Game Design: A Journey From the Ground Up

4r Da Sqaw

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/veakxp/tri-wing-a-real-time-action-grid-based-card-game

GUESS WHO’S BACK!!! OK, so I’ll spare you the details of all of my personal stuff for now. Maybe one day I’ll fill the gap. For now, all you need to know is that my game is in a SEMI-playable state, and I’ve begun taking feedback and input from people for a Kickstarter in August. There is a lot more detail on Reddit (I’ll ink it below). Even more progress has been made since the time of this recording, so please join the discussion and share this with friends!

If you watched this, I love you

OK guys, so I know it's been a minute since I've given you some form of update, but life caught up with me again. Finals took most of my time from me and I also got a new job and a girlfriend. I've also been working out more and doing rock climbing on my free time instead of coding. I'm getting back into things soon, but I've recently applied for a few internships and I need to spend the next couple of weeks brushing up on my coding knowledge to make sure I'm mentally prepared for any interviews that might head my way. I think I'll be coding again towards the end of the month as school starts up, and he first things I will be attending to will be restructuring my code and adding comments in the event that I get busy with life again. Rookie mistake, but being away from my game for so long without leaving comments set me back further than I had anticipated haha. After that will come bug fixes, then I start adding cards and some art for an alpha test. Thank you all for your support and patience. -Vince

So I've been super busy with school and work, so I've had very little time to actually work on Tri-Wing lately. It's that time of the years where midterms are sucking all of the time out of my hands, so I'm doing what I gotta do haha. Hopefully around mid-November I'll have some time to work as well as an announcement I would like to get across at that point. Until then guys, I'll try my best to get back to work!

So I’ll post an update about TW later, but for now here’s a doodle I started in Government class haha. I’ve started using Photoshop now in preparation for a future project (that will not be announced for awhile). Anyways, school has kept me kind of busy (even though I still doodle), but I’ve been working on stuff so stayed tuned!

Holy fucking shit. YES.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLyRRbtdUY0) Sorry it’s been awhile since the last update! I’ve been busy with school haha

Speaking of Megaman, I actually played some Battle Network 6 with my buddy today. We grabbed our GBAs and played a good 5-6 sets, and I forgot how much I loved it. I forgot how crazy the dynamics were and how fun it was just to shout some stupid stuff at my opponent cuz we were having a good time. It made me reflect really hard on Tri-Wing, because my original purpose was to capture that essence. Tri-Wing won’t have super big lobbies. Tri-Wing won’t have super complex matchmaking systems or anything like that. The most important part of Tri-Wing that I will try my best to create is the gameplay, because I want people to enjoy that the most. I have to accept the fact that I am still just a new guy in game development with no real training and that of all projects, my first one will not be perfect, and that’s ok. It doesn’t mean that I won’t try my very best into making it the best game I can, and you can bet that I will. I don’t ever see myself not improving on this game as I grow older, because I want to see this game evolve with my skills as a game developer. I hope you guys will understand that, and I thank you all for the support. The card system is coming up next.

I have exams for the next week and a half, so I can’t work on this as much as I would hope. This workaround will have to suffice for now, because I’m tired of not making progress. I hope this is the only time where I’ll have to do this, but I MUST move on. If the demand for the lobby system grows high enough, I’ll try to update the game ASAP.

HOLY SHIT, this lobby is frustrating me. I managed to get some work done on it, and quite a bit is finished. In fact, its semi-playable now...sorta. There are some strange bugs that shut down my lobby and forces me to quit the game every so often, and I have no clue why. On top of that, the code itself looks like a mess. Imagine a boat made out of mismatching wood used to patch a bunch of holes in order to stay afloat. That's basically what my code looks like right now. It literally randomly started working on me when I was expecting it to crash, and I have no clue how. Sure I could keep working on it now and attempt to carry on with what I have, but something tells me that I'm going to regret it in the long run. I'm actually really unsure with what I should do right now. Earlier this week, the NetworkLobbyManager object I was testing never worked, so I went about this workaround. It's looking so sketchy that I want to scrap it, but reworking the whole network is a hassle. I could always try to improve on my existing code, but anything could go wrong with it at this point (thank you, backups). I'm really at a loss, right now. I think I'm going to go back and do some more tests with that old NetworkLobbyManager. I'll review my existing code tomorrow after sleep. This whole thing is making me anxious. I've never had this much trouble before when coding, and it's becoming a nightmare. I can't wait to figure of a solution

In the last few days, my views on multiplayer and lobbies have shifted all over the place due to potential options, features, and setbacks. Today I have a new proposal. Before I begin, allow me to say that my handwriting is AWFUL on touch screens. Please don’t judge haha. So the main reason I chose UNET as my networking solution is due to its simplicity. One of the biggest problem that I’ve encountered with that is the lack of options that are available in this early state. For instance, I am having a hard time setting up a dedicated or master server of sorts. The reason I want this is to promote more gameplay among players with less hassle! I don’t want players having to share IPs with EVERY opponent. That’s just annoying. I’ve considered going back to Forge Networking (as pictured above), as it has a lot of what I’m looking for. I just don’t want to have to re-code a lot of my shit, because that will include some major setbacks. The lack of a server browser is really discouraging though. We’ll have to see. I’ve posted some questions on the Unity forum, and if things don’t work out by Thursday, I’ll give Forge another try now that I understand some basic networking concepts.