What excites us about the Anniversary Update? - Dev Blog

The Doborog Team have been working hard on lots of new things! Merch with iam8bit, a mobile version of Clone Drone in the Danger Zone and the 10 Year Anniversary Update! It was all revealed in our Doborog Direct video.

All this and more will Launch on November 12th!

Cutscene Animation - Josh

You may know me as the guy that makes the TikToks but as long as I’ve done that, I’ve also been using our Level Editor to animate bots! I’ve had lots of practice by trying to make funny little jokes and memes like this PikuNiku video we posted.

If you’ve played with the Level Editor, you know that it can be very powerful and very deep! But did you know that the Level Editor you use to build levels is the same tool that we use to make Levels and animations? It’s true! We’ve used it to make Adventures, Endless Levels and even the Story Mode!

Something we’ve not done before is use the arena screens to show what’s happening elsewhere in the world. Simulatron is busy while you’re in the arena and causes a lot of chaos that you’ll get updates on as you progress through the levels. Normally we show the arena or the commentator’s talking on the Upgrade Room screens but now we’re using them for something new. Security camera footage from outside the Arena that’s taking place at the same time as your battles tells a little story about what the bots are doing to try and prevent Simulatron from taking over the Arena.

Obviously the most important technological improvement is EYEBROWS. Simulatron is the first bot to have fully animatable eyebrows which give him so many extra emotions! Our artist Isaac added this new feature and I had so much fun playing around with them. We instantly decided to use them for surprise and anger.

It’s been great to be able to contribute towards a game I love in a new way. I hope you enjoy the new animations and cutscenes!

Josh

Cutscene writing and processes - Geoffrey

Hi, I’m Geoffrey! I was the Narrative Lead for the Anniversary Update. This was such an exciting project for me, because I got to collaborate with so many different team members and stretch my creativity in new ways. From start to finish, Hhere’s a peek into what it took to bring the Anniversary Challenge to life.

#1 Idea

Our creative director Erik decided the next update would celebrate the 10th anniversary of CDDZ’s initial launch on Itch.io . He asked me to come up with pitches for challenges. I had many ideas, like a haunted arena and a deadly surprise party. Erik’s favorite was a time travel challenge where the player fights through 10 years of development history. I ran with that!

#2 Outline

Next I wrote a bulleted outline, breaking down the story and major gameplay elements. I researched the evolution of CDDZ by reading Steam update blogs and talked to our QA Jonathan, who’s been at Doborog for nearly 10 years! I got the basic story beats on my first draft, but it took a few rewrites to figure out the main character would be Simula-tron. He would hijack the arena’s power for his restart sequence, forcing the arena to restart back to alpha!

#3 Script

Normally I write dialogue in a spreadsheet, because it can be easily imported into Unity, our game engine. Since I was writing animated cutscenes, instead I wrote the script in screenplay format. This way I could script out the action and get a sense for the length of the cutscenes. (1 screenplay page = 1 minute of screentime) When Erik approved the script, then I imported all the dialogue into our spreadsheet. There’s no getting around spreadsheets!

#4 Storyboard

I’m not a professional artist, but I volunteered to storyboard all the cutscenes in Procreate. Most of the work was done when I was visiting my family in Buffalo. It was surreal to be drawing for a living in my childhood home, since I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was a kid. Even though they’re pretty rough and cartoony, the storyboards turned out to be invaluable as a communication tool internally.

#5 Implementation

I guided our artist Isaac when creating the Simula-tron model. My vision was a clunky 1950s sci-fi robot who was out-of-date, but powerful. He nailed the design IMO. I love the rust spots.

Our level designer Dylan took my gameplay suggestions and transformed them into awesome levels. Well, some of them. My original outline called for levels based on Twitch Mode and the Level Editor, which were fun ideas on paper, but not in practice. That’s why we playtest!

I worked very closely with Josh, our marketing lead and level editor expert, on animating the cutscenes. He would take a pass, then we met many times to smooth over and punch-up sequences. He’s a very talented animator who achieved complex shots, like a robot battle royale!

As of this writing, I still have one last task for the update: lead the localization. I’m sure the translators will have questions about all the weird robots-killing-humans jokes. Whatever language you end up playing the Anniversary Update in, I hope you enjoy it. Happy 10th Anniversary, Danger Zone! I’m honored I got to play a part in this murderous mechanical milestone.

Matchmaking - Scarlett

Hello there, foolish mortals! I mean- hello, esteemed humans! I, the server engineer at Doborog, am definitely also a human, and certainly not a robot. Pay no attention to the beeps, boops, and/or whirrs you may be hearing.

With the anniversary update of Clone Drone in the Danger Zone, we’re also launching our new matchmaker. This change is mostly behind the scenes, but it’s a long overdue update that will clean up a lot of technical debt on our backend.

