Whats Happening#

So in my last post a couple months ago, I began work on a party game which would play similarly to Mario Party or Pummel Party. The players would attempt to go around a gameboard to complete an objective while doing minigames to progress further. I have halted development for now while I work on smaller projects.

The Issues#

A few problems started to appear a few weeks into development which caused the game to become cumbersome to manage and caused issues when developing each minigame. This I later marked up to be due to making the major networking components not scale to the project’s needs. While the current implementation would be usable for a game like an FPS, which has a far simpler gameplay loop. But this game I was making is far more complex, with gameplay varying significantly different between minigames.

The goals of each minigame: A.) Make them completable in less than a minute. B.) Each minigame to be unique from previous minigames

These would give the players a far more varied experience when playing. Which in turn makes the game more fun to play. And in the event players don’t like a particular minigame, it should be short enough to cause as little pain to the player as possible.

While following these goals was simple enough, making unique minigames is a challenge as it requires a lot of work, as most games won’t share the same code or even art at times. While this is a challenge already, the problem got made worse by the code they did share: the networking components. The code was not designed well enough to scale with each additional minigame. This meant I was rewriting parts of my networking scripts for each minigame. This also came with the possibility of causing later problems for previous minigames as the code may not function as previously intended and/or cause errors.

The Solution#

In the end, due to the networking scripts not scaling well enough with the project, they would require a rewrite. And as the issue is with a fundamental part of the project. This would then require a large portion of the code base to be rewritten. Due to this, I have decided to put it on hold and work on some smaller projects instead.