RoboTRONFanInterview

An interview held with RoboTRONFan on 15/07/2022. It lasted an hour and a half. Any  REDACTED  material relates to unused concepts / prototypes, shelved plans or more recent work that developers may not wish to make public. It does not confirm or deny anything and is to be treated with a grain of salt, as it is simply work that would rather not be fully public yet, in the case it is used in the future.

Early History
Convoy: “What is your earliest memory of ROBLOX?” Robo: “My earliest memory of ROBLOX… Funnily enough, was playing a Transformers game on what is now one of my alt accounts. I made an account back in 2010 to play ROBLOX and I remember just hoppin’ on and playing games. I remember the Transformers games at the time had really fun morphs, the transform tool would just like… fly. It just flies. And it contorts your body. You know those old RoFormers? I have immense nostalgia for those. I was thinking, my earliest memory couldn’t have been RoFormers - but it actually is one of them. Actual Earliest memory… I remember playing a game, it was night time, green baseplate… might have been the old crossroads map. I remember touching a badge and getting like the badge sound you know? The winner sound. Convoy: “The do do?” Robo: “I feel so nostalgic. Yeah, the du-dun! “If you look in my account it’ll say I’ve been on since 2011, but I’ve been playing since 2010” Convoy: “So, ok - early RoFormers stuff. Playing all the early Kelco games, how did you get started in deving for Transformers?” Robo: “That one’s kinda…

I don’t remember what actually got me to start, but the resource I looked to the most at the time was Kelco’s how to make RoFormers videos and I guess just naturally through that. I learnt how studio worked and… it was cool like following the videos and learning how to save things as models, making thumbnails, using minimaps and what not. Pretty fun time. From there I guess, I just started making models for fun. I’d be hanging out with friends and use the insert tool whilst hanging out just to play around and roleplay. It was a different time Actual dev work… when did it really start. I made a thing called Transformers: War for Roblox. Twice. We’re gonna call one of them WFR2. The first one was just a free model map with two spawn areas and a bunch of morphs I didn’t make. WFR2 was the same thing but like, this time it had a little more structure to it, it had an actual spawn lobby this time and stuff like that"

Dark Of The Moon's Early Days
Robo: "From there, I guess Dark of the Moon multiplayer happened which is just, I had played the DS version of DOTM games at the time which was like hey… what if I made a ROBLOX game based on this? Which is why there was only 8 playable characters at the time, with like 4 VIP characters. Each iteration of DOTM since 2011 has just been me getting better and better at developing. If you look at DOTM now and compare it to DOTM from 11 years ago, the difference is like night and day. With each iteration you can see how much my work has grown over time”

Convoy: “That original iteration, because I don’t remember yours that much - did it actually only have 8 characters because of the DS game?” Robo: “Yeah it had the 8 characters from the DS game which were Optimus, Bumblebee, Ironhide, Dino, Megatron, Soundwave, Lockdown and uh… Crowbar”

Convoy: “Lockdown?”

Robo: “Yeah, Lockdown from the ROTF toyline was in it. It was a strange choice. Unironically, we love to see it - but it was a strange choice. And then VIP I added Starscream, Ratchet and… who else did I add. I already forgot. But Ratchet and Starscream were in it because they appeared as NPCs. Shockwave was in it for the same reason, he appears at the very end. Sentinel Prime is the one character who didn’t appear in the DS games, but I added him as an Autobot funny enough” Convoy: “So, you might be the only person ever to make Starscream DLC?” Robo: ‘I… I might be”

Convoy: “That’s terrible!”

Robo: “That is terrible!

It’s why he became main roster in every iteration from there”

Convoy: "Every Roblox TF game, one of the first guys they make it Starscream. Like omg, I’m gonna make Starscream I’m gonna add Starscream and you’re just like… no”

Robo: “Add Starscream! … No. Starscream? You want him? You gotta buy the VIP t-shirt dog. Starscream, Shockwave, Ratchet, Sentinel as DLC”

Convoy: "That might be the scummiest VIP pack in like, ever”

Robo: “It might be, it actually might be”

Convoy: “Going through the iterations of DOTM and seeing it escalate has been really cool - do you have a favourite? Excluding the latest, what’s the most nostalgic one?”

