Systems in motion

The player story

In the mid to late game, the player carries resources back to the base and orders finished products — perhaps a new sniper rifle or a huge rhino mount. The robots take care of the production chain while the player can steer the base toward the next island.

Automation around a moving base

The automated factory system let players organise bots to carry resources around the base and automatically order the components they needed from different workbenches and smelters.

I designed and implemented the mount movement and automated crafting systems for Futurion.

Futurion factory systems operating while the base travels · Silent loop.

Scheduled polling loop

The drones were not driven by visual behaviour or scene events. Their work was calculated by a scheduled polling loop that stayed separate from the visual layer.

With deferred execution, the result could be imprecise at the scale of roughly a third of a second. For this gameplay, that did not make a meaningful difference to outcomes or player experience; keeping the system fast and simple mattered more.

When the player was away from the base, production continued as pure simulation: no visible drones or per-object scene behaviour needed to run. That left the player’s machine free for the resource-hungry work elsewhere — sensors, colliders, movement and projectiles while the player steered a mount or fought enemies. It also made the system easy to test at 10× or even 100× speed.