#networked games

Well it’s about that time. After pumping out a few game prototypes, it’s time to take some of them a bit further. One that I’ll be working on over the next couple of weeks is this game. It’s come pretty far since I made that post, but there’s still a lot of work to be done on it.

So far, I’ve made a “complete”, if lacking, experience. The game starts and ends and has a story arc. Something that I want to refine about that, though, is its pacing. The game’s climax comes way too quick, quicker than the player has a chance to get attached to the affected parts of the game, and the ending leaves the second player totally uninvolved. The latter was an artistic choice I now regret. The way I’ll be approaching solving this is creating another level before the game’s climax. I’ll also totally redesign/extend the game’s ending so that the second player can get involved in the largely first-player-centric ending.

Another tweak I need to make is balancing. The first player tends to finish their level long after the second player finishes theirs. This is difficult to balance because of the extreme asymmetry in gameplay between the two players, but I have some solutions in mind.

I also need to polish the game’s visuals. The game’s art style is less than coherent and not very attractive or stylized. I’ve never made 2D game art that wasn’t pixel art, so this is just something I need to practice. I don’t expect it to come out looking gorgeous, but refinement is needed, even if it just benefits my own skill more than the game itself.

This is an untitled networked game I made. Very rough, no actual graphics that aren’t generated by code (I made this in Processing 3). The host (right) guides the client (left) through a world they are only shown for a few seconds each turn. The difficult part for the host, however, is that the map view changes slightly each turn, but the actual map does not.

For the player, landing on the black means death, while the green is safe. Gold is the key needed to win the game, which is accomplished by reaching the blue at the top of the screen. Throughout the game, the host’s view of the map covers some of the previously black tiles with a green tile, forcing both the host and the client players to rely on memory as well as the other player’s judgement to win the game. If you can’t reach the end by turn limit, that is loss. Death is simply a metric to measure your performance.

I’m not particularly proud of the design, because I regrettably put off the design of it until the day it was due (it was a class project). So the design wasn’t really something I was passionate about or really felt great about, and code-wise it was more complex than anything I’ve managed to program in just a week.