Robo: “I’m really nostalgic for the iteration that has pretty much the same models and loadout for what I call 1.0 which is right before I closed it, but it has the old map which isn’t so big. It’s basically the same map but significantly smaller and the bridges were a lot smaller. Is it the best one? No. But I have a lot of nostalgia for it! And I think this map has a charm to it.

I remember there was another one we all played on, but it doesn’t exist anymore and that’s really strange. In this game, when you’re a flyer - you use right click to fly and left click to shoot missiles. The missiles were bubbles, like Mega Man’s pea shooter… but just bubbles” Convoy: “It’s built into my muscle memory actually, the right click to fly and left click to shoot” Robo: “Yeah do you remember the old GUI for it? There was like.. A picture of a mouse, with the buttons labelled for which one is to fly and which one is to shoot”

Convoy: “Oh my god, yeah I do remember that actually”

Robo: “And uh, while going through all the old iterations - this one was the most fun to go through, one reason being there weren’t a million updates I had to scroll through that were just minor edits that didn’t matter. Like, I think once the new Chicago map was introduced my game really hit that phase where I thought oh, I gotta make the models look like MT. Nah, this was before that time - so I was just having fun pumping out new characters each time”

Convoy: “So you mentioned trying to make your models look more like MT, how did you feel to be deving in the golden age where Lewa was the big hitter?”

Robo: “I’m not sure how to describe how it felt at the time, but definitely looking back it’s very surreal. Because like, a lot of those devs aren’t as active anymore so I just, feel old you know? Not in a bad way, but I just feel old. It’s kinda cool”

Convoy: “Were you ever in any studios?”

Robo: “I was actually, but we didn’t exactly pump anything out. I was in studio called Blocksteady. I was introduced to this studio by TommyJoeJack3 and uh, OptimusPrimeTFDOTM was also in it. We were working on a fighting game called Shockwave… or sorry, Net Revolution - It’s been a little while. It’s very sad looking at the wall because now all I see is spam. Oh, 2016 - they moved production to Shockwave to a new group. Let’s see it… it’s under Alternative Studios. Ah, it looks like they haven’t been deving or a while. But yeah, that was the only real studio I was in. Unless you count StudioBCX2”

Convoy: “But you still collabed with Lewa a few times right?”

Robo: “I think given the meaning of collab and how it’s changed over time, I wouldn’t necessarily call it that. I think contributions is the best term for it, I did contribute to Lewa’s games quite a bit. I looked at his leaderboard script and helped him fix some of the issues. I also inspired some of the transformation animations. I didn’t have as many direct contributions but I talked to him and we had fun talking about what ideas we had for our games”

Convoy: “Did you talk to anyone else that much? Like Kelco or Mark?”

Robo: “I actually… didn’t. Of all the big devs, no. Well, I talked to Mark a few times in DMs, surprisingly it wasn’t 100% just trying to get the transform tool. But yeah, I remember DMing him and talking to him once when he first left ROBLOX and came back, we just talked about life and stuff, it was cool. Beyond that not really, I would have liked to talk to Kelco”

Convoy: “So not big devs, but you hung out with Peeta and Goldenclaw right?”

Robo: “Yeah, I did. It’s been a really long time since I’ve talked to Goldenclaw, so I don’t remember too much about him. But we had a lot of fun playing his MCU games. He was doing Age of Ultron and Civil War, he just really liked MCU phase 2. A lot of his games have pretty much the same formula as like, typical Roformers. But it was applied to something that wasn’t even Transformers. Unfortunately I can’t show much because both are privated now, but you can tell both had a lot of love and passion put into them. Just look at this thumbnail, this is cool”

Convoy: “I never played the game, but I always remembered this thumbnail. He did the Drift in your game right?”

Robo: “He did! He did the Drift and Galvatron in my game”

Convoy: “Did he do much TF stuff on the side?”

Robo: “He did, but he might have closed them down. I don’t remember what TF games he had, it might have just been Age of Extinction. He did give me his Hound model, but I never ended up using it”

Convoy: “Well, 1.1 baby!”

Robo: “I was going to use Hound though, in a project. You might have heard of it”

Convoy: “Hm. Hm. Hmmmm, could you elaborate on this project?”

Robo: “So basically, it was a project called: Our Darkest Hours”

Both chuckle.

