Building

The building system in Robo-Bee allows for full hexagonal grid snapping in any angle the player wants. Larger hexagonal grids allow the player to place buildings that aid them in their goals.

Because perfect hexagonal spheres are not possible, the player is able to swap between angle modes, allowing them to change whether they want to angle their platform relative to neighboring platforms, or to instead use a globally agreed upon direction to spiral platforms around, letting you create perfect tubes of hexagonal pieces.

The movement in Robo-Bee is unique in the sense that the transition between flying and crawling needed to feel seamless and intuitive.

The crawling system allows the player to dynamically crawl on any surface and automatically solve the players desired movement using information from the surface they are standing on and information from the camera.

When crawling, the player essentially acts as a car with soft suspension by essentially reducing the resolution of the surface the player is crawling on to improve transitions on sharp angles. By probing ahead of the players desired input direction, we can further improve movement feel to create an easy to understand player controller.

In Robo-Bee, the player can create worker bees that automate certain tasks around the base. Because the game has a complex building mechanic that allows the player to make unique structures, the bees needed a way to navigate through the world. Using a faster and less precise version of a Voxel A* pathfinding algorithm, the player can have dozens of bees navigating the world while staying well above target framerates.

The voxel grid is not pre-baked, and can dynamically adapt to any new obstacles it encounters in the scene.