Weekly 2: Gameplay Fundamentals

03 July 2020, Ecen

After finishing the great refactoring last week, our primary focus is on getting the fundamental gameplay elements into place. Most of Network: OVERRIDE is console-based, but there is one central graphical component: the network map. Algot has been taking the lead on this one but since there has been quite a few things to fix with basic rendering you will likely hear more about it next week.

Meanwhile I have implemented a new network model. We spent a lot of time developing the old one, but it turned out to be way too complicated and ill-suited for our purposes at the same time. Mostly stemming from that we tried making it more realistic behind the scenes than what could be noticed when actually playing the game.

The new model is simpler and was much quicker to implement, leaving me time to work on some of the first programs and components that can interact with servers over the network, like the login screen above. This has been quite informative since these are the first apps that makes proper use of our refactored rendering system. As such, coming up with good ways of building components is going to pay off in the long run as we build more of them.

All of this allows us to finally add some of the core gameplay functionality. That is, exploring the network, connecting to nodes on it and using a number of tools and programs to deal with their defences. More about this in the future!