Our Darkest Hours
Robo: “It would have been a third person shooter, with double jump and dash mechanics. Aaaand, stealth force! Baring the SF, it does sound similar to DOTM 1.1 right? It was going to have a prestige system, or a ranking system with battle points. I forget what you would do with it, but you would probably use it to buy or upgrade characters. And, there would have been a campaign mode where the Autobots are trying to stop the Decepticons from hacking into a NEST mainframe while the Decepticons are trying to hack into the.. The.. NEST… mainframe… all the while, the Decepticons are trying to… get Scorponok (Headmaster) working, whilst the Autobots were trying to build Metroplex.

There is no big payoff. All of that gets thrown away, because Wheeljack dies, Optimus has a fit of rage and becomes… let’s say he stays very in character. And you fight Shockwave at the end. Ah! There’s a level where you play as Shockwave and use the Driller. There would have been a lot of DLC packs with only 3 characters each. Like, three or four. Four, two per faction” Convoy: “Can you name any of those characters?”

Robo: “Dreadwing, Jetfire, Crosshairs… Crosshairs is pretty popular. MV1 Megatron would have been in there. Dropkick? No. Cyclonus? No actually Cyclonus might have been main roster. I didn’t exactly write this down”

Convoy: “So, the campaign curse right - I want your opinion on it and why do you think it is?”

Robo: “I think the problem right… I think the campaign curse, you want to have a game fully realised, fully prototyped before you really start working on doing a campaign mode. You also want the story prototyped and finalised. I think some of the pitfalls of campaign, it is a really overwhelming task and I think it’s possible. Someday, someone is probably going to make something cool but it is a lot of work and it’s really easy to feel overwhelmed by it. Plus like, story needs to go through proof reading, you need to make the level design fun, pick the right characters, have a good level loading system, it’s just a lot of work. That’s the jist of it. Doing a multiplayer only game is already a lot of work, now put campaign into the mix. I’ve said it a lot already, but it’s just a lot. Once something becomes too overwhelming you start to feel like uhhh maybe I don’t want to work on this” Convoy: “Is that what happened to you?” Robo: “Yeah. It was a pretty colossal task and I wasn’t sure how the enemy AI would work. I think it’s less of like the campaign existing and more of just, I got ambitious without seeing if I was capable of doing any of the things I wanted to do. I think the best thing to do if someone were to try this, start with a multiplayer game, figure out what’s fun and then figure out ways it can work in a campaign setting. But that’s also hard to do, so I don’t think I’m gonna try it anytime soon”

Later Experience & Reflection
Convoy: “So, we mentioned Goldenclaw and doing the TF formula in non-TF things. What can you tell me about the development of Real Steel? Which is my little favourite of your classic games”

Robo: “Unfortunately there isn’t much I can say, it is one of those games that was developed in the span of a few days, if not - one day”

Convoy: “Really?”

Robo: “Well, the models maybe over a span of a week or something. But the rest, a day. The map is just a punching ring and the punch was a SFOTH sword tool just invisible. It was very easy to put together, but the simplicity has a charm to it. Less is more. Is it really simple and basic? Yeah, but I think that’s part of what I look back really fondly on. Ironically, I think the models have aged better than DOTM’s models”

Convoy: “Just in that general timeframe, what was it like cracking the Transform tool? Learning the secrets?”

Robo: “Cracking the Transform tool? It was very confusing.

First there was seeing the tool, to imagine it you gotta see it. I think the first instance I had seen of it working in Lewa’s DOTM. It was the old transform tool, but with all the backpack stuff turned on and off. So I decided I wanted to try something similar to that. I didn’t really know how to do it, I didn’t know how to script. I tried studying some scripts like Mark/Robert/Lewa told me to do. I didn’t know how for loops worked, so the method I used was basically, I made sure each and every part in the morph had a different name. Then I would individually set the individual transparency of each individual part with each individual name and because every model has a different number of parts with different names in them, you basically had to do a unique script for each and every single model. And here’s the funny thing.

According to Mark, Lewa also did that at a time, and then gave up. Then Robert came in and was like

 'Dog, ever heard of a for loop?'

