As usual, Mikeyo kick started our week with some crowdsourcing projects:
YouTube Link
He follows that up with his weekly update:
YouTube Link
Let's Play Indie Games
The indie games that we played last week were:
Savage XR
Black Ice
Castles in the Sky
We've got quite a bit going on over at www.letsplayindiegames.com. I'm working on getting dedicated hosting for it, rather than routing to a subdomain on our main site. Also, the contact page has been fixed (again; every time I make a change I manage to break that page even though it hasn't been touched since the launch of bealssoftware.com's new layout.)
We've also added a ton of Let's Players that play indie games to our wall; 30 of them at the time of posting. To help promote them (and also because I apparently am too busy at the moment to be able to work in recording and editing a video every day), we're going to be highlighting one of their video on days that we don't post one. In the future, when I'm able to hand the project off to someone else, we may change it to one of our videos a day and a video from one of the Let's Players. I'm not sure, this is the part where the fact that I shouldn't be in charge really comes to light: I'm too indecisive to pick between a couple videos, let alone 30; the entire point of the site is to help promote everyone, how am I supposed to pick a single video a day? We'll see though, maybe a good idea will pop up.
Another idea is having the Let's Players sign up for a mailing list and then dev's can submit their game's information through the site and we'll send it out. Not really sure how effective it would be; some improvements have been offered up (like allowing the Let's Players choose a genre to receive notifications for.)
Kind of a spin off of that idea - I know I plan on putting up a notification for our games that anyone and everyone can make a let's play and monetize it. So I'm contemplating adding a page to the site that will basically be a collection of authorizations from developers for let's players to make videos (and possibly monetize them.)
So, we have a lot of stuff in the works for it. The whole idea is to help promote indie devs, Let's Players that play indie games and to help bring them together. I personally think that let's plays are one of the best forms of advertising (I don't know how many games I've bought simply because I saw the guys from Rooster Teeth having a blast playing it), so I'm really putting a lot of time into getting that off the ground.
Indie Spotlight
The indie spotlight for this week is Black Ice. You can find out more information about it on the project page: http://bealssoftware.com/?module=project&id=10.
Lord Sen's Battle Arena
Last week I showed off screenshots of the multiplayer lobby that I through together for Lord Sen's Battle Arena. However, know that there was a fundamental difference between TCP and UDP, I decided to dig deeper before moving forward. Lots of reading later, I decided that it would probably be best to switch to UDP before moving forward. So, I took our core library, ripped out all of the TCP stuff and integrated in Lidgren.
We're now back up and running and moving forward. I've added a screen for entering the settings when creating a lobby (your username, the port number and the lobby password):
I've added a screen for entering the setting when joining a lobby (your username, the host, the port number and the lobby password):
Here's a shot showing some different teams:
Here's a shot that shows actual map files and map previews working:
And finally, here's a shot showing the host in game:
At the moment the client doesn't actually get "in the game", he just sits at the lobby, but the host can start and move around. I'm hoping to be doing some connection stress testing this weekend. Following that, I get to try to figure out network prediction.
For anyone looking into networking - I definitely recommend Lidgren. It is super easy to get set up and the library itself is just really well laid out.
Well, that's all for this week's update. I'll be back next week, on time and with more info. We're quickly approaching the alpha, so there will be lots of screenshots and some videos coming out. Keep an eye on my twitter, @Programmer16, or check back here next week. Thanks everyone!
