A New Collaborative Project!

For some time, me and two friends and fellow developers, John Wheatman and Daniel Dennis, have discussed potential game development projects that we could work on together. We have been through MOBAs, FPSs and RTSs, as well as a number of other genres that could conceivably provide a fun development experience with the potential for a full release through the distribution program Steam. Most of these ideas have either been lost to the vast wastes of left behind ideas, but recently, we were provided with an opportunity.

Unity opened up the ability a couple of weeks (or maybe months? I'm unsure) to have multiple developers work on the same project through a 'Collaborations' feature. It allows the syncing of files over Unity's cloud servers so that the project can be edited by all three of us without having to use Dropbox or google drive to store the data, and removes the large upload times that using those methods would entail. This feature, however, is in a closed beta. But, I applied anyway, and we were granted access to the beta feature! It works fantastically, and while having a couple of technical difficulties stemming from being unable to connect to the cloud servers from time to time, it works perfectly and is very well optimised.

So, perfect! The stage was all set for our first collaboration project (well, besides helping each other in college, but we won't mention that cause those games generally sucked ass and were more tech demos then anything). Our basic premise was an RTS-MMO hybrid that would allow players to build armies and defences, and then attack other random players to topple their kingdoms because...I don't know, maybe they're assholes, maybe we didn't think of a reason besides 'killing is fun'. But either way, we had our premise, and after an in-depth discussion we've made decisions on most of the units and buildings that will be present. It's also worth noting that, as per John's suggestion, this will be medieval themed, so units, buildings and gameplay will be themed as such.

Our roles for this project will be me providing networking code (I've used Photon Unity Networking (PUN) a bunch before in a number of different games, so we'll be using that for this too) as well as models, animations and most scene-related stuff, some AI work, plus making things look pretty. Dan will be our main coder, though I'll be helping him every now and again, as will John, though I imagine i can coax him into helping me with some textures and things further in. John is there to look pretty, and maybe tell me how inaccurate to real life my unit models are (I already got told off for accidentally labelling a catapult as a trebuchet).

Anyway, more info is to come, but as I want to split it up into posts, it will probably be in the next one. FYI if anyone from Bungie or Dice read this and decide that you want to hire this coding and graphical genius based on what you see here, hit me up.