I think that’s how Lewa came around to not having to suffer. Actually no, I don’t think they even use a for loop. I think it might have been the transparency scripts pasted into every part. What I did? Let’s just call it a miracle, BobBrick released his transform tool. All I did was I took it, I gutted the mid transformation and I used it. It worked pretty well, but there was a part of me that just felt unsatisfied, because it isn’t the same as what Robert/Mark/Lewa used. I was like.. I want that. And then it was a combination of leaks with the number values and seeing those leaks, then putting 2 and 2 together with the transparency scripts and that was the a-ha moment where I figured it out. So I went and told Mark about it and he was like "congrats you figured it out, you’re like the first person to do so!" Which is funny because looking back, ironically I think Bob’s tool is better practice and Mark would agree with that. It’s just a lot cleaner and uses a for loop instead of a bunch of copypasted scripts, but it felt pretty satisfying figuring it out the first time.

I notice a lot of people in the Roformers community are fantastic at making beautiful models but a lot of them don’t seem to want to get into scripting, I wished they wouldn’t give up as easily because I think there’s a whole world out there you’re missing out on if you just let yourself suffer for a little bit to get where you want. Even if it’s just basic coding, I think everyone should learn a little bit about the basics of how LUA works. Mark also did that very recently and he had a great time doing it. I think it’s fun!”

Convoy: “BobBrick right, just that generation, minus yourself. Out of all those games, do you have a definitive favourite?”

Robo: “I actually don’t. I have a number of favourites! I don’t have one single definitive favourite.

Cybertronian War 2, Warbots, Battle for the Future. I really like Peeta’s Fall of Cybertron. That was like, three Lewa games in a row. Oh, looking back Kelco’s tycoon is really cool. I may be biased because I only recently replayed it, but I thought it was pretty fun”

Convoy: “Yeah when I was a kid, that one was one of my favourites. Especially when you’re like, 9 years old and you get to play that, it’s crazy man”

Robo: “Funny thing, when I was playing it again like a week ago. The transform tool didn’t work so I was trying to find out a way to move really quickly. I tried using a bike, I tried using the velociraptor, I tried a number of things and I found the velociraptor didn’t work despite being fast and easy to control because it kept taking all the energon. That was for me bro!!! But yeah, when you try to collect energon from all the zombies, you yourself have to touch energon to collect it, but the velociraptor is another humanoid so it stole all the energon. Then I resorted to bike instead and it worked, but everytime I unequipped the bike, well Roblox gear broke. Then I just grinded all the tasks. I have no idea what the thing you get with the cyber planet keys does”

Convoy: “So, Cybertronian War 2 is very dear to our hearts. But a lot of people especially nowadays, haven’t played it. Could you elaborate?”

Robo: “Well, it was like War For Cybertron.

It was like War For Cybertron"

Both cackle.

Robo: "The colour palette was what I wish War For Cybertron was more consistently, since it is sometimes but not all the times. Muted colours but with really bright, vibrant neon. Some maps in WFC get that really well, but not all of them. So it was cool seeing it in CW2 where it is just that one map, but aesthetically. Rust right? It’s such a colourful map, I wish the rest of the game was. That’s kinda what CW2 reminded me of.

Also, it had the speedways. Which did not remind me of the speedways from WFC, but it reminded me of the transport tubes from Legends of Metru Nui. I was like, oh his name is Lewa and he used the transport tubes? I put 2 and 2 together”

Convoy: “Sly dog”

Robo: “Sly dog”

Convoy: "Something interesting about that game in particular, that and Warbots had the level up approach, which I guess RS kinda has as well, but DOTM from you and MT always had that unlockable roster approach instead?”

Robo: “It wasn’t really a conscious choice, it was just simpler to do and honestly I wouldn’t be opposed to trying the level up approach now because I wanna try something a little different. Honestly I was still in that generic Lewa clone mindset, so I just saw a very simple formula. It’s why I didn’t go class based and why the game still isn’t class based like Mark’s game is. With how skins work in Mark’s game, you could argue he has the level up approach as well”

Convoy: “No… that’s copium”

Robo: “Yeah that is copium. I wouldn’t be opposed to trying that in the future. I think Real Steel doesn’t count because, it’s just an unlockable roster. You start with two and unlock the rest. I think the main point was I didn’t think too hard about how it works, I just wanted a sense of progression so players feel like they’re earning something out of playing the game. That’s also my current mindset for why I don’t do gamepasses. I don’t like the idea of VIP anymore like I used to, because why do you wanna buy your characters when you can play the game and get them? It feels… HYPOTHETICALLY feels more rewarding, depends on the amount of work the dev put into the reward, but yeah. That was kinda the point of unlockables I guess. I’m not sure if that was always the point, but it’s definitely the point now”

Modern Career
Convoy: “So, we’re talked about all the retro stuff for a bit. Now we’re gonna start with the new stuff. We’re gonna go from day one”

Robo: “Day one, the day I don’t even remember”

Convoy: “Day three!”

