Welcome to another State of the Game! This week I have been focused on the pre-game lobby system. This is designed to help people stay playing together once they have a game going, allow people to have more strategic battles with allowing them to properly establish teams, and make it a little easier for people running ‘headless’ servers, or servers without a UI.
So how am I doing that?
The first step is to make the lobby not just a menu. I took some inspiration from some other games and will be bringing the garage to the lobby! Now, this is not the FULL garage, as I don’t want people to hold up games while they tinker with their builds. I do want you to have access to your saved builds though. In my playtime, I noticed it is very common practice to leave a game, switch builds, and join back up. This is a very poor way of handling it, so the ability to load builds while you wait to launch should help keep groups together.
Next up is a clear communication of teams and the ability to switch teams. In the new lobby, there will be a clear ‘Waiting for Players’ phase, in which there is group chat and you can switch teams as many times as you want. After a certain time, it will move to a ‘Ready Up Phase’, in which you are in team chat only, can see your team mates MAV’s and you can change out your MAV. You CANNOT switch teams in this phase and the game will be locked to new players. Anyone that joins the game after this phase will join as a spectator.
After the game, you will be show a new after action report, which will be my task for next week.
As always, you can follow my development in real time on twitter and facebook, and let your ideas be heard, or start up a thread on the message board. See you next week!