Development has ramped up a little over the Christmas break and I was able to slip in time to add music, sound effects, and a little bit of juice. Altogether they have made a big difference in the experience; so much so that I'm finally able to share with people what I want the game to be like.
In the video you can see myself and five bot players going at it. There are four different player classes you can choose from (which I explain in previous posts) and each has a primary attack and special ability. Not shown is the ability to change which class you play when you die before you respawn. The bot players work off "Behavior trees" which I designed, and to avoid too much clumping of players around the ball they also respect "home zones" where they idle if other teammates are in control of the ball under certain conditions.
I would have preferred to make a video demonstrating the online play, but I"m not quite there yet. As you can see from the local multiplayer action, the game often has to deal with split-second movements. This makes me concerned about online games because of latency; if you have two players fighting for the ball, there can easily be jitter and rubberbanding that ruin the experience.
Intro Sequence
I also finally recorded the main menu intro. I know a prototype doesn't need one, but I wanted to immerse players into the game right from the beginning. We shouldn't underestimate the importance of the very first thing that a player sees when they launch a game.
In this intro the players just kick the ball around until the camera goes to the main menu area.
Project development
I haven't touched on this in a while, so I'd like to rehash how the development is done for first-time readers:
I'm the only developer on this project, and I aim to have a prototype of it released in January 2017 to itch.io, Greenlight Concepts and possibly other places for the purpose of determining whether I should collaborate with another studio to really finish the project.
I started working on this in October and have only put in a few hours a day (at the most) here and there. The reason the project is so far along is because of the third-party Unity assets I used in its development:
- Photon networking
- Medieval character assets
- Medieval town art assets
- TextMesh Pro
- FX Quest
- Behavior designer (for bot players)
- (Art from Turbosquid)
- (Music and sound effects from Audiojungle)
What's left to do?
I'm currently knocking out some bugs in preparation for network testing which should be happening within days (unless I decide to put it off until early January to relax for Christmas, which is likely). After network testing passes, I just need to add the End of Round sequence where the winning team celebrates, then get more game art and videos ready to distribute along with a plan on how to announce the prototype, and then I can release it.
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