Dev Log #6 - Final 3C submission post

Asset list and References are available in a separate post

User Guide separate post

Design Changes:

I've mostly stuck to my concept design, procedural dungeons didnt make it in though sadly, and Perma Death went out the window with PvP.

The biggest change is that rather than being an offline single player roguelike/rpg it's a fully authoritative persistent MMORPG, which honestly I had plans to attempt from the start. 

I made sure work I did early on could be used if I needed to drop the online plans due to it being too hard and or too much work in the time allotted, and also scoped the design to work for either.

While adding the MMO component added a lot of work mainly around persistence and synchronising what should/shouldn't be updated for in range clients, the architecture does make adding new gameplay content quick and easy without even requiring a new Unity client build.

Quite a few areas have had a lot less polish than I would have liked as well, the UI still feels very much like it was quickly thrown together for example.

Really happy this Unit finally gave me an excuse to attempt it lol, how ever I would say Lindsay/Lakes advice of not to do multiplayer is probably some good advice for future students!

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Further feedback review, and what I got fixed/changed this week

Firstly want to throw a props out here to Chloe in particular for her relentless work testing everyones games.

Please See previous Week #5 devlog for feedback summary.

But during this week these are the items, I've been able to action from the feedback.

In response to "How intuitive did you find the user interface? Did you feel any elements needed explaining?"

4/7 Found issues with the UI, mostly with the terminology I've used that will be unfamiliar for those who haven't played the genre. Most common complaints were:

* Paperdoll was a meaningless word to some, I've renamed this "Character Window"

* Skills needed tooltips to explain Passive/Usable, I've added tooltips to Skills and Items now, and added documentation that Skill icons can be dragged out.

* Toggling combat was confusing with War/Peace mode, Ive changed the text to Toggle Combat

Feedback for "If you could add one new feature to the game, what would it be and why"

* Loot Drops - This was always on the todo, just didnt make it in for the test session, monsters now drop some basic loot.

* PvP mode - This is in already players are just other mobiles, Full PvP!

* Other suggestions like Offline mode, Final bosses, were a bit out of scope though some Boss monsters would be cool to add.

"Did you encounter any bugs or glitches during your session?"

6/7 Spotted at least one issue lol.

2/7 was a crash that only appeared in WebGL when opening an Item context menu, Fixed this midway thru testing with a new build.

* Chat Text overlapping - Think this is fixed now, added some more spacing between strings.

* Some Null Ref crashes - Think I've tracked all these down, but they are mostly to do with other Players logging off mid animation and stuff like that

* Few of the bugs were just unimplemented features, ie no loot.

* Rubberbanding - Chatting to the testers and watching this only became an issue towards the end of the test, my poor little free azure server was hitting the swap file as I forgot to kill apache/php etc and with 6 players online we started to get some rubber banding. In the future I would need to run some profiling, but I have an awful lot of LINQ in the hotpath, and all network traffic is causing allocations at the moment, no buffer reuse, movement lookups are into a List<Tile> and not sorted by X/Y etc, so masses of areas that should be optimised server side but time time time!

I feel a bit bad posting  verbatim feedback but since it's anonymous.

Feedback for "If you have any other feedback feel free to provide any here, thanks!"

• No feedback over then the bug i mentioned above.
• I feel like the feedback I've given is rather negative, but the game is actually insanely good. A game of this scope is bound to have some bugs, but none of them (aside from the potion crash) were gamebreaking. Visuals were really good! 
•  Great work on getting the networking done! Love the concept. Very RetroMMO. 
•  very unobvious where you can move. some objects take up more space than i would think. movement diagonally into the walls seems like it should make you slide along. 
•  Cool to see an online multiplayer game being made for KIT109 you've done an awesome job

All lovely feedback!, I did note the movement issues, and it is in my bug todo list but probably not fixed before submission.

The Future

The client and server github's will be swapped to public, once the unit is over.

I would like to keep any paid/non open source content out of the server/client, so i can keep the sources for those public.

So I plan to rejig things and have the ingame scene loaded from an asset bundle, that way I can have paid assets kept private while still sharing the core game.

Once that's done I plan to ditch the sprites and go for 3D models https://syntystore.com/products/polygon-fantasy-kingdom

The plan is to keep a fixed viewpoint, and maybe go more isometric than fully top down, the Netcode and UI have all been built with this in mind for the future, would still keep movement "tile" based as I like the oldschool tile based movement feel. Server side only changes will be to assetnames on Items/Mobiles, and also support for what ever kind of nav/collider setup i workout when moving away from the tilemap.

The Past

Can skip the below TL;DR just some context for why I attempted an MMO, not part of anything marked.

For some context of my experience with Unity and Games Dev, before this I had written a ski free ( that windows 3.1 game ), clone for android using libGDX, A 24 hour game jam game with Unity, and a bunch of single element proof of concept kinda stuff, like does this mechanic work etc in Unity, and Pong of course!

I have spent an awful lot of time reverse engineering other unity games how ever, Highlights include a barebones Login/Cluster/World Server emulator for a defunct MMO called "Shards Online/Legends of Aria", using only the client for reference. I decompiled source code+ asset bundles of a different MMO 'Codex", and recreated an entirely working Unity project that could build a working Client with all content.

General Game coding wise, I've been writing macros/bots for Ultima Online and other MMO's for as long as they have been around.

And I've been involved coding in the Server emulator scene for UO for years and years contributing to both RunUO and ServUO projects over the years, also contributed on Mooege the Diablo 3 server emulator, and also contributed to ClassicUO and created the first working proof of concept WASM web browser port of the ClassicUO client.