Heya, this week marks the final stretch of development, with the focus on completing the core mechanics for the Leader role in our multiplayer heist game. The goal was to wrap up functionality, polish interactions, and squash bugs. Here's what was achieved.
The Leader’s main objective is now fully implemented. Player controlling the Leader must infiltrate the manager’s cabin and locate a randomly generated 4-digit vault password (between 1000–9999). This password is cleverly hidden inside one of the pen stands in the office. Once found, players must interact with the Manager’s PC to input the code and unlock the bank vault. The player can interact with the pen stand , the drawer and the managers PC in the cabin and the way the player knows the object is interactable is that i kept a "Interact UI" canvas in the World Space so when the player comes near to the interactable object the "Interact UI "pops up.
A new feature called the “BankMap” has been added to the Manager’s PC. Viewing it not only shows the layout of the bank but also activates a dynamic UI target arrow, pointing toward the next objective or escape route—crucial for time-sensitive heists. This improves player navigation and adds clarity to the game’s objectives. The arrows UI will only be available after the Leader puts the gold in the cart and the UI arrows will pop up showing the direction to the vent which will be our escape route and only if the player presses the "Bank Map" Button on the Managers UI else the arrows indicating the escape route wont show stating that the leader did not see the Bank Map and does not have the escape routes memorised . I acheived this by using Coroutine to enable this after around 1.5 seconds of Leader putting the gold in the cart.
Basic UI systems are now in place. When the player approaches an interactable object, a contextual popup appears showing the required input (e.g., “Press P to Pick Gold Bar”). This simple but essential feature boosts the game’s usability and player feedback. Also makes it easier for the player without the player to memorise all the key inputs to do the basic tasks.
After opening the vault, the Leader’s next task is to pick up gold bars and drop them into a cart. The Leader also has to push the cart full of Gold Bar towards the exit route, once the loot is secured, the target arrow dynamically updates, guiding players toward the air vent escape route—a stealthy exit that complements the game's tension.
This video sums up everything that i said till now all the Leaders tasks and Interact UI and collecting Gold and pushing cart the dynamic updates of the arrow towards the Target (Escape Route).
A laser-based alarm system has been added to protect high-security areas. Touching a laser triggers an alert and results in being caught. To deal with this, in this case the LockPicker comes in , his task is to disable the Laser system and to go past through the Laser Security System without being caught , he has access to a lockpick smoke grenade ability. When used, it disables the laser temporarily , i created the smoke effect using the ParticleSystem and during the same duration disable the lasers, offering a narrow window to sneak past. This adds a tactical layer to gameplay, where timing and planning are key. The number of Smoke Grenades are limited, and i am using throwing animation to make it seem like the player is throwing something, then applying force on the Smoke Grenade using linearVelocity component from RigidBody so as to apply throwing physics. The animation though looks a bit weird i used animations from Mixamo and they werent as smooth as i thought maybe it was because i did not get the perfect animation that i was looking for, but they work neverthless and give the player a gist as to what is happening in the animation.
With all major mechanics in place, the final development phase has focused on:
Bug fixing and smoothing out transitions
UI polish and visual feedback improvements
Minor additions and tweaks based on playtesting.
Adding Sound effects so as to add realism and tension in the game.
The Leader’s gameplay loop—from stealthy reconnaissance to cracking the vault, managing loot, navigating hazards, and finally escaping—is now complete, along with the LockPickers task of disabling Laser System. These updates significantly enhance the depth and excitement of the heist experience. With polishing done, the game is ready to make a strong impression. From now i have completed the basic prototype the offline version of the game and also created the lobby using Photon PUN in the beginning that my teammate will be using and now for the prototype my teammate will be converting the script into online multiplayer script by tweaking a few lines of code by adding additional PunRPC lines to sync and make the game multiplayer. My teammate will be cutting corners due to approaching deadlines and will remove certain abilities such as Hacker Vision, pushing Cart , throwing bomb animation since syncing animation was turning out to be difficult and our designers did not contribute much in the project and were running behind the decided schedule so me and my programmer teammate had to redesign certain elements in the Bank ourselves which took time and in turn cut us in our programming time and we had to improvise for the last minute details including the UI, we executed simple tasks and not too complex programming as our main goal was to convert these simple tasks into Connected Multiplayer game, which would have proved to be difficult had we tried doing complex offline tasks and then converting those tasks into online multiplayer game, since both of us were new to using Photon and PUN, Nevertheless me and my teammate ended up making a decent game which has a start and an end, most likely will post the game here on itch.io, Will definitely put some future updates in the game depending on the response and any suggestions are welcome, Thank you.
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