Hey everyone, and welcome back to the VV Eekly Update! I’m glad to have you back for the last update of the year. Somehow, 2024 is almost over! 😱
Unfortunately, life has caught up to me a little bit, and I’ve been busy doing interviews (!) for a Real Job TM (!!). I’m still committed to publishing Vyn and Verdan and working on games, but it will likely soon be in only the evenings in my spare time. Hopefully, once my situation is more stabilized, I can return to spending more time working on games. Until then… gotta work that job!😱😱
And, the last bit of administrivia before we dive in to today’s update: Next update was scheduled for January 1st, but I’m planning on skipping that week and so this will be the only update for the next 4 weeks! 😱😱😱
Today, I’m going to go through a couple smaller features that I’ve implemented. Each of these are fairly minor, as far as games go, but I think they’re really important for making the game feel polished!
Minimap
Vyn and Verdan has a minimap!
As you can see, it’s just a smaller version of the map, but in mini form (duh). I think it’s nice now that there’s a natural spot for the key-bind hint for the larger map as well.
The behavior where it switches back and forth across the screen took longer than you might think. The actual implementation wasn’t too bad, but I had to mess with where the minimap started, when it switched, and what its default behavior is. It’s odd because this behavior is fairly standard across games like this, but it’s so subtle that I had trouble thinking about it!
I have a future plan to actually show where each of Vyn and Verdan are in the map as little icons, but the icon currently just follows around the main player.
Roles
Players can switch around what roles they play in-game.
I implemented this earlier just for myself to test moving each player, but it seemed nice enough to expose to players too!
The most challenging part of implementing this was definitely figuring out how to transition player control. If you remember in VV Eekly Update #14 – Networking, a large part of a networked multiplayer game is figuring out who the authority is for each player. Naturally, each player should control the character directly, but Godot had some quirks for changing authority mid-game.
The second most challenging part of this was actually integrating this with Steam usernames. As you can see, the top of the role card says your Steam username – Vyn is “shrubbmakesgames”. I hadn’t planned to incorporate Steam usernames, but then I realized that, with no names, you can’t actually tell which character you control! That’s not a great experience, so I had to label the characters with something. That made this task take twice as long as I expected… but, hey! It looks good now!
Mac Support
The last item isn’t something I can show off, but I’ve been working on Mac support. From talking to potential players, it turns out that about half of my userbase really wants Mac support. That’s not too much of a surprise! I do know that a lot of “casual gamers” don’t have a PC, and that’s definitely who I’m targeting with a casual 2-player coop game.
If you do happen to have a Mac and you’re reading this, then I would like to test on your Mac! Please let me know if you’re willing to do that. You’d be helping all of Mac-kind!
That’s all for today. It’s a fairly short update, but I’ve been fairly busy. I hope that I’ll have a lot more to show you next year! If you have any thoughts about today’s VV Eekly Update, please drop by the Discord and share!