Hello Generals and welcome to
Building a Better RISK.A brand new monthly developer blog series where we want to give you a more indepth look at our processes than we’ve ever offered before. Allowing us to build a better RISK… get it?!
Each blog will focus on trending topics from around the community, allowing us to gather YOUR feedback and address it in future updates. We’ve heard your suggestions, so let’s work together to make them happen.
So let’s start with v4.0 and share some insights into what it is and more importantly why we’re doing it.
For v4.0 we wanted to do something that really impacts the future of RISK. We have a lot of data to understand what players are looking for and how they’d like to see the game progress, especially with multiplayer, but for us to implement these changes, we needed to do some major admin - a
Network Overhaul. One of the best ways to understand what the Network Overhaul is, is to imagine that RISK is a car. And to move forward with the features and updates we’d like to add, we need to rip out the engine and the steering.
That way, when v4.0 launches, everything will look exactly as you remember - but ultimately will run a lot smoother.
To offer a more technical explanation, we’re reworking the way that the RISK servers operate, and refactoring the way that instructions are sent between players and servers.
As RISK was originally designed to be a single-player experience - multiplayer being added later - the game’s logic lives in the app. For Multiplayer RISK, we added the ability for each app to talk to other apps using a 'dumb server' to relay messages about the state of the game. This is known as a 'Client Authoritative' or 'P2P' (player to player) model.
Now that multiplayer has become more popular amongst the community, we're changing this to a new server-based model where logic and state is stored online, on servers owned and run by us. This is called “Server Authoritative” - it's more accurate, more reliable and opens up a whole slew of long-requested features once completed.
This means we will be keeping the game logic in the app (so you can continue to play offline) but we have to duplicate the logic on to our new multiplayer servers.
The app will tell the server what you want to do (attack, fortify etc), and the server validates, makes the move and tells the other apps. To do this, we have to change all the messaging from “This is what I did and this happened” to “This is what I want to do” - then the server then sends the “this is what happened” messages to everyone.
Not only are we changing the messaging, we also need new ways to split and separate the data (allowing multiple users to send messages at the same time), and new servers to handle the work. All while keeping single-player/offline working.
As you can see, this is a major undertaking and we’re only now beginning to get a good sense of how much we’ve bitten off -
it’s a lot! We recently entered the ALPHA phase and
are on track to deliver v4.0 by the end of 2024. We’ll be sharing more information once we turn the corner to the BETA - including going
into a lot more detail about the tech behind the scenes and why we’re using them. So if you’re keen to be part of the next generation of RISK then keep your eyes out for these blogs.
If you have any questions or any particular topic you’d like for us to cover, then let us know in the comments below.
Thanks
TEAM RISK @SMG
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*cat for scale, so that I could claim him as a work deduction 🐱