New Beginnings

Hey, I'm back! I spent the last week or so thinking about the game and decided that my time would be better spent on the gameplay than the networking. To explain, I spent hours working on routine networking issues, but I knew I wasn't learning much. When working on Zenith I had to solve tons of Unity networking issues and I knew that the same problems just had different solutions in Unreal. I wanted to use this project as a chance to actually iterate on gameplay in Unreal and develop my skills. So I made an executive decision and purchased the Multiplayer FPS Template from STUMP Games.

The template was pretty straightforward to use, but it did mean making a new Unreal project and starting from scratch. However, it's so fully featured out of the box that I feel like this was the right choice. On the first day I had a fully networked battle royale with the Stage Rush Phase System on top of it.

I also realized I never explained the phases of the game, so here we go.

• Combat is the first phase, which functions like a typical battle royale. Players fight and kill each other.
• Stage Rush is the second phase, when a stage pops up somewhere on the map and everyone has to rush towards it and climb on. The area around the stage is a safe zone, meaning that combat is disabled and players inside take no damage.
• Rhythm is next. This is a DDR-style rhythm game, needs a lot of prototyping. How well you do at the rhythm game determines what your reward (if any) is. If you do poorly enough I may even make you take damage.
• Resolve is last. In the Resolve phase, everyone gets their rewards/buffs/debuffs/other results of the rhythm game, and the playing field is reset. This will also require some prototyping.

The game loops through these 4 stages repeatedly. Right now, I have the server informing all clients of the current stage (for demonstration purposes, each phase only lasts about 5 seconds in the video; in the real game they will be much longer).

Next task for me will probably be to set up the stage system, we'll see!