Dev Update 22-Nov-2016

While I was poking around the games story I figured that I need to change the games current progression system to fit new requirements. What I had was one lobby/hub level where players could join the game and from where they could choose from a set of game levels. Once you solved all the levels, you solved a stage. Once a stage is solved, you get a new set of game levels to choose from:

Thing is that this system gets in the way a lot when you want to write a story for a game, because in most cases it just doesn’t work out without a change of location.

Now I redesigned the game management so it supports multiple lobby/hub levels which are chained linear or even non-linear. Now I’m able to build a much more interesting game flow like so:

structure

Multiple scenarios here:

  1. Multiple levels in a row that connect to a new lobby. This is pretty useful if I want to connect levels that have different themes.
  2. Choose from a set of levels that unlock the way to the next lobby. Imagine you need to complete a set of mission objectives, like say powering a door and additionally find a keycode to unlock it.
  3. Forking parts are also totally possible. This also adds some more replayability.

Needless to say this also affects how the save system works. The game progress and the players inventories will be saved on all clients whenever the players successfully complete a level. If the players fail, the server will reload the last savepoint and the players restart from there.