Bot Battle Mode is here!  

Thank you to everyone who has played the game so far. The feedback I`ve received is great and people seem to enjoy the game, and that`s the most important thing for me.

Combat Beans has been live for a month now, and since release I`ve been working through the roadmap as well as taking on board feedback from the community.

One of the most common requests was to include a game mode against bots, so that people can jump on and play properly even when nobody is online. Originally, I never planned to add bots (or any major single player mode) to the game, but soon after launch I realised that there are a few hours each day where nobody is online. In those cases, it`s unfair for people who bought the game being unable to experience the game properly. So, I decided to add bots to the game, as well as a new game mode.

You can play against up to 12 bots (I find playing with more bots to be more fun) in a mode where first to get to the kill limit wins the round. Round kill limits can be selected from 10 – 100, and you can also select the difficulty of the bots as well as what weapons they will use.

As I never did AI before my technical knowledge is quite basic, but I tried to make the bots play like real players as best as I could. They jump and slide around and will melee you if you get too close, though they generally prefer to keep at range if they can. There are still times when they can be a bit derpy, but overall if you`re playing against 12 bots, there`s so much chaos all around that it`s very hard to tell. Over time, I will keep updating the AI behaviour. 

There is one problem I need to fix regarding the Bot Battle Mode, and that is the EXP gained during this mode isn’t being sent back to the playfab servers where all the player data is being stored, because that Bot Battle game mode isn’t being run on an online server on playfab. So, what I need to do is decide to have the EXP and level stored locally on your machine (a bad idea for a number of reasons) or switch to using the steam cloud storage for all the stats. Steam cloud is a much better solution for sure but will take some time for me to set up properly and debug everything.  

Another request I need to take into consideration is to add a feature so that players can host their own public / private sessions. Right now, I`m using playfabs servers to hot games dynamically, where I can easily add or remove servers whenever I need to. In the future, I think it would be great for players to host their own, so I will begin taking a look at the work required to make that happen.

Over the coming weeks I will keep working through the original planned roadmap, like adding power-ups and team death match, As well as any bug fixing if required. Thank you again for playing the game. Please join the discord if you want, and be part of the growing community. 

  https://discord.gg/6vcRDyfVzr