Devlog #4 A whole new world

Hello there,

So this week was mainly a focus on refactoring the network code to support the future plan for expandable gameservers. In addition to this I got the artwork swapped out and cleaned out the old art work, then learned to work with the new pixel art and building structures with the new assets.

Server Architecture

A good majority of the week was spent with my friend Tango teaching me more about how high level multiplayer works and the proper ways to use it to design the server structure I wanted. This is now for the most part in place, where when the server is launched, it acts as the database manager, the authenticator, the authority and the first map server. The authority and authenticator side of things are handled under one access point, within the authority part of it is now the database manager which can only be run by the server now which considerably raises protection from client abuse. This system will also help transfer the client to the appropriate map server

The map server is handled under a second access point, this will generally handle the authority inside the map. The first/main map will always be built into the server .exe file because the rest of the system handling isn’t very heavy on resources and it would be a wasted effort to separate them into 2 .exe files at this time more or less.

Alongside all of this, the client experience has been changed once more to be a more streamlined experience. When the player loads the game up, they will be directly presented with the login credentials. This is where they will select the server and port they wish to join. Once credentials are entered, the player will then be able to select or create a character from this server’s database. Once a character is selected or created and then selected, the player will load the main game world and be spawned in.

The server side of this has been completely removed from client access. The server is now designed to be run as a headless .exe only through a command prompt setup. This removes the unnecessary in-game option to launch as a server because it was just wasting resources needlessly. The Readme that comes with the download has been updated to reflect how to handle server setup.  The game itself still doubles as the server, that has not changed. You simply can’t open it up as a regular exe and click host anymore, that option is gone.

Art Swap

With this in place, I have also moved the character and playground over to a newly created playground which has almost nothing in it lol The reason for this is the house creation, but I’ll get to that in a minute. The character has been completely transitioned over to the new art and animations, everything else works fine with the character so far. 

House creation pipeline

So learning how to make houses on the new art was less than fun for me. I’m not an art guy, I’m really not even a world design guy. While world design is something I have done in the past on Unity on a previous game I attempted, that was more or less because I felt it was my only way to contribute to the project outside of funding and even then, most of my designs came out like giant boxes lol. So with all of that said, after much back and forth with Tango, we found Scene collections in godot. 

Basically I can create a scene out of a node2d, use it to build the house in that scene with various tilemap layers to make it look just right, use the node2d origin in regards to the position of the house on the screen as my y sort origin to determine when the player should fall behind the house when walking past it, add collision shapes to block the player from walking through it, then finally add the scene into a tileset as a scene inside a collection. This turned the house into a usable tile of its own that I could use in my playground with already determined y sorting and collisions ready to go.

Having this design in place will allow me to create houses in a clean and efficient manner moving forward and make the designs easily reusable.

Cleanup

After all was said and done, I had removed all of the old vector art and cleared out all of my old scenes and code scripts from previous designs prior to the refactoring I’ve done over the last couple of weeks. The project has seen a huge loading improvement each time I open the engine to do more work since I’ve done this. I’ve been learning about wasteful resource importing and how to avoid it as I go along.

I have released the latest design to the itch.io page as the latest update for the game, version 0.0.17 ready to be downloaded today.

The whole experience has just continued to be one of learning new methods and techniques to get things done while trying to remember there is not just one right way of doing things and trying to find the way that works best for me along the way. My concept for the game itself is evolving as I learn these new things and I’m still working out ideas for the end goal.

With the server architecture more or less at version “1.0” of how I want it to actually be, I can focus once again on the mechanics of the game, adding things like inventory, combat, crafting, etc and building them as multiplayer systems.  I am looking forward to this while also contemplating the ever fluid design of the game as a whole.  As far as combat goes, I’m still leaning toward staying in the turn based combat style, but I’m not 100% on whether it will stay that way. Much is still fluid until these things are built fully to a level where I can test how it feels.

All in all, I’m happy with the progress being made. There are days where I feel like I got almost nothing done and there are days where I feel like I got a hell of a lot done and I just need to accept that each day is going to be different and that each day I know a little more about something I didn’t the day before.  Below is a quick preview of how the client looks now.

https://kappa.lol/Mxb8y

Until next time.