Robo: "Day four”

Convoy: “Something like that. That period of time where there was a lot of contests in TheBlaze’s server. So TFA Optimus, MV1 Optimus, FOC Grimlock. Do you have a favourite of those models?”

Robo: “I really like Kindover’s Tarn”

Convoy: “Your models"

Robo: “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

My favourite? I don’t know, I like all of them for different reasons. Animated Optimus, sure he has complex shapes but the aesthetic is very simple and follows the less is more approach, I like that. He only took me a few days to make. Which is kind of a lot if I’m being honest. He was fun! The quickest to make too, which is not very surprising. But the thing that made me enjoy him so much is that I was trying a new approach to the aesthetic, it was the first time I had done a cel shaded model. Literally, the first time I had ever done it. Grimlock, was for the big contest and it was very much like, I kinda wanna just do my thing but go way over the top for it. I kinda looked at our very old concept for  REDACTED  Grimlock, where his transformation worked? Do you remember that?”

Convoy: “Vaguely yeah”

Robo: “It was like the Roblox dude, he had his hands on the floor and his legs became like the tail. Yeah that, because for some reason my mind just forgot I could do custom rigs completely so I limited myself to R15. Except R15 but rescaled and different proportions. I wanted to break away from the default R15, so I was like alright, humbling river time. How’d the model come out? I liked it. Could it have been optimised a lot better? Uhhhhhhhhh. It’s all complex unions with horrible vertices and a lot of repeat textures applied to them, it is terrible. At least it looks good when animated. I do have the untextured model as well which looks really good, I re-rigged him a few months ago which was fun to do”.

After a quick break, Robo proceeds to jumpscare Beef

Robo: “I re-rigged him to follow conventions that I use now, it’s a lot easier to animate now let’s just say that. That’s why ladies and gentlemen and homies and people, rigging is very important. I still haven’t picked a favourite but my favourite might just be TFA Optimus. The other two that I did were way too complex. They’re fun to work on but if I had to keep doing them like that, I’d get way too burnt out”

Convoy: “Yeah I remember they burnt you out pretty bad when you finished them, you dropped dead”

Robo: “All three of them all together took a total of one month. Not just a result, but also the process? Animated Optimus is my favourite”

Convoy: “To me, they’re landmarks, they’re some of the most things to happen to RoFormers. I think that period of time where you, Kindover and I were all pushing each other and just going going going in those contests was really significant. Do you think overall though, in terms of the entire community, did what you set out to do then have the impact you wanted it to have in terms of pushing everything forward?”

Robo: “That’s hard to answer, to an extent it didn’t but to an extent it did. The extent that did is a person named MarkForge. But at the very least, I like that people recognised my stuff and it has inspired them to do more. There was that night I was showing some of the Sector 7 gang how to rig, AshCr4ft has been trying stuff before even I was. It’s cool”

Dark Of The Moon 1.1
Convoy: “Could you walk me through the reason why you wanted to bring back DOTM instead of making a new game?”

Robo: “I guess that was like the path of least resistance. Basically, I’m very lazy and I also wanted to see how well this formula could still work. It has been a while, so now that I see that it works again I feel more confident in making literally anything at this point as long as I take the time. So, that happened. ''' REDACTED and REDACTED? ''' Those two are gonna pop” Convoy: “But we can’t transcribe that legally” Robo: “Ohhh ma god”

Convoy: “So, why double jumping?”

Robo: “Why did I add double jumping? I just really like double jumping. Every game I like has double jumping in it. War For Cybertron, Devil May Cry, Nier, Ultimate Spider-Man. Honestly, a lot of games have it and I like it. It feels good. I know a lot of people don’t like it in DOTM, but what can I say?”

Both chuckle. Convoy: “What can you say? Tell them, tell them what you can say” Robo: “I like double jump, that’s all I can say!”

Convoy: “This game has a really packed roster and you did add to it, was that a fold or was it always intended?”

