This was a semester. So since the year was going at the speed of 2020, I need to remember the past three months of my life, which is about six months long. So what progress has been made?
We now have a worm that chases you and ropes you in. It also has some pathfinding, so if you’re hiding behind that wall it will find a way to get to you. This was originally the ball pit from my prior game, Rat Race. I wanted to isolate it and have it work server-side as opposed to only the client seeing the tentacling event.
Now since online games and responsiveness don’t exactly go hand in hand, let me let show you what the server sees.
The balls in the ball pit and the rope itself is drawn client-side. The head of the rope, the piece with the smiley face on it, follows that sphere that the server is controlling. Since the head of the sphere is the only piece that interacts with the player and environment in any meaningful capacity, the rest of the worm I can create client-side and not have to worry about lag from replication.
I have a couple other toys I was working on this semester, just for fun but definitely assets I can use in my final project. The picture above, while I can’t get a video right now, is a seamless infinitely-looping staircase. I entered the stairwell from the door my friend Seth is at, went up to the stairs, and at that halfway break I managed to wind up back where I started. If you move the stay still and move the camera around it also shows that the floor above and the floor below are one and the same.
In that same testing grounds as the stairs, I recreated the Super Mario 64 painting gag from Rat Race because a couple people asked for a tutorial on how I did it. Check it here.
So what next? I have the toys and tools; now let’s make the game. The worm came from improving the ball pit, and I turned it into something fun to run away from. Tech demo games do have their tiny niche on the Roblox platform, but I can expand upon this and create a gameplay loop involving that tendril.
I know literally nothing about Roblox. Couldn’t tell you a single thing about it. Nonetheless, I like where this is going. Nothing too fancy going on here also, which I like. Simplicity can be key.