What a week. It can be said, one does not simply ‘Add multiplayer’ to a game. I am very happy I started working on the networking now as opposed to later though. The amount of ‘single-player-only’ code I had already written is quite staggering.
Lucky for me, Unity does take a lot of the pain away from networking (once you wrap your head around how they want you to do it). It still requires an immense amount of testing though. Sadly, the laptop I was using as my second player, completely died on me so I am reduced to playing 3 instances on 1 machine.
So, to the nitty gritty:
I have a semi functional multiplayer game now! You can grab the build and join the ‘official’ tester thread here on the forums. If you haven’t signed up yet, I would hope you can take the time to as I will start using the forums to get together certain feature testing. There are a lot of great threads there talking about game play ideas, and it’s a great way to report bugs as well.
So, you may be asking what ‘semi-functional’ means. Well, the game is playable, but there are still quite a few serious bugs and quite a bit of things that are completely untested. That why the multiplayer build is only available on the forums as well (the single player was completely removed for this build).
I will be spending the next week in hardcore bug fixing mode. There more coverage and bug reports I get the better, so remember to comment in the forums, please.
I have some new UI artwork coming in as well. I will post it up on Saturday for the Screen shot Saturday post. It feels nice to finally be able to start putting stuff out again.
I want to apologize for my lack of updates. These past few weeks have been pretty crazy for me and I let myself fall into seclusion while I worked on the networking. I will try to not let that happen again.