Multicolor bunnies and online co-op
Hello! After writing my last newsletter I designed some co-op multiplayer palettes for players 2-4, and since then I’ve been chipping away at my online multiplayer code.
Co-op player colors
Each player in co-op is now a different color! I went with olive green (like my stream character), light blue, and orange. I'm pretty happy with how they all look:
Their explosions are color-coded too! You can see them all in action in the video below. Unfortunately I didn't have enough gamepads laying around to control all four players at once, so the orange player just stands still.
Online multiplayer
Getting online co-op working takes a lot of effort. Thankfully my game Chessposion already has online multiplayer (with rollback netcode!) so I can use a lot of its code, but it’s taking me a while to get it all working in a way that will let me easily reuse it in future games.
My first step was to get the basic in-game netcode working. Here’s one of my testing sessions, using 10 copies of the game running on my PC (4 players + 6 spectators):
Next I need to get Steam lobbies and matchmaking working, which will let me connect to some friends and get them to help me test out some co-op design ideas. I just got basic online lobbies working today but they’re still missing some important features, such as being able to choose the stage that you want to play on and the difficulty mode that you want to use.
The lobby menus are an ugly mess too, because I haven’t touched their code since Chessplosion and I revamped my engine’s menu system since then. If my co-op design tests go okay, these are the next thing I’ll work on.
Anything else?
I've been playing arcade games again! Butasan: Pig's and Bomber's doesn't seem to have a whole lot of depth to it but I was charmed by its character designs and animations. I love the little cutscenes introducing new enemy types before each stage.
Kozure Ōkami / Lone Wolf and Cub was a fascinating beat em up. In my post on getting into beat em ups via The Punisher, I mentioned that beat em ups are almost like the old arcade game Kung Fu Master except with a Z axis (i.e. you can move up and down), complicated enemy AI, and strong moves such as invincible throws that let you push enemies around and group them up. Lone Wolf and Cub is a fascinating middle ground; it's basically just Kung Fu Master with a Z axis and nothing else. You technically have a few different attacks but they all do pretty much the same thing, and none of them have enough vertical range to outrange enemies who are approaching you from above or below anyway. So it's pretty much a game about trying to force enemies to approach you from the left or right, poking them with your sword when they get close, and trying not to get surrounded. It's so much more fun than I expected it to be, so you might like it too.
I should mention that I found out about both of these arcade games via LordBBH's Push to Reject series of streams and YouTube videos. Here are his Butasan and Kozure Ōkami videos, but I recommend browing through all of them and checking out anything that looks fun.
MASH VP! Re:VISION (pronounced "mash up revision") just came out of early access on PC. It's a rhythm action game with two sets of lanes at once, that even has charts where you mix back and forth between two songs. It looks great!
I'm way behind the curve on this one but I love KASSO. It's a skateboarding-themed Japanese game show, almost like Ninja Warrior or Takeshi's Castle on skateboards. Despite ostensibly being a competition it feels more like all the contestants are working together, trying to figure out how to solve all the different wild challenges.
That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I’m going to get back to working on my online multiplayer code, and hopefully it should all be done by the time I write the next one of these. I hope you have a fantastic couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!