On The Line [multiplayer] by Robinerd

[raw]
made by Robinerd for LD 39 (JAM)

In this online battle arena your friends will become foes as you fight for survival. Only one will remain.

Pro Tip: Stay close to the runes, they'll keep you alive... for a while..

Game by me and spiderspy. We are Carry Castle.

Instructions - Find a friend (or many, up to 10 players) - Start and wait in the lobby, first player will become host. - Host should press start once all are in. - Kill your friends. Last man standings. - Restart game when you get network issues (sorry, didn't manage to get it stable, had to rewrite all network code last 6 hours)

Controls

  • W/D to move
  • Space to jump
  • Mouse to aim
  • Click to attack

Thoughts

What a journey it's been! Multiplayer with physics was a big bite to chew but it kind of got together in the end.

Theme connection

Your HP drains over time. Only the runes can keep you going. But they're limited too, essentially limiting the time of a round and also encouraging tactics like starvation/dodging once runes are drained.

Stuff we used

  • Unity 2017
  • Hand drawn graphics by spiderspy, scanner and photoshop.
  • No 3rd party assets except for the player character silhouette.
  • Multiplayer done with Photon TrueSync. (still very beta)

Ratings

Given 6🗳️ 7🗨️

Feedback

mortus
01. Aug 2017 · 10:07 UTC
I wasn't able to find anyone to play right now, but I've tested it a bit single-player. For some reason I was unable to jump most of the times. Sometimes I jump, but 9 times out of 10 nothing happens when I press Space. Is it a bug or am I missing something?

Not rating right now until I can play versus someone and learn how to jump.
🎤 Robinerd
02. Aug 2017 · 09:29 UTC
@mortus The jumping issue sounds like a bug! For me it's more like 1/10 failing. Not sure what it's caused by.. What resolution do you play with? Running fullscreen?
mortus
02. Aug 2017 · 18:14 UTC
@robinerd I've tried it in 1280x1024 fullscreen and 720x480 windowed. This time it's more like 49/50, I basically can't jump at all.
🎤 Robinerd
03. Aug 2017 · 08:12 UTC
@mortus sorry to hear that, and I'm not sure how to fix it since I can't reproduce it across any of the 4 computers I tried on :( Will go rating lots of games now and get ppl try my game more, then we'll see how it is for others. Thanks anyway for your time!
🎤 Robinerd
03. Aug 2017 · 08:13 UTC
@mortus Ahh, where are you located? Perhaps it's a latency issue that causes rollbacks/desync
Zirrrus
03. Aug 2017 · 09:24 UTC
I had pretty much the same experience, tried it out with nobody else online and also encountered the bug where pressing space did nothing most of the time.
I'm not sure that bug is because of lag or anything, all other movement was smooth and my connection should have been pretty good.

The hand-drawn style is really nice!
Mr.Houdini
03. Aug 2017 · 09:38 UTC
This is interesting. I've played alone (just testing physics) and with a member of my team. Making a multiplayer game for a jam it is quite risky. The experience was good, but the game wasn't always working well. Being a platformer everything leans on the interaction of the player with the trees. This mechanic is sometimes not working.

What I'm trying to say is that you have an excellent art and mood: filters, this burton-like design, a simple pvp game (which normally are the most fun games). But polishing is everything and a jam is not the best place for polishing. Summing everything up: make this game a pvp multiplayer with every detail really polished, keeping the art and the "game feel" and it will be a great game for sure.

Great work and good luck!
Ferran Benavente
03. Aug 2017 · 09:43 UTC
Although we did not have any problem with the character movement, my teammate and I had a bit of connectivity issues at the beginning of the match, once one of us killed the other the game appeared to disconnect us and the rivals character stayed in one single position for the rest of the game.

But as I said, the game on local worked fine (the trees are a bit unpredictable but I think that's a fun part of the game) and the art style look great, big fan of the chromatic aberration filter you used on the corners.
It's a risky and brave move to make a mutliplayer game for a gamejam, for the moment it doesn't really work on multiplayer but I'll keep checking you page for future updates :)
Mike Cullingham
07. Aug 2017 · 05:31 UTC
Didn't find anyone in the lobby, but I jumped around for a bit. Think I saw in a gif that the trees can fling you, but I couldn't get that to work... I tended to just get caught on the trees. Love the art.
🎤 Robinerd
07. Aug 2017 · 11:42 UTC
@mike-cullingham What you saw in the gif was correct but I sadly couldn't get that working on the multiplayer so I removed it last minute :( We'll probably bring this idea into a single-player prototype instead, inspired by Limbo but with vikings. Will keep you updated if we manage! Doing multiplayer was too much :P