qubodup

Nikki and the Robots is now on Steam Greenlight™ and we sure hope that it will get enough Thumbs Up to join the comfortable cross-platform player community soon!

It might end up being the first piece of software on Steam that is open source code and written in Haskell.

Nikki and the Robots Greenlight Trailer

By the way, if you happen to speak German: we have been interviewed by Pixelmacher and will appear for four minutes on German TV (ZDF.Kultur on Monday 26th Nov 2012, 22:30 - 23:00 GMT+1) and more material will be available on pixelmacher.tv for two weeks after that.

Release Trailer Video

We released Nikki and the Robots 1.0, which especially enhances performance and audio.

Also, it is now possible to buy the story mode from buy.joyridelabs.de

Feedback about the game, payment process (the payment website is open source under the name papst and release trailer (made in Kdenlive) welcome!

Blog announcement

Here is the new Nikki and the Robots 0.5 Beta(!) release (download here).


video: Nikki and the Robots 0.5 Changes and Story Mode Peeks

We're working on a preorder web page, which is open source under AGPL and hosted here.

The changes explained in the video (and some that were left out) are as follows:

• Game:
  
  • Info terminals instead of text bubbles in tutorial
  • Falling tiles take a little longer to start falling
  • Batteries have a little less mass
  • Switches are easier to trigger
  • Added laser robots and laser endpieces
  • Cannon-robot sounds
  • Boost sound for jetpack robot
• GUI/OSD and Controls:
  
  • Added keyshints in game mode
  • Allow configurable game keys (jump and context) to control the menu
  • Main menu will notify you about the availability of the story mode
  • Mac OS X: default jump key is space
  • In-game OSD shows total number of batteries in level
  • "..."-bubbles when nikki can start npc/computer monolog
  • Added "retry level" menu item to failure menu
  • Added retry-option to pause menu (and major refactorings to AppState stuff during levels)
• Level editor:
  
  • Added gray level template
  • Better layer insert and delete control
• Other:
  
  • Game art sources added to source code repository
  • Bugfixes on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows that prevented many users from running the game

Episode 1 of the story mode is ready to be released and we are very excited! This will also mark the first public beta version.

We will start selling the story mode using a pay-what-you-want model, which is strongly inspired by the Humble Indie Bundle (which on the other hand was inspired by a World of Goo sale). After one week we will then set a fixed minimum price.

When you buy the game, you pay for the game as it is, but will also get all further episodes and updates for free. With each further episode, however, the minimum price will increase for new buyers of the game. The sooner you buy, the less you pay, hooray! This is similar to the Alpha-Beta-1.0 price increments of Minecraft.



Right now we are working hard on the presale website and we hope to be able to release Nikki and the Robots' story mode until mid February.

In the next post we will tell you some more details about episode 1, in which Nikki's great adventure begins to unfold.

Original post here

We want to allow to preorder the storymode very soon but before talking about business plans, let's take a look at the levels in the story mode first!

We used some of the level contest entries as a basis to create story levels. Lootninja by sauer2 for example:


Original Lootninja Level, as included with the latest release


"Upgraded" Lootninja Level

Some of the steps when "upgrading" a level are the addition of...


background, skyline and info/data terminals...


shadows and characters...


hidden areas...

... and new content in general. Most "upgrade levels" are larger and require more time to do a 100% run than the originals.

Here is a big screen of a different, jetpack robot-heavy level, which is not based on a contest entry:


Codename "Jetpack Intro" (1920x1200)

We're nearly done with all the levels for episode 1 but some bugs, the preorder website and paypal integration will probably not allow us to release before January...

Original blog post here.