Robo: “It was kind of both. Well, it’s both in that people wanted an update with characters in it. That was a fold, I was ready to call the roster complete. At the same time, I added characters I wanted to add, you can tell because Crosshairs isn’t in the game, but a niche character like Reverb or Seaspray is in the game. No one wants those two”

Convoy: “I don’t know, I feel like Seaspray is something people didn’t know they want but really like. Reverb we, the S7 team likes him”

Robo: “We like him, he’s cool. I half added him because I needed to balance Sideways. The other half is because I think he’s cool. What other reason do I need, right?”

Convoy: “The roster is probably the largest now and people still want more. Do you think in 1.1 you’re still going to give more, or just hold off with whatever you’ve been teasing”

Robo: “Maybe not 1.1 (Current build) because a lot of the characters I want to add are for what I’ve been teasing, but whenever that plan goes through I might reopen 1.1 on a different place and add any new additions to 1.1 in the old art style. I just want my stuff to be accessible to people, even if the version I want to be the most accessible won’t, at least a different version will”

Convoy: “What can you tell me about the Cybertron map in the game, because that isn’t your right?”

Robo: “No that’s not mine at all, it belongs to a person named TransformersLegacy who was working on a Fall of Cybertron game. I think his original name was FallOfCybertronGame. He made that map using the C-Frame tool, which is kinda nuts because I would never make a map that way. I’m surprised it turned out as well as it did, it was so well thought out that when it came to re-lighting the map I just knew what to do, the blueprints were all there for like.. This is where a purple light would go, or this is where a spotlight would go. All of that thought was there to begin with, it was simply up to me to make it look good on the new lighting engine. Aesthetically it’s very well thought out.

The level design is mostly pretty good, I’m not sure if it was greyblocked but it looks like it might have been a greyblock with added parts, it has that vibe in a good way. A problem with it is that at 100% scale it is really small and the Autobot spawns can get hectic, so I had to add a new room to get out of that spawnpoint, or it becomes two different chokeholds which is pretty terrible, so now it plays a lot better because of it. I think re-doing the lighting must have been the most fun thing, out of all four maps to re-do the lighting for”

Convoy: “And it’s gorgeous, out of those four maps the lighting just shines beautifully” Robo: “Not to pat myself on the back but I do agree, have you seen the before and afters? Like you have, but I gotta send it again anyways. I gotta gush over my work sometimes you know. There’s being humble and then there’s being mean to yourself. Look at that, I’m really happy with how it turned out” Convoy: “Did you talk to the creator of this map much?”

Robo: “I talked to him a bit when he was making his game. Not a lot, but I definitely talked to him when he was still active. He wanted to try moving away from a tool and doing a keybind instead, so he is one of the first who wanted to do that”

Convoy: "Wow”

Robo: “Man, I think it would be cool to see his reaction to what Roformers is like now. I feel like it’s not too far off from his vision”

Convoy: “He was so ahead of his time, god damn”

Robo: “Let’s bring him back!”

Transformers Prime
Convoy: “You’ve done a lot of work with Mark working on Transformers Prime, what difficulties did you have trying to adapt to the new toolset and this art style?”

Robo: “What difficulties?

All of them.

I’m kidding, it was mainly just the weapon system. There’s a thing in LUA called metatables. The fact that I can’t even explain to you what that is right now kinda shows that I’m really inexperienced still, but I was learning how they worked and kind of like Attack On Titan’s ending I didn’t understand it. So, it was very hard for me to make the weapon system work. But it was also a learning experience, so now I kinda understand how getmetatable and setmetatable work. It makes the code a lot easier, but you’d have to understand it and it’s really complex stuff. An there’s so many script libraries too, when I tried to make one change I had to go to this other script and check what that change effects. So I think the weapon system was easily the hardest thing.

As for like, aesthetic contributions? Those are the easiest. But, I don’t know if they were more time consuming than the coding but they were easier. I did Smokescreen’s car and I’m really happy with it, I did some of the melee weapons. A few unreleased melee weapons that I can’t talk about, but they exist”

Convoy: “What was it like doing Jetfire?”

Robo: “Jetfire was really fun. He was the easier of the two concept arts that I made, because with Jetfire Mark had a vision and he explained it, so it was putting his ideas into visuals. You got the Macross Valkyrie, I looked through every Jetfire design and tried to see similarities I could use, it’s why he has the big Thrilling 30 shoulders and back columns and everything. Unintentionally I gave him Gundam kicks and when it came to modelling, Mark changed up a few things (he did 100%) but what he ended up with at the end is still really close to what I gave him. It was just easier because he had an idea and it was up to me to make the idea work.

