robot & materiel has] been a good test of our reusable rocketry technology. The easier it is to get these delicate machines up to space, the wider the range of possibilities."
Some of the previous attempts attracted widespread discussion & mockery.
The 4th trial with Robot "OC-09MSN" ended with it spinning in place whilst attempting to rivet a secure panel, requiring a human operator to override it's Wetware to force it to slow down.
The staff took it in stride, one saying: "We fully enjoyed the various remixes people made, Deja Vu is a personal favourite."
Other trials were less comedic.
During the 5th trial, where OC-09MSN was reused, during the operation it unlatched from an ISS hard point, drifting towards one of the astronauts overseeing it.
"We came dangerously close to losing a life then, just by them being forced away from the ISS without thrusters to move back to safety" remarked a NASA official after the robot was finally caught a few hours later.
Following this trial, the project was put on hold for 3 months.
"Whilst we want to pursue the goal of un-manned work, we got a lot to do, lot of problems to solve - the robot should never be able to disconnect from a hard-point without good reason is just one of those cases" said an Adam Project spokesperson following the 5th trial.
GravTech has announced plans for further tests of unmanned robot repairs.
In a statement put out this morning, they've announced a contract with the United States Space Force: "Following our work so far, we're confident that this joint venture between GravTech & The Adam Project will lend itself to the support of Governments around the world. This is the first step towards that. By maintaining the GPS network, we're hopeful that everyone will begin to see the benefits sooner, rather than later."
The contract will be to perform repairs on the GPS network for an undisclosed amount of time, after initial trials of robot repairs show good results.
"We're absolutely looking at all possible contracts, but in these early stages, the priority is towards those that guarantee repeat interest, or research opportunities." says spokesperson Fidel Pérez, in an interview after the announcement.