Hey everyone!
A recent photo from Toronto's Comic Con 2022 (March 18, 2022). Cecilia (Duncan's Fiance), Duncan (Modeller/Playtester), Dave (Game Director), and Pedro (Concept Artist), from our team!It's been a few months since we formally posted, but we have been
updating the game regularly on the
test branch.
Most of the changes have been
backend work for
online play to work, and don't really translate well to patch notes.
The past
3 months or so have been Kosam and myself building our
networking architecture out so we can
run the game online like it was
in person.
So far, it feels pretty good. You can grab and shoot the ball while not being the host and it feels like couch co-op.
Some kids really enjoying playing Rise and Fall co-op together at Comic Con 2022. They had some great ideas for us, and even came back several times to play!
You can go ahead and
play an early version of online matches on our
test branch right
now!
To switch off the
main branch onto our
test branch, do this:
-Open Steam's Library and right-click on 'Rise and Fall'
-Click Properties
-Click 'Betas'
-Select 'Test Branch'
Secondly, we've got a
rough roadmap ready we want to share.
Timelines are
still flexible, code always takes longer than you think it will.
Generally, our goals for the next year or so are
these 4 milestones.
-We continue
playing,
testing, and
polishing the
online play so it
feels good enough to play for
hours on end.
The
backend we're using for networking is called
Photon PUN 2.
It lets us have
up to 16 players in a 'room' at a time,
And it allows us to
scale our backend up to higher and more advanced tech.
Eventually, we can
upgrade our backend from Photon PUN 2-> Photon Quantum.
Quantum is
built for
e-sports.
It has great
prediction and
rollback netcode,
deterministic physics, allows
replays and
spectating,
cheat protection, as well as
server-authoritative simulation.
It's a lot of big words, but what it basically means is
we've designed our architecture for the long haul.A
fun,
easy to get into couch co-op game, that
anyone can jump into and
immediately understand,
But a game that has
depth and
nuance enough to spend
years mastering.
The networking
feels good enough for us to be comfortable recommending friends and players to
test out.In the
future, we'll eventually upgrade to Quantum, which will have
even more features for
even better online play.
We've really been enjoying some of the awesome new features we've been adding since May 2021 (our last 'stable' build, and the one you'll see by default if you install our game).
Just like networking, we
playtest and
polish everything in the game (that being networked and couch co-op) modes so they
feel amazing to play and you
can run for hours on end with no issues.
We are
so proud of the
glowing feedback we've gotten from players we've gotten a chance to play with in person at
Eat Play Mingle, Comic Con, and early in class at
George Brown.
It's so
incredibly motivating to see all kinds of people's
faces light up when we hand them a controller and they start playing for the first time.
It means the world to us, and we're so happy to continue building this
special game we all love.
The build we've been showing off at in-person events is our
May 2021 build, and also the one on our main default branch.
That's because it's the
most stable, and we know we can run it for 20+ hours of play and not run into any issues that could interrupt you having fun.
Our 2nd Roadmap goal is to
take everything we've been working on in the last year and bring that out to the main branch.
Some features include:
-Default map has been made bigger to accommodate for bigger matches and increased speed and abilities.
-Up to 16 players can play in a single match, allowing Rise and Fall to be a fun large group activity (like our Streamdays with Among Us and Scoober Splat). [Previous build was up to 4 players]
-
Right Stick Aiming: Players can use the Right Stick to aim their shot precisely in the direction they
want to shoot. [No longer limited to shooting purely in the direction you're facing]
-
Possession: Players can now grab onto the ball if they choose to, and carry it with them. [Previously
players had to hit the ball in motion]
-
Gliding: Players can press Y to open a glider and get extra control in-air to line up shots and perform
trick shots. [This actually came from a glitch that froze players in the air, but it was so fun, we made it
a feature]
-
Dive Momentum: After diving, players have increased speed until they stop moving.
