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DIY Robot

DIY Robot is a collect-and-build game where you have to collect materials to craft parts to design your own robot, sell the product, and earn money.

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This game was made for the GJL Parade Game Jam for Spring 2025. The theme of the jam is 'Feedback Loop'. I was in a team of 4, we used the Unity Engine and it took us 7 days to make the game from start to finish.​​

My Involvement

My Role for this project was Game Designer, Programmer and Writer. 

As a Game Designer, when the jam started, our team brainstorm ideas and considered concepts with the theme of 'Feedback Loop', I was inspired by an idea by someone in my team to create a gameplay loop.

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However, my biggest challenge is getting my team to understand what kind of game we're making, as we go through the concepts, and formed an operating gameplay loop that also follow a similar structure as a Feedback loop.

gameplay loop.png

(Diagram of the game loop that I designed.)

My biggest challenge for this project is that my team was still unsure of what kind of game we were making, and often asked questions. I tried to answer to the best of my ability, but with a deadline, I created a blueprint with all the stats and mechanics for the game. The image below took me 2 hours to make, and it helped my team understand our game..

Blueprints and Visual Concepts.png

Programming

On the Programming side, I was responsible to make the Robot Building workshop. which features to robot building workshop, the crafting and managing feedback from customers.

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the robot building side was a matter of changing sprite images and crafting is no different than buying an item at a shop. The real challenge is detecting matching feedback as well as generating new feedback for the gameplay loop to go full circle.

Feedback show.png
Feedback show.png

(Early work of the Robot Building, Placeholder heads were used to test part swapping.)

There was a lot to consider. The idea is that the feedback uses keywords, which act as hints for players to figure out what the robot needs for a positive response. Positive results mean a star increase and more profit, and then new feedback will have new keywords to repeat the process.

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How I done it is using 3 keywords types, Functionality, Appperance and Extras, when Feedback is generated, it will use a series of RNG to pick which type and which keyword to use. the keywords will be in strings.

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The robot building has parts which each contain their own keywords. if the robot part keyword matches with the objective keyword, then the result will be positive, if none of the parts matches with the keyword, then the result will be negative. showcased in the new feedback to show past results.

Writing Feedback

Not only I program the functions of the Feedback, I also wrote the feedback. which isn't as easy. I had to think of keywords and how to write it in a way that the keyword is used in the feedback and make it stand out. as well as making sure each feedback feels like it came from a different person. which is why I structured the feedback in the way I did, based on known feedback comments when people buy products.

Feedback Sample (with pointers).png

In the end, there are over 20 usernames, 5 comments for both positive and negative, and 26 keywords, 10 for Functionality, 6 for Appearance and 10 for Extras.

Feedback Result.png

While the result of the game overall wasn't something that I feel satisfied with, I feel at least happy with what I done with the feedback loop and writing up different feedback.

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