Being able to develop only after work or in the weekends, managing an healthy ratio with life/sleep is very hard.
Regardlessly, I've refined so many things in the last couple of weeks that I'm impressed of how I'm keeping any semblance of mental health.
Below you can see an initial stage of network play and characters customization being shown in all its glory :
Needless to say, I had to rework my own physics controller, mostly based upon Corgi Engine if anyone knows it, in order to make the feeling snappy and valid for a platformer made in Unity.
Networking has been another pain, I moved between different APIs until settling on Mirror and falling in love with it.
Right now everything is transmitted via UDP, with smoothing and prediction in place.
Cheating wise everything is mostly server authoritative, although I've left a few things client authoritative, in a way to prevent hacks while online. Honestly I expect people to play with friends and not get into that. I hope.
All the local information is encrypted, with somewhat a punishment for whoever tries to fiddle with local gamedata. Or if it gets corrupted. I need to get into Steamworks as soon as possible and get Cloud Saving in place.
That said, I received a good amount of feedback from the people who tested it. Special thanks to Mr Banana and PiratoPotato.
Roadmap for the next patch :
- More Tilemaps and adding variety to the existing one
- Animations for the main player
- Particles when moving around
- Monsters with at least a basic AI
- More definition over character classes' skills
I'll spend some time on Aseprite basically.
And that's all for now, hope my first article made you interested in my loving design :)
See ya!