Hey everyone! It's been a while since I've posted on the devlog, so here's an update
Throughout the week, we've been working on building and playtesting various parts of the game - attempting to bifurcate the process if you will. On Friday of last week, we managed to playtest the social meta-game that JC's been building, and that went pretty dang well! We gained a lot of interesting feedback, some of it pertaining to the tone of the messages that people would say, and how people reacted within the game to form social interactions that were either uncomfortable or hilarious.
While JC's been working on that and the 3d unity build (which we're still editing the concept of), I've been working on a particular unity build that's all centered around how to manage a mech, mostly via numbers and different ways of pressing a subset of keys.
The system itself isn't super complicated, and the player interacts with the mech solely through Q, W, E, R and the numpad, but the complicated portion is making sure that you piloting the mech itself doesn't feel aimless. Feeling pointless would be interesting, as that's one of the major concept's we've been playing with in our own playtests, but in this case, I want there to be a solid goal for the player to work towards. Just as a note, the images that I'm using here are just some picrews that I happened to have saved on my computer for generating OC's for other tabletop games, or just messing around. The final images that I hope to use will be of mice that I drew, and ideally they would change with the state of the players.
Players? Yeah! Once the project is minimally functional - in that a player can interact with the mech interface but not have it be so pretty that it makes it complicated - I'm going to be working on the central tenet of the base digital game: multiplayer! So far, I took one look at how unity used to handle multiplayer, said "That's not so bad" and then proceeded to figure out that they had completely abandoned that as of 2018-2019 (I'm pretty sure). Instead, they've shifted into a system that's called MLAPI, which was... so intimidating (and my part of the project so barebones and incomplete) that I just kind of, stopped. At least, I've stopped for now. Once I'm able to make this single player host version, making a client version should be relatively trivial, because I can just change some of the names and messages around. Then it's all MLAPI stuff, all the way till the end
The thing is, my build is actually just a giant test in the first place. We don't actually want this to be the game almost at all - managing meters, yes, but the idea that it would all happen through UI is somewhat of a personal project for me, almost completely separate from this project. The main thing that this is testing (which might seem like a question with an obvious answer) is "Is it fun to pilot a mech?" - our question is "Is it fun to pilot a mech in a way that's similar to this, but platforming?" The other concept this is testing is our ability to use MLAPI to make a multiplayer game in the first place - and would that game be fun.
Anyways, that's all from me for today. We'll add some of our more interesting notes from playtesting in the future.
As always, thanks for reading. Robin, signing out.