Late update, but an important one.
1. News are… interesting on the Online Multiplayer side. After much experimentation the contractor and I agreed that the approach we took for MC2 was just not the right way to go. Basically, the way we are doing things we cannot avoid strange synchronising teleportations all over the place, which make the game feel wrong. He is now busy building the UI and logic around online just so his side of the bargain is completed as we had planned, but, as things are, online is practically unplayable.
With all this said, we talked about a possible alternative way of approaching the online development where we would avoid this problem with collisions at the cost of some input lag. The contractor has agreed to try this approach and see if it makes the game better. This should happen shortly. We’ll see.
I must add, should this new attempt fail I WILL shutter online development entirely and work on finishing MC2 as a local multiplayer experience. Nobody is more sorry about this than I am, but I simply don’t have the budget to attempt such a lofty goal. I never thought that collisions would be such a difficult thing to deal with, but, if you think for a bit, you’ll notice that there aren’t very many online games where non-lethal collisions between players occur regularly and are as central to gameplay as they are in MC2.
I’ll keep you posted.
2. Not huge news on the PR side, primarily because I have very little to update about MC2… Last weekend I participated in a Game Jam, and I came up with a neat little game called AlterWare Tactics, which I spent some time polishing and I released online. I’m personally in love with it, and at home we play it regularly, for great fun. Our neighbours love it too. Here’s a video of us playing together:
You can download it for free here:
http://www.inprincipleinc.com/downloads/InPrincipleGames_AlterWareTactics.zip
Play it, you won’t regret it.
3. I’ve managed to fix the logic flow of Soccer Mode based on the fact that the invasive online code affects all modes. Soccer now works flawlessly again.
That will be all for this week. Sorry about the bad news online-wise.
Thanks.
– Mike