Posted March 22, 2022 by Mobile Last
I sometimes tend to forget that from its essence, Avaruustaistelupeli is a local multiplayer party game. As a reminder, we started having testing workshops more regularly. They help find issues that are hard to detect when playing/developing alone, and when properly organized, can also be one of the funniest moments of the development process.
But they are also surprisingly hard to prepare: list of design goals should be clear, all previous issues should be fixed and everything should be bug-free and stabilized. As drinking and coding don’t mix, I usually avoid modifying the game during the workshop. This means that preparations may easily take a day or two.
In the 11.3.2020 workshop there were four participants, a table full of pizza and a fridge filled with beer (workshops can get quite expensive). And of course, something new to play with.
The first version of cooperation mode is now added. Up to three human players can battle together against one AI ship. Currently the AI is far too selfish to cooperate with anyone, but I might add team-vs-team -game at some point. Below is a video of the very first cooperative game, and a collection of some other matches we played.
We also held the first four-player tournament where every player had a gamepad. Input system recognized all four controllers (two XBox-controllers and two Logitechs) without any problems. No calibration issues either. Nobody had difficulties to tell one’s own ship, crosshair or even lock icon anymore, so all the recent changes seem to be improvements.
I made three new ships to replace the old pre-built ones. Each of them has only three special modules, so they should be easier to handle. For the cooperative game, there’s also a stationary ship with immense firepower and strategic points that detach large parts when destroyed.
Naturally, some room for improvement was also found .
There are already more features added to 0.5.1 than I intended. The following weeks I'll probably concentrate on polishing and releasing the next version.