WW1 - No Man's Land Devlog 11

Once again, it's been a super long time since my last update. Since then, I have been slowly working on more stuff for this game, and have a ton of new things to show here for those interested! 

Don't want to take up too much time rambling, so diving right in!

Networking

Prior, I was making use of an  AWS server in conjunction with the Mirror API to support multiplayer; however, AWS only offers a free trial for about 1 year, after which charges would start getting accrued. This is something I wanted to avoid, so I went ahead and switched over to Steam Networking. 

This of course means that multiplayer, in its current form, will only work through steam, but I think that is perfectly fine. I plan to release this game on Steam (perhaps do an early access run?) anyway, and this can always be updated later if I want to release on other platforms.

After making the switch to Steam Networking (also still using the Mirror API  for the in-game networking), I was able to setup a public and private lobby system. The private match feature also includes the ability to invite any of your steam friends! The videos below show those 2 things in action:

Public Match Flow:

Private Match Flow:

Oh also, the entire game is now networked. Prior, players could only connect to each other and load into a match, but actions within the match were not synced, and now they are thanks to the Mirror API.

New Card Animations

Did a massive UI overhaul as well (as you most likely realized in the previous section). As part of that overhaul, I added some animations to each of the cards, to spice them up a bit:

Also went ahead and implemented that card displayer art I showed on my last devlog. Cards are now presented in a war-letter like fashion:

Flag Animations

I also want to add more life to the battlefield itself, so got started by adding some wind animations onto the flags. Next steps are to maybe add some sway animations to the knocked out trees, and some more movement to the idle troop animations.

Below are the flag animations as they appear in Aseprite (the pixel art editor I am using), and in-game:

More Troop Animations

Currently working on the front and back facing animation frames for the troops themselves. I am following the same process I followed for the prior frames: sketch the rough poses out on paper first, transfer into Adobe Illustrator to get their vector art forms, and then size those down to produced a pixelized version that I can then cleanup within Aseprite. 

It's definitely a process, but i'm not exactly a god animator haha, so just rolling with what works for me to avoid total deadlock in this area. 

Below are the different stages of this process:

Here are the frames in their vector style forms:

Here are the frames as they appear in Aseprite (still need to do major cleanup on all of them):

Also did a test run of the running (backview) frames in-game:

Main Menu BG update

You may have noticed that the main menu is now looking a bit more fleshed out from the vids above. The initial BG for that was going to be a still image with a tank, but I wanted the main menu to feel a bit more immersive (as was done in the previous game I helped to make called Sengoku), so I went with a trench background that moves as you go through each menu, to invoke that you are sort of moving through a trench, and just beyond lies No Man's Land. 

This is the sketch behind the new idea for the menu BG:

And this is the sketch for the old idea:

I also reworked the game title art, trying to mix in some more key images of WW1 into the title itself (such as barbed wire and helmets):

Final Notes

That's all for now. As mentioned, will continue working on the rest of the animation frames. Going to make a full push to get all of them done and stop pushing it back. Can expect more on that in the next devlog.

Thanks for stopping by!