Happy October! I had actually intended to write this up earlier, but work, Mythlink, and general life stuff have kept me very busy this month. As predicted, I don’t have anything new or flashy to show off, but I can give just a brief overview of what I’ve been working on. I expect next month to be able to show off a better “start to finish” video of a multiplayer battle taking place. This battle demo should be much longer than the one shown back in the August blog post.
Anyway, on to the notes about this month’s development. As previously mentioned, I have been working on smoothing out the online experience and let me tell you…that has been a chore. I originally wrote most of the multiplayer stuff just enough to “get it done” so I had something to show off and could sort of have a proof of concept that the entire idea was possible. Unfortunately, this is a bad trap to get stuck in when programming (or life in general, really) and caused me to abandon a ton of my coding standards and practices that I had been keeping up with. Getting multiplayer working is a big undertaking, so as you can imagine this means a lot of stuff was affected by my sloppiness.
What does this all mean? Well, most of my development time has simply gone to rewriting and fixing all the stuff I slapped together in my haste! I’m pretty picky about making sure everything follows the same standards so I can’t just let it sit. It’s not quite all finished yet, but since I’ve now stated I want to show off a smoother multiplayer system in November, that means I have about a month to get it all cleaned up and going. Things were slow to start (as I had been slacking on my Mythlink work near the end of the summer and needed to get my bearings back), but things are in full force now and progressing smoothly.
Look forward to next month with what will hopefully be a nice multiplayer showcase video!