Devlog #2 Bring your friends

Well hello there,

So, I had a plan, that plan was pretty straightforward. I then discovered some material through a friend on setting up dedicated servers in Godot 4…needless to say, the plan changed lol

https://kappa.lol/-XqXA

As you can see above, I have tested my first iteration of a dedicated server based experience with my game. If you don’t know what that means, it means multiplayer. This changes the entire design plan I have for the game.  Initially I was designing this specifically in the manner in which I was because I felt multiplayer was far too beyond me since the last time I tried and failed.  This opens so many new doorways for me and I’m even more excited to jump into them.

Now this is a bare bones concept right now. What I have put together is simply a very basic, localhost test of an authentication system. This means I start up the authentication server, I then start a client copy, I enter the login credentials, submit them, the credentials get sent to the server, it runs them against a (Currently) fake database and if the credentials match a user in the fake database, it returns a token to the client that permits it access into the game, the player then gets a login success notification and the play button becomes available.

Everything else is the same as it was last week. I got sick this week so I didn’t have any drive to work on it. But I jumped on this over the weekend feeling better while the kids played their games and this is what I was able to come up with.

What does this mean?

It means that I am shifting the design of my game to be more of a survival sandbox than an RPG for starters. I will continue my focus on mechanics, but the story will take a very large back seat if it will exist at all. Lore however will still be secondary in the game, just not a priority as of this moment while I build out the foundation.

This also means that enjoyment from gameplay comes sooner rather than later. As soon as the foundation is up and running for a dedicated server and the client, I will be including both in my next update on itch.io for downloadable content. This means you can uselessly stab your friends because I haven’t unlocked health limits yet lol

But like I said, I’ve been out sick for the last week, so this is the main focus of my update, not a lot else to write this week because of this. I expect to have a lot more to talk about next weekend once I’ve had time to build out the foundation.

Current Goals

Right now, my plan is to get Realm of the Dominion into a multiplayer playable state as soon as possible. So that means replacing the fake database with a real sqlite database, setting up the server to allow for an IP to be entered by the server owner as well as the client to enter an IP address to a remote server, adding a player spawner and synchronizing gameplay in the world. There is a chance I will push updates to the game during the week for testing with friends, this means some updates may push broken until I get things solidified on the multiplayer end of things.

Everything is focused on taking the current gameplay and modifying it to fully support multiplayer before I move forward with more mechanics.

All in all, I’m super stoked to have just gotten the very basic authentication system down.

Tune in next week for more interesting things and stuff.