https://youtu.be/o17JEpzcQuE
Multiplayer has been central to our idea of WolfQuest from the very beginning. In the early days, we only managed to make a basic “hunt and explore” mode for multiplayer, but we began to rectify that in WQ 2.7, with a multiplayer version of the complete Slough Creek mission arc, along with secondary features like friends lists and packs. WolfQuest 3 and Tower Fall will carry this effort further, in two ways: Improving core multiplayer functionality and adding new modes. Pack vs. pack will a new multiplayer mode in Tower Fall. (Why not in Slough Creek? Honestly, wolves with younger pups just don’t have time for much pack vs. pack competition). We also have some ideas for other modes that could offer more gameplay variety while still representing wolf life accurately, and we hope to investigate those more after releasing Tower Fall.
But our first task is to improve the core functionality for all modes of multiplayer games. We’re rebuilding the multiplayer system from scratch for WolfQuest 3, so we shouldn’t have any of the old bugs that occur in the current game. (New bugs? Sure!) We’ve already got some nice improvements in mind, such as:
* Players can write a short bio of their wolf, which other players can see (along with that wolf’s stats) in the Pack Stats panel.
* The multiplayer lobby will show more information about each game, including difficulty, the current mission, and latency.
* The Chat panel will be collapsible (so you can hide all but the title bar) and draggable, so you can place it where you like onscreen.
* Players can chat with a single other player in the game by typing /wolfname before the message, so only that player sees the text.
* Eventually, when we have pack vs. pack mode, the Chat panel will have two tabs: Your Pack and Everyone (perhaps with text coloring to differentiate between your pack and others in the “Everyone” tab).
But we know that there are more ways that we can improve multiplayer. So we’d like to hear your ideas for how to improve the core multiplayer experience. What could we do to make it more usable, more interesting, and more fun? What kinds of multiplayer functionality have you seen in other games that we should add to WolfQuest? Post your ideas below!