Hey everyone welcome to the Prego Wars shareholder meetup of September, I'm only... two weeks late! No big deal!
WHY SO LATE??
Long story short I worked at my actual job for a good portion of this month with a pretty intense deadline to hit. We somehow made it happen, 1AM in the morning and everyone dying inside. Really fun stuff. Anyways I'm back in action now and am ready to work on the game again. HECK yeah brothers.
The Big M
Multiplayer is now in the game and it now works (mostly). Absolute hell on earth to implement, and looking back I have no idea why I didn't just suck it up and buy/learn a proper networking library, it’dve saved me a ton of time and headache. But now, we've got Steam lobbies, networking, and a good bit of the game sync'ed up! And it's (in theory) really high performance and will work on much slower connections because I actually put some work into making sure packets are nice and TEENY!
The hardest part of this whole process was much less getting the gameplay sync'd up, but it was actually getting everyone connected and the match STARTED that was the hardest part. I never thought about how this system would work until now, and it had to be flexible enough to work for both offline and online matches, so training mode and everything else.
I think I've got a decent system in place now, though, and it's... decently future proof. We'll see how well that ages a few months down the line LOL.
Proof of Fun'ness
Playing the game with real people is a completely different experience than hitting dummies that stand there and don't move or fight back. This game is going to be fun as hell. But it absolutely needs TONS of balance changes. For example, I thought I picked a pretty good melee weapon range for Salty, and it is when they're standing perfectly still, but when the target is strafing all over the place and moving at mach-10 you can BARELY hit them. I'm really glad I did multiplayer sooner than later because it's clear that balancing decisions need to be made and tested with real people instead of punching bags.
fast paced action, maybe I should update the store page with some of this
Other stuff
I did some other stuff this month and started to pin down my workflow for short-form content, but it's still early days with that. It feels like I'm selling out or being cringe every time I try to make a TikTok or Reel. They pull views and likes though so I've gotta push on with that.
End + Video
We're already halfway through the month and I haven't gotten to work on the game at all yet besides fixing bugs, so temper your expectations. I'm gonna be working like a madman to add multiplayer to the map editor, get my company started so I can pay REAL PEOPLE AND NOT AI, and get the boys started on some concept art and map design. We don't have a concrete 3D visual style yet, and I'm hoping to get that nailed down in the coming month or so.
Check out my video where I basically go over all this, as well as show some REAL GAMEPLAY and a bunch of other cool technical stuff!:
View game page
Follow Development
Join the Discord Server for progress updates, community, maybe drop your ideas, and participate in the weekly brick throwing competition!
Subscribe on YouTube, I post shorts and my monthly devlog vid.
I'm on TikTok now too but am still completely clueless how it works
Love you guys, peace ːspyroː