For you players, there are a few noticeable changes. Your region ping times will be significantly more accurate. Now they’re being routed to the same server clusters that our games are being hosted on, instead of just a server in that approximate general area. We’ve also fixed up how we track player counts in matches, which should hopefully fix those pesky issues where sometimes private games get out of sync and say they’re full even when there are slots open. You should also run into far fewer instances of failing to connect to a game that you’ve been matched to (because, previously, we sometimes failed to actually start up the server). Yay! Our new matchmaker also enabled properly supporting multiplayer for the upcoming release of Danger Zone on mobile devices, and we hope you’ll have a blast playing on the go.

This update has been in our backlog for a few months now, and I’m glad I finally got a chance to get it done. My previous dev log talked about some of the upgrades we wanted to add that were blocked behind doing this upgrade. Making this matchmaker update is hopefully a first step toward fixing our game being inaccessible to our Russian players (without a VPN). Additionally, it’ll unlock some future quality of life fixes like better error messaging when something goes wrong, and making it a little easier for us to offer you customer support in those situations. Another big one that we have planned is being able to join an invite code without having to select the specific game mode first, which should make it a bit easier to play with friends.

Are there any new multiplayer features you’d like? Maybe you wish there was a list of ongoing matches you could join to make it easier to find custom games and workshop levels? Or perhaps you wish there was a “quick join” feature to enter a random game regardless of the game mode? Please let us know in the comments or on our Discord! We’d love to hear your ideas and we want to know what sounds exciting to you.

Besides matchmaker-specific features, getting the new matchmaker done has also unlocked doing some work to improve our multiplayer. No promises or timelines yet, but I’m planning to look into some annoying multiplayer bugs next, like hit registration issues and other weird behavior. So please look forward to a smoother game experience in the months to come. <3

Cheers,

Scarlett a.k.a. “ButterOverflow”

Sawdog and Summon Walker - Erik

Maybe you’ve caught on to the fact that we like dogs here at Doborog Games? Our logo was modelled on my first dog, Hunden Hundsson, and Brownie the dog regularly steals the show during my livestreams.

So naturally, 10 years ago, my first thought for what enemy is coming next is some sort of robot dog, with… a sawblade for a face, YEAH!

But then, over the course of each subsequent update, we usually had a strong central feature and theme (HAMMERS, FIRE, Story Chapters) in which a little sawblade dog didn’t quite fit with the rest of the content.

It makes me happy to finally be able to keep the promise I made all those years ago.

The saw dog is a tough little dog! It dies only when its sawblade face gets cut off or shattered.

We had a lot of fun animating custom walk animations for every combination of its legs getting cut off. That felt very Clone Drone.

The saw dog also supports robots riding it. We messed around with the player being able to ride it, but ultimately it felt kinda awkward, so we decided to limit that to enemies only. A thing I have learned from watching the movie Jurassic Park, is that not everything that COULD exist SHOULD exist.

I hope you enjoy fighting this delightful dog in the Saw Dog Challenge and new Endless Mode levels!

The other new enemy we’re adding this update is the Summon Walker!

The Summon Walker is the oldest discarded enemy in the game. It was the 3rd enemy I built, after sword and bow robots.

A key part of making a good game is to try stuff and then CUT THEM if they’re not fun. The idea behind the Summon Walker was to create a big enemy that you had to cut down to size in order to kill. At the time of implementing it, the voxel destruction in the game was not very performant and somewhat janky. The thick legs and body meant that the game would often stutter and it just felt kinda frustrating to cut it.

So we scrapped it, and harvested the experiment for its good ideas. The concept of a tall enemy you had to cut down was still good, and made its way into Spider-tron 5000, now with thinner legs and a red instead of green energy crystal to explode! Later, as we built the Battlecruiser Command Bots, we also lifted the summoning of robots from the Summon Walker and put it onto Infantry Command Bot.

When we decided we were gonna go back in time for the Anniversary Challenge, adding the Summon Walker as a bit of nostalgia seemed like a fun idea. My original thought is that it would show up as part of some levels and the commentators would go “omg, how weird”, it’d be kinda janky, you’d kill it and move on.

However, as I restored its functionality and iterated on it a bit, it actually turned out to be a fun enemy to fight! It’s still THICK, so I leaned into it and made it so you could stand on top of its robust legs. And the performance concerns from 10 years ago are no longer the same. We’ve improved the voxel engine massively over the years, to the point where cutting volumes the size of the Summon Walker is no longer a big deal.

And from a level design perspective the Summon Walker serves a role that the Infantry Command bot can’t. The Infantry Bot is a mini-boss. It flies at you, uses a flame thrower, and has a lot of stuff going on that makes it very active in any level you put it in. The Summon Walker by contrast is a back-rank enemy. Like spider-tron it works well when it sits in a stationary position behind other enemies, creating a little puzzle for the player about who to attack first.

We’ve put the Summon Walker in a lot of Endless Mode levels for this update! It’s a welcome new ingredient that adds some more variety and interesting situations for you to experience.

It also has its own co-op challenge, featuring a bunch of brand new levels that were a lot of fun to make!

What should we add for the 20-year anniversary? Let us know, and we’ll start planning now.

Erik