On Sunday I did some proper LAN play testing. The basic game mechanics are all working and synchronising nicely over the network. I’ve now got a whole lot of notes on minor bugs and issues, and game mechanics that need to be tweaked, but none of it is serious stuff. No crashes, no major synchronisation issues, no terrible problems with the game mechanics, and my playtesters didn’t want to stop playing which has to be a good sign.

The game’s still a ways from being publicly testable because I’ve got to set everything up in just the right way – player’s can’t join after a game starts yet, and they can’t quit either. Cleaning up properly after people quit should be easy enough but correctly synchronising everything when people join mid-way through a game will be more difficult, mainly due to how players can transition between different states in the game as they’re playing (in-game, evac in progress, build screen after evac, waiting for respawn…). That’s not necessarily needed in time for demoing at events like PAX though.

I did a quick 1v1 playtest on Saturday and as I suspected, the DustBowl map was way too big for games with few players, so I threw together a sort of mini version in literally about an hour:

“SmallMap.” It’s sort of a figure 8 with a plain untextured bridge in the middle. This is not a map that’ll be in the game – I’ll make something better that’s not a blatant copy of the DustBowl map, but might have a similar layout.

On Sunday I had a couple of people over to play a three-player game. The map actually played well apart from some awkward terrain around the bridge area. And here’s some video of it!

Yes, I’m still using a 4:3 monitor. And a trackball mouse.