Dead End on the other hand was a lot harder, but he was really fun to do because I had free reign completely. I wasn’t limited to any design, so I was like - let’s give him wheel boobs and make his legs look kinda funny and let’s make his face look like Casey Jones. Let’s give him a really cool stripe decal on his robot mode so he looks like he turns into the car. The cool part is, his alt mode is the same as one of my old OCs from way back. So in a way you can say my Transformers OC made it into Mark’s TFP game”

Convoy: “When designing characters and modelling, what’s your process looking like?”

Robo: “It’s a similar process to how I do any kind of art. The first step is gathering references because I know a lot of beginner artists want to draw from memory and if you can do that, you’re amazing. But it’s harder than you think it is. Plus, when I’m in the process of gathering references, the subconscious and conscious ideas start flowing into my head. Then I start with what’s the personality of this character, what kind of pose would they strike or make? Confident, angry, that kinda thing. I start with the gesture sketch, since this is digital art I move the parts around until I find proportions that I think work and start sketching over it with some humanoid looking shapes.

Then, armoured details, I play around with those armoured details a lot. Silhouette of the character also really matters and it’s one of the things I try to emphasise, making the silhouette look like it has individuality to it. Then colourblocking is another thing, I think when I do colourblocking it’s not 100% intentional everywhere I do it, but I do try to make it so that the colours separate here because the parts separate here, or you look at mechanical engineering or human anatomy and a joint should move right here and that’s probably where I’ll seperate the colours. That also goes into how the armour design works. If this character needs to move a certain way, will this piece of armour be intrusive or obtrusive to how they’re moving? Or if they’re less on movement, are they allowed to have heavier armour? Those kind of details go into the design process for characters, not just Transformers but any character I do. Of course, then the most important thing of all - does it look cool? Yes, that is subjective. What I think is cool may not be what you think is cool but I thought it was cool so I went with it.

As an extra bit for gathering references, I gather a lot from multiple continuities. I try not to limit myself to one. If you want an example of that, with Dead End, Mark said he liked Cyberverse Dead End. I also looked at Transformers Online and I thought aspects of it looked really cool. I looked at WFC, just multiple designs. I didn’t want to just cherry pick aspects of designs and stuff them all together, it was more so that I wanted to see what aspects of each design worked with what I was going for and what aspects all of them had that I wanted to implement here, how can I twist it so it still works while looking really cool”.

Reflection & The Future
Convoy: “Of the latest generation of Roformers, do you have any favourties?”

Robo: “I really love Transformers Shutdown. I love the aesthetic of that game a lot. Every character is just, the colours pop. All the designs, just the kibble and the alt modes, they’re all very recognisable. Sure the silhouettes don’t have as much individuality because of R15, yet somehow you can still tell them apart in spite of that. I like how clean all the details are, it’s not overdetailed. These look like action figures, I really like it. I like how he uses the original R15 body underneath, with the beveled meshes. You can look at that as being the skeleton and then the blockier shapes make up the armour, which looks really cool. The facial details, expressions and designs are really expressive and I like them a lot. Plus, Blaze in general has a lot of cool ideas. He’s not afraid of taking risks and doing something he likes regardless if people say it sucks, he’ll still go through with it. He sticks with his guns and that’s like the coolest idea ever. I did say that the colours popped and you can tell where his inspiration comes from. Like the lobby and how he calls his maps stages, that’s the coolest thing. His stuff is inspired by stuff like Tekken and Street Fighter, he isn’t just pulling from one continuity of Transformers, it’s everything he likes. The idea for the EX colours in DOTM came from Shutdown.

Also, Blaze did a game called Transformers Reloaded, it’s pretty cool. Because Reloaded isn’t as good as Shutdown I think, you can look at the two and really see how much he’s grown over time and how much his aesthetic has evolved. It’s really insane, you can compare it to seeing DOTM iterations. Shutdown, might just be my favourite outside of Sector 7 (TFP & DOTM). I can give a shout-out to Corekai’s Simulator, with all of those rigs and everything being toy accurate, that stuff is hard. You need like a degree in mechanical engineering to do that”.

Convoy: “Why do you think after all these years, Dark of the Moon is so popular nowadays?”

