World Showcase and first demo!

Hi again! 

We made some progress on our project to show to you all. The code words are World Showcase. 

Concept Art

The first thing you can see on this post (and also in the cover image of it) is... some sort of concept art for the game (none of us are artists so it's just a general idea that we made), where we picture how the final game will play out. You can see the layout of a map, some enemies and a few positions they might take. Following this, we started recreating the map on the engine itself and expanding it a bit, which you can see below!

The Lobby

We put our hands on the lobby colors to greet the players with the atmosphere of the game. Don't mind the peachy orange, that's only a placeholder so the main menu is more visible. Changes on the upper layers are yet to be done.

Into the Map

That's how the game starts. Pretty neat, huh?  In a two-players scenario the player that hosts the game (A) is spawned on the left side of the map and the guest player (B) is spawned on the right. The map was crafted to be symmetric, so player B's screen is a mirrored version of the picture above. 

There's collision! The map has borders that contain the player, below there's the full map with the polygons that establish such rules. The crosses mark the spawn sectors that take into consideration the two-payer scenario.

Into the Gameplay

So far we've only covered the visual aspects of the game. There are two main mechanics that have been built into the character.

Shooting

The player movement is controlled by the WASD keys and the mouse is in charge to pivot a weapon carried by the player at all times. The left click on the mouse makes the player fire bullets into the direction the mouse is facing. The collisions of the map don't apply to the bullets since they are defined as an area, so for the moment they just cut through everything and head straight into infinity and beyond. The mouse action is restricted by the authority of the current window, however that is not implemented for the weapon pivoting. Each client sees all the weapons follow their mouse, but the change stays on the client and is not broadcasted.

Dash

By pressing the space bar while moving the character can move forward more pixels than usual. They are not limit enforced at the moment so the player can make infinite use of the feature, however it is planned to incorporated such mechanic into the attacks logic.  Sorry mates, no fancy gif for this one.

Small demo build available!

However, if you'd like to try all this for yourself, you can download the build right now! The link will be down below. You need two players to start the game, so you have to have two windows of the game open to make a local server (the IP you can connect is localhost by default, so it connects with your own computer, however if you'd like to setup a local network with a friend it should work too). After that, choose a role for each "player" and click the "Ready" button. Remember that you can move your character with the WASD keys, point and shoot with your mouse and dash with the spacebar.

And that's all we've got for today! We're hoping that for the next devlog the first enemies are implemented,  along with a basic switching mechanic that we'll expand as time goes on :)

Stay tuned and see you around folk.

-Solarflare Fire