Progress on my multiplayer upgrades.

Last blog I gave a plan for my first 14~18 days of Multiplayer upgrades.

1) Add an option for the player to play Demons instead of Knights,

2) Add mapping from controllers to either Knights or Demons

3) Modify the game UI to handle 2 players playing on the same board.

4) Make a local lobby for players to set up who plays which side and any handicapping between players.

It is now 17 days and I have completed item 1) and did some refactoring for items 2) & 3) of code that needed to be changed to make demons playable. I also started the on a local 2 player lobby. No surprise, I will not complete 2, 3 & 4 in the next to 2 days. If I get 2 done I would count that as a win. The trick of mirroring the whole map by scaling the world by (-1,1,1) worked. Unity logs some warnings about having negative scales in collider may not work as expected. I tested the colliders and they worked fine so I guess Unity's hack for negative scale covered my use cases. Working with controllers on a Mac is a pain, mainly because Macs don't really support many controllers and often need various hacks to get them working. Also, Apple is not really clear about what exactly works with which Mac and which version of OSX. The Main reason I am way behind is I found my graphics really suck for a demon player. The demon side is dark and hard to see. This is fine when playing the Knights because you aren't solving puzzles in a dark area with dark terrain. It looked OK when playing on my large high contrast Apple studio display but was not playable on my dim small old 13" MacBook. So I decided

1) To put some bright magic demonic sigils on the buildings using decals in Unity.

2) Then I decided these magic sigils would be for showing who owns the building. 

3) That means I don't need to use building Texture/Colors to show ownership.

4) So I can change the code related to changing a building's appearance depending on ownership

5) So  Ino longer need exactly 3 textures for each building. This is good because some of the demon textures were too dark.

6) So I can use 1 or more textures for every building and can randomly select one each game. Good for more visual variety in any level but looking a textures and choosing ones eats a lot of time. 

I did not have any of this in my plan. I also realised a lot of the time I spent choosing exactly 3 textures for each building was wasted.

My new estimate is adding 5~8 to my original 18 day estimate for 2 player local gaming. Getting two cursors on screen each behaving slightly differently depending on if they are the Knight or Demons cursor is the big unknown. I think it is mostly complete but I have had both on screen at the same time. If my estimates for remote multiplayer are right I still be ready for Steam NextFest a day or two. early. Well worst case I will have local 2 player mode ready. Now I need to get a DualShock 4 they are supposed to work with Macs ( by some sources but not others) and Steam has check boxes for whether you tested with DualShock (USB) and DualShock (USB + Bluetooth). I do have a Windows laptop I use for testing but it is not my preferred development platform.

P.S. Just remembered adding more random elements will break parts of my tutorial, since even with the same seed for the RND I will get different building and tile IDs in the tutorial. I thought of this when adding the random sigils but did not write it down on my todo list so forgot. Not a big fix.

new screen shot with  sigils on buildings