Intriguing!

[Bethins]

This is probably the most interesting and intriguing game I've ever seen in the App Store. I'm currently stuck, trying to figure out how to charge my robot so that I can continue the game. I followed the tutorials/missions, which hinted that I needed to research mechanical for a future quest. So when the charge quest came along and said that iron to make a generator, I switched to genetics. Iron seeds need level 2 and I'm currently sitting with a dead robot, 97.24 percent research on genetics 2, and I'm clueless as to how to proceed. I think I will just reinstall the app, As I'm finding no reset option, because I'm super excited to get into the meat of programming my robots!

Wonderful game! Best concept I've seen since I got the first iPhone! Hope it's still being developed!

[worfc]

Glad you're enjoying the game. Yeah, we were pretty excited about the idea though, in fairness, we stole a lot of other games. In particular the robots are almost directly lifted from the classic Robot Odyssey, an old favorite.

Reinstalling is one thing you can do. Another is to create a new farm. However, if you want to go by "strict play", one feature of the game is that your robot will never be dead forever. If he runs totally out of juice and you let it sit for a few hours or overnight, you can get him up & running again -- he picks up a small "atmospheric charge" just sitting offline.

To be honest, waiting for a recharge isn't much fun, so I don't actually recommend it. I mention it here only for the sake of completeness, as I know certain players are of the mindset that their 1st farm is the one "that counts" and they like to bulldog their way through no matter what the obstacle.

Welcome to WoRFC and, again, glad you're enjoying it. Feel free to let us know your ideas for improvements here.

And please spread the news. Tell your friends, write a review -- all these things help keep WoRFC going!

Thanks!

[Bethins]

I couldn't get him to charge, I read about the solar charge thing, but maybe I was just too impatient to figure out how to make him charge. I left the game open all night, but nothing. I think I just farted around too much on my first try. I'm back up and running now though, finally harvested some iron trees! Thanks for the game! I'm sad that I'm just now finding it and my son is sad that I've stolen his iPad to play, lol.

[worfc]

I'd have to go have a re-look at that feature, but I believe the "solar" charge only happens if you sign out of your farm. Hence, leaving it open all night would actually defeat the solar charge. (Sounds like an opportunity for feature clarification...!)

Glad you're back up & running; sorry that you lost that initial time.

In the lower-right of the screen is the robo-menu which has, among other things, the Sign Out option. On the main screen, you should also have the option to Create New Farm.

NOTE: There's no advantage for one player to have two farms -- any progress in one is not carried to the other, so doing so would only "slow you down". I mention this in case your son decides he'd also like to play. Just remember to sign out at the end of a session (not normally a big deal, but handy with a shared device) and to select the correct farm when starting. You can edit the farm names, for easier tell-apart-ability.

NOTE: We don't yet have a good mechanism for moving a farm from one device to another (say, if you get your own iPad, or if someone upgrades). Something like that is "in the works", but every solution we've come up with so far has some horrible failure mode that leaves it unacceptable so...

[Bethins]

Yea, I found the sign out option after I reinstalled the app :p

I have a few questions/things I've noticed...

The first being the tools drawer. I've "programmed" it to cycle through the tools as it goes down the line; an effort to saw, til and plant all in one go... When cycling through the tools, I get hung up on the drawer icon. When it's selected, nothing happens and my system kinda just pauses... What's the best way to handle skipping over the drawer icon?

And the second has to do with the saw tool. It seems to me that the robot has to be moving in the direction of the tree before the saw is engaged, whereas with the shovel and dibble, the tool can be used while the robot is sitting still. I'm assuming this has to do with the tree being on the next block? My current system stops until the tool is used, then moves, so when the saw is selected, it Doesnt get used and my robot just stands there talking to the tree. How does one work around that?

Also, I see you have a section for circuits, but it's empty? Can you post screens of your common systems?
And plus also... It would be cool if we could write little notes on the screen/circuit to help with remembering what was intended with a given circuit.

[Bethins]

Oh wait, I found the circuits in the county fair section. It says I don't have permission to view the pictures though.

[worfc]

Drawer icon: I'm guessing that you feed output of tool drawer to cycle-tools input? Then when there's "no tool selected", it doesn't cycle because there's no signal. You could just add power (drawn from any source, like a NOT gate or battery terminal) to the input, instead.

Saw tool: Yes, saw acts on an item bumped whereas shovel & dibble act on bare ground.

Work around: You may not yet have enough automation to do saw-shovel-dibble in one go, yet. Later circuitry simplifies this but, for now, you might find it easier to do a saw/gather pass, a shovel pass then a dibble pass. Perhaps changing tools based on turning around at the rock-walls. Do you have sensors, yet?

During early-game, there's a bit of manual-labor required. Each phase of the game is intended to nudge you toward automating the thing that you're mostly doing manually now, and then getting you to spend your (human player) time doing some new thing. Then you solve that and it all shifts down one. That is, more or less, the game progression, until you get to the point where you push a single button and your team of robots does as instructed

In my early farm, I would tend to do plots of 4-8 rows (depending on my seed resources), saw them in a zig-zag fashion, then manually "drive" to start to hoe the same plot, then manual-drive to plant until out of seeds. Later, I added a counter so it would auto-stop after N rows. Later, I added the "...then return to the top of the loop" logic. I'm pretty sure all of that logic was locked-up in chips before I managed to have a "now do the whole thing, all at once" robot.

YMMV. Feel free to invent!

Circuit notes: Once you get to chips, they can be annotated with text. For non-chip circuits, the best thing we have currently is colored wire.

I'll add a feature request for user-supplied labels -- seems easy enough...

[worfc]