A pixel-art mini-game where you pilot the SCOUT reconnaissance rover through dangerous environments, using its radar to detect obstacles and deliver a medical payload safely. (This is part of a larger project!!)
I worked on the ending of SCOUT: Recon Run today.I added a proper mission-complete state so the game knows when the player reaches the objective instead of just letting them keep driving around.I also added a completion screen with a short celebration effect and sound, and started working on making the game return to the menu afterwards so the player can replay the mission.I had a few issues with the UI overlapping the rover and the different game layers, so I had to experiment with where things were drawn in the main game loop.It was a small change, but it made the game feel much more like an actual complete mission rather than just a rover driving around a map.
I finally finished the SCOUT demo game.
The idea was to take the original SCOUT rover project and turn it into something people could actually interact with instead of just looking at the physical prototype.
The game now has:
One of the harder parts was getting the controls to work properly on both PC and mobile. I originally had the dialogue working with keyboard input, but getting tapping to work reliably took a lot more debugging than I expected. I ended up using pointer events so the same input system could handle mouse clicks and touchscreen input.
I also had to make the dialogue UI adapt to different screen sizes. On mobile, the text box needs to be smaller and the text needs to wrap properly, while on PC there is more space available.
This was also my first time making a proper playable game around one of my hardware projects. A lot of the work wasn’t just writing the game itself, but connecting all the different systems together so that the game actually felt like one thing.
It’s finally playable now, so I’m going to move on to testing it on different devices and fixing anything people find.
🔥
This was the first version of the SCOUT game simulator.
At this point, I had the basic SCOUT rover moving around the screen and some simple walls to drive around. The idea was to make a small digital version of the rover so I could experiment with how SCOUT would actually work in an environment.
It was pretty basic at this stage, but getting the rover movement working was an important first step. From here, I could start building the actual environment and eventually add things like objectives, characters and missions.
This was basically the starting point for what eventually became the full SCOUT demo game.