Can be a nice way to get a little more speed without needing to do a full size change.
Players can also continue to press and hold the dive button to 'boost' themselves in higher tiers of
speed if needed.
-
Triple Jumps: One of my favourite features from platformers, players now jump in a 3-stage
cycle, with each jump being slightly higher. It also makes each jump feel unique and bouncy, and
we're really with it.
-
Ball Lifts and Freezes: Pressing Shrink or Grow + Jump will either shoot the ball up into the air, or
freeze it's current momentum. These can be chained with other players to set up for some fun lob
shots.
-
Ground Pounds: Pressing the Grow Button will make your player slam down onto the ground, which
can be a good way to quickly drop height, as well as disrupt a play beneath you.
-
3rd Person Camera: Players playing in modes that aren't couch co-op (like online) can press in
the right stick to swap to a special 3rd person camera. Lets you focus more on your individual play if
you want to play that way.
[h3]
Match Setup:[/h3]
-Players can set up
custom matches before they enter a game in a
new match setup screen.
Players can choose: a) What
team they play for,
b) What
character model to use
c) What
colour their UI should be
d) A
nickname for their player
e) Whether that player should be
human or
AI f) If that player is AI,
how difficult they should be.
-Players can then choose to play
with or without goalies, and
add or remove certain
stage hazards, before
choosing a map to play on.
This was a
HUGE undertaking, and once again, huge props to our Lead Programmer
Kosam for
re-writing our backend to be able to accomplish this.
It basically required us to
re-write the entire game's code from scratch with architecture that let us build matches modularly and independent of each other.
We're
really excited to get this feature out to players and see the
different kind of matches you come up with!
-On top of expanded offline, couch co-op matches, Rise and Fall 2.0 will include
online matches for the first time.
-Players will click the
'online' button and be
connected to our
network and sent to a
main lobby.
-Once
connected, players can
create and join rooms--
individual instances of the arena where players can
hang out,
start matches and
practice together over the network.
-Up to
16 people can join a room as of right now (with
bigger rooms possible in the future).
-Players can then
enter the arena,
choose settings like
which team they want and
how long a match should last,
Then
ready up and a
match will start when enough players are
ready.
-To
start, we're
locking rooms when matches are happening, but in
the future, we want to
open rooms up for people to
join at any time,
hang out,
watch matches, and
play in practice courts.
It's kind of meant to have a
Destiny, VR-Chat and
Echo VR public space vibe.
The
architecture for this is already
mostly done (thanks to the
amazing work of Kosam).
We want to bring
building custom characters to
every part of the game.
This means customizing: (at first) a) your
character's model b) Your
skin and hair colour c) Your
clothing colour d) Your
club You can then
save that character and
use them in
matches online and offline.
Eventually, when we feel
confident with those features being
stable,
We'll add
more cosmetics and
customization options as
free unlockables/purchases.
When we're
confident with the
stability of that, we'll look at adding
battlepasses,
paid cosmetics, and
in-game earnable cosmetics through
challenges and achievements.
When those
3 stages are
stable and we're
confident with them, we'll look at launching on
more platforms.
Our game is built in
Unity, an engine designed to be
easy to port games to many platforms.
We use a special Unity asset called
'Rewired' for handling player input.
This means that the
backend of our game was designed from the
beginning to be brought to
more platforms!
For example, our backend with Rewired,
automatically recognizes over 100 different controllers and assigns inputs to them based on a template we choose.
If there's a
small mistake (like input is reversed for some reason), it's a
quick button mapping fix.
Our plan is to get our game out on
as many platforms as possible (including mobile, Rewired makes input mapping for that simple!).
There are also cloud backends (like Unity cloud build) that automatically push builds to multiple platforms every time you make a change, that should make this streamlined.
Lastly,
What does this all look like together?
I did a little walkthrough of Rise and Fall 2.0 here.
More videos to come more often!
-Dave
https://youtu.be/1NwlBlioUhE
