Garden of Eden

Networking! Really fun stuff, right? Well, apparently I thought so when I was starting this project. If I still thought that by the end, well, let's just say I stopped after a certain point. And didn't really want to continue.

This project fits in weirdly in the timeline, because technically, I started working on Kingdom of Rage first. Then I got a new job and moved away, so I had to put the project on haitus. So I worked on this for a while after moving since there wasn't any money being spent on it.

Another really interesting project with a really interesting story. I don't have any gameplay to show here, because unfortunately, this project was mostly back-end stuff - figuring out networking and the like. However, it had a lot of really interesting ideas.

The basic premise was that it was an action-rpg in the same vein as Monster Hunter. I got obsessed with Monster Hunter World at around this time, so this project was a result of that. You start in a "hub" area, picked a quest, then left with up to four people on a hunt to fight a monster and return with its materials. You then used those materials to upgrade your weapons and armor, and rinse and repeat, ad infinitum.

I never got to the actual gameplay part. I stopped around the "four people in your group" part. That being said, I was successful with networking! It did work! Just implementing it in a robust way that worked with the gameplay I had in mind was hard. Hard enough that I gave up.

It started with small stuff...

...and got gradually more complex, until I could handle an arbitrary amount of users at the same time.

That's three clients at the same time in that last video, though they were all on localhost. I did manage to get it working with people over the internet, but I unfortunately failed to get a video of it. It included a chat log, too, so you could type and send messages to other people.

Finally, the other interesting thing about this project, was that I aimed to have a fully-functional game engine with it. Which meant editing and everything. So the game has a fully built in editor, which I made in an IMGUI library that I also wrote myself.

Tile map loading, entity adding, property editing, it had it all. Everything would be reflected in-game once you pressed the play button (though it isn't visible in this video.) It would even save and load the worlds from files. It's one of the things I'm most proud of, and it's very functional. I might even end up coming back to the engine some day to make some other game in it, though I'm not sure it will be Garden of Eden or not. It's a good game concept, but... very ambitious.