A few days early, but I wanted to get an update on the progress of this game out now since so much has happened in that area over the past month.
January was a very heavy development period for Frenzy, in fact it may have been one of the most productive periods in the game's history which now spans about a year and a half. The single player arcade mode was fully hammered out and completed, with all content and levels present. This process led to a vast number of improvements in the enemy AI, physics, GUI, and structure of the game. The GUI has been switched from the clunky GLUI library to now use the much nicer AntTweakBar, which allowed me to very easily add a variety of new items, including the in-game map editor which is now completed other than adding in the planned asset manager. it is very easy to make custom maps for Frenzy, and soon it will be very easy to add your own custom content for maps using Blender and our tools.
A big area of focus was also in the multiplayer netcode, and many issues were worked out and now I'm happy to report that the servers work both on remote and LAN connections. A good bit of things got streamlined and refactored code-wise to keep it simple and organized. With that focus in mind, I also added the ability to choose different player skins as show here:
Players can also still customize their eye, fin, and belly colors with each of these new skins.
I also began to formulate some different game modes/rules, with an emphasis on multiplayer. A form of "deathmatch" common to Arena FPS games has been devised called LifeEater. The rules are changed in that scoring is based on how many other fish you kill, and that eating meat regenerates your health. The weapons and powerups remain the same as in Arcade mode. There will also be a team version of this mode, with up to three teams.
More big news is that Steamworks is now fully integrated in the game, and you can access the leaderboards from the game, as well as upload to the Workshop your map creations. I will be adding over 50 achievements over the coming months.
VR support will begin this month, and the Android version is partially completed. Everything is on schedule for the June initial release, which I'm starting to lean on as being an Early Access release, and then releasing the full version which will contain two more Arcade mode episodes, four more player skins, and quite a few more goodies.