Robo: “I think the main reason is that there just isn’t as much competition being publicised that is fully working”

Convoy: “Not as polished?”

Convoy: “I think it’s because it’s a complete game. Other stuff, or what I mentioned earlier like Shutdown, not to throw shade - is a little unpolished or (In TFS’s place) incomplete”

Robo: “And Shutdown’s an Alpha build, fight?”

Convoy: “Shutdown is an alpha build, so the weapons don’t work on mobile, when most of the playerbase is mobile. Things like a game may lack mobile support or another one will have heavy lag that causes a phone to cook eggs. Even to an extent, TFP and DOTM have similar issues, it’s just that DOTM is a finished product. I playtested it, I tried to fix as many bugs as possible. Just that level of polish is the reason people are willing to come back to mediocre gameplay like DOTM.

I’m kidding, it’s not a bad game. It’s also because the roster is really big, bigger than it has any right to be. It has multiple maps, two of those have really good lighting and I went through the effort of making everything feel as smooth as possible with quality of life considerations and everything. Just stuff like that is why I think TFP & DOTM are really popular. It’s not any one of these factors, just all of them together. Other stuff has been popular before, or had strong bursts and still maintain dedicated communities. If people know how to publicize their stuff and work on it consistently with polished, working content, people are gonna love to come back to your game and play it. I’m praying for the day Shutdown becomes super popular, I want people to play that game. Favourite RoFormers aesthetic, tied with Battle for the Future” Convoy: “Speaking of the future, do you have any words about future projects you’d like to share?” Robo: “Do I have any words about future projects.. Hm. Let me think”

Convoy: “Granted, no one’s going to see this for months”

Robo: “There’s the big update I teased in Sector 7, but I don’t want to talk about it too much right now. That’s like, a remake of all the models and an overhauled weapons system. You’re not gonna feel the overhaul, since it’ll feel the same way as intended, but it’ll be easier to code. I’m moving everything to a new engine and it’s mostly aesthetic changes. A lot of the game design is going to be the same. Basically, that big overhaul is more akin to what people want, close to what people might actually want. It’s gonna blow people’s minds. There is the  REDACTED  project, that we can’t talk about”

“Am I omitting that?”

“Up to you”

“Wow, screw you”

Robo: “There have been a lot of things people have asked for which I’m against trying for the near future, but I have thought about them. I think if I got the support I need for it, I wouldn’t be opposed to trying it. Unfortunately, I am terrible at accepting support but just to list them. Juggernaut mode people have been talking about, something like MvM, people want that. It would be cool. Campaign mode, what do I have to say about campaign mode for DOTM? Well, there is an approach I could do for it, but it would make me look like an Attack On Titan fan. It’s called rewriting the entire story, which is hard. I don’t think I want to do that right now. But it would be cool to see. I think a lot of people would want the campaign to recreate movie scenes and I feel like that would be a good selling point, so I don’t think I would ever do it anytime soon, but if I were, I’d base set pieces on the movies and diverge the story. But we have talked about why campaign mode is so hard, so let’s just put that on the backburner”

Convoy: “It’s a curse”

Robo: “I’ve seen it work in other games before, like Super Paper Roblox or uhh.wav, those two games have opened my eye that a campaign mode could work and I want to see it done on a RoFormers game, unfortunately I’m too lazy to do it. If one day I got the support that I need, sure. A lot of this is stuff I don’t want to say no to, but don’t want to say yes either. Heat-seeking weapons wouldn't work with the engine but I could eventually try to make a whole new system that works with it. Hard to implement though. More characters I’ve also already addressed.

Some of it is proactive and stuff I want, but some of it is reactive because I look at what other people want too”

Convoy: “The last question is, do you have any words for the next generation of developers?”

Robo: “My main thing is don’t be afraid of getting out of your comfort zone. It’ll be hard, but learn to try new things. Some of it might be frustrating, but you never know, you might bump into something you end up really liking. The more new things you try, the more a-ha moments you’re gonna have when you make something really cool that you’ve never done before. You don’t even have to be breaking ground relative to the community, you just have to be breaking ground for what you are capable of and that alone, is really special. Live and learn”

Robo: “Is the interview over? Because now I have one interview question for you”

Convoy: “Oh god, okay”

Robo: “The question is, when are you going to fix the bot in Sector 7 that keeps muting people?” End.