Last weekend, we took a stab at creating an online multiplayer shooter for the Ludum Dare game jam. If you haven’t seen it already, it’s a fun 2-player experiment where each player can hack the controls of the other player, disabling up to two buttons. Since the original release had a lot of technical problems, we’ve created a post-jam release that improves on the following:

1. Explosions and sparks will not sync their positional data to the server more than once.
2. Increasing how often the player and bullet syncs their data.
3. Made the opposing player’s animations to be much more reactive.
4. Changed the health meter graphics.
5. Vastly increased the range of the radar.
6. Player avatar now appears as arrows in the radar.
7. Added a laser to indicate the path the bullet will follow.
8. Prevented disabling more than one directional key
9. Shields (called “Reflect”) can now be disabled. The programmer actually forgot to enable this button, and was meant to always be hackable.
10. Made the player avatars and their colliders much larger.

Hopefully these simple changes will improve the playability of the game.

In the meantime, there’s only a few minor updates with Not a Clone: basically our entire team are enjoying their holidays. There is, however, one new feature in works. Called “inverted mode,” the instructions of a couple of minigames may randomly change to something opposite of the originally intended instruction. For example, in a Totemman minigame, the instructions will change from “Slap!” to “Die!” As one would expect, the intended solution to this minigame would be to figure out how to kill your poor character within the time limit. Obviously, there will be a lot of setup necessary for this new mode, such as keeping track of how many times the player won the minigame before allowing inverted mode, or providing a visual indicator for more experienced players. More updates will be coming in the near-future about this neat feature.

Happy holidays to everyone!