Over the past 2 weeks I have been working primarily on Leaderboards with some investigation into Skins.
On the Rivalry Beta you will now notice that there is a new “Rank” UI that is a fairly barebones leaderboard containing a Scrollable list of player names and scores. (These players are merely there as an example to test the feature).
There have also been a few changes to the UI layout including an extra network menu option allowing you to choose between the networking and ranking feature. Some menu names have also been changed to aid in the consistency of the UI.
I have also added some new commands to the network protocol that can add and request scores from a set on a database. With this whenever someone wins a game their score can be incremented on the database and then retrieved by others when the ranks are displayed. However in its current state I have not yet wired up the client with the server.
Currently peoples scores are simply judged on how many players they have killed. This can be gamed with people kill farming accounts they have control over. I have experimented with algorithms that scale against the player you are fighting and will discourage killing the same person over and over again. This I must put more thought into and would definitely welcome suggestions on improvements.
I have also looked at how to effectively add skins into Rivalry and have started working on replacing the current player sprite in the choose weapons screen with an actual player.
Pending tasks are now
- Chat System (Keeping in theme with the game).
- Leaderboard (I need to think of an algorithm that can't be exploited).
- Complete network game lobby UI (make pretty and complete all network game modes).
- Complete network game restart UI (make pretty).
- Research player skins.
- Research different arenas and backgrounds.
- General bug fixing, tidy up and enhancement of look and feel..
I also had a little experiment :)