I’ve managed to create a basic game with a title screen, character naming screen (someday will be a character customization screen), and a world you can romp around in. Furthermore, you can host or join a server and see and chat to other players romping around in it too!
You can choose your character’s name, which it saves to a local file and loads next time you start the game and you can change it again if you like. Eventually this screen will use something like UMA to create a customizable character.
Once in the game world your character can walk, run, jump, crouch, chat, explore. Eventually I’ll make her shoot a bow. I’ll also make footsteps make different sounds based on what you’re walking on, I had that at one point but removed it temporarily. I’ll also have to make the water make noise and add swimming at some point. And eventually add clothes and tools and weapons and so forth.
Using the amazing Forge Networking I’ve managed to create the networking features. Including on the title screen which allows you to specify an IP address to join, Browse servers, Search LAN, or Host a server. I haven’t fully implemented the Browse Servers screen yet or the dedicated servers but that will come. Forge Networking is also responsible for the chat system.
Once in a world there is some beautiful terrain created with the wonderful Gaia which makes it quick and simple, while also offering a lot of flexibility. This is just a placeholder for now until I can manage to figure out how to use something like Terrain Composer to generate terrain on the fly and allow it to be editable by players. This way they can dig in the dirt and built stuff.
Next on the TODO list is preventing players from falling through the terrain, if they fall too far teleport them back up. I’ll have to use a spherecast for this and make sure there’s a safe spot for them at the top so they don’t spawn inside of anything.
I also want to make it so we can set the spawn location for players and maybe optionally allow them to spawn randomly around the world, so long as they don’t spawn in the water.
And of course the chat system could use some work and the chat window could fade out after some time and come back up again when you press T to type more.
Another thing I have to do is make it so your animations play for other players and visa versa. Right now it only shows animations locally on yourself but not on other players. This shouldn’t be all that tricky but I just haven’t done it yet.
I’m looking forward to the new Forge Networking Remastered and the new Terrain Composer to see how they work. I don’t have any extra money to spend yet on more assets but I’ve wanted to check out MapMagic eventually and see if I can use it too as it sounds quite nice.
So many things to do, but I’m having a blast! I can’t wait to get back into it. So I won’t.
Here are some potentially useful links:
Unity Multipurpose Avatar (UMA) – Character customization at runtime. Open source and free and awesome!
Forge Networking – Add networking to your game, bypass limitations and do it with ease.
Game Framework – They also have a whole series of tutorials on creating a nice little game interface, much like the ones you see on mobile games. Also pick up the Extras Bundle to get their other awesome assets!
Acrocatic – This is a little 2D game framework with lots of character features like double jumping and running up walls
Gaia – Terrain generation tool which makes it quick and easy to create nice terrains.
Terrain Composer – Another terrain generation tool with more features, a new version coming very soon which looks amazing.
MapMagic World Generator – Looks quite impressive and I really want to try it out.
Cubiquity – Open Source and free voxel terrain generation tool. I managed to get this working in Unity and it seems pretty useful. I’m not sure if I want to use it or not though yet but I haven’t found anything remotely close to as good for free or even cheap with the ability to edit terrains at runtime.
Writing PlayerPrefs, Fast – This looked like it could be useful. Especially for mobile development to speed up saving and loading of playerprefs.
Voxel Farm – Looks really, really nice but I have no money and I don’t really like their licensing scheme.
Procedural World – This guy knows his voxel stuff! Works on Voxel Farm.