Hey everyone!
Coming out of the developer cave for a bit to give you guys an update on where we're at.
So... Online Multiplayer is surprisingly difficult to do!
Those of you who've followed us for a while know that online multiplayer is the main thing missing for us to do a full release - we want you to be able to play Block_Up with your friends regardless of whether they're sitting with you on the couch or if they're on the other side of the world!
Block_Up started as a game jam project, and the original code ran on the programming equivalent of duct-tape and hope. As we continued development on it, it grew organically into a chaotic - but functional! - mess. Think of a charming, blocky little robot with terrible cable management, where the leg joints are for some reason connected to the eye sensors - that was Block_Up. Changing anything came at a pretty big risk of things breaking - I distinctly remember one day, trying to change jumping mechanics and it destroyed the UI for no discernable reason. That's not something that should happen.
The amount of changes needed to add online multiplayer would've broken everything. Easier to just throw the old code out and start from scratch.
So we did!
So where are we at now?
The game mechanics themselves, as well as most of the visuals, are almost fully ported over! And the rewrite even allowed us to update a couple things to make them smoother!
Here's pic taken from our current version:
The Blocklets currently have placeholder visuals and are waiting for their fancy new animations. Portals have a snazzy new look, and the ice block is looking pretty cool! Any ideas on what exactly its mechanics are?
We've still got a long way to go - UI, control rebinding, lobbies... all the vital things which will ideally be practically unnoticable in the final game.
This is taking too long, I want to play the game now!
We get ya - we want you to play the game too! We've set the original game as the Demo with a selection of levels. Feel free to show your friends and try speedrun them (and share your times on our Discord server)!
Thank you for following us as we make our little block game. We'll try and keep you updated a bit more frequently from now. We have plans! They'll all just take a little time...