Over the past two months, Project Genesis has seen a lot of changes. If you’ve been following the social media channels, especially Twitter, you’ll have seen a regular stream of content from 8 Circuit Studios highlighting some of the progress the Project Genesis team has been making.
HUD Exploration
Balancing what information is placed on the screen and how it is presented is generally a highly iterative process. Design must contend with how to provide the maximum view of the environment while also providing information that is pivotal to the player.
In Project Genesis, the developers have the added challenge of ensuring a seamless transition between the expansiveness of epic space combat to the claustrophobic close quarters combat while in FPS mode. They have begun exploring options. There is still a considerable amount of work to do in this area and they’d love to hear your opinions on what kinds of HUD’s you think really hit the mark.
Network Code
In addition to employing a rapid development model, the team has a history of tackling the bigger challenges in game development first. In this case, after rapid prototyping out some initial-phase net-code prior to the holidays, it was time to refactor and build out multiplayer in a more robust fashion.
Four vs Four…and More!
The team’s objective for the January 2019 milestone was to achieve 4v4 matches. They knew that it was overly optimistic to expect more than that with this first iteration. After some extensive internal testing they felt the code was sufficient to offer a playtest to their trusted ambassadors in their Discord channel. They also extended an offer to participate to other folks in the community who’ve demonstrated a keen interest, or who have been very engaged in conversations.
While there is almost always a bit of stress when letting anyone external to the core team test your extremely early product, Christian’s net-code exceeded expectations. In fact, the developers were even able to push into 5v5 territory with no significant networking issues. By all accounts the testers actually had a fun time getting their hands on the updates provided — especially around controls.
Here is a sample of some of the footage they recorded to get a sense for how these playtests go so you can see how the netcode is working for yourself:
For the full update notes, please visit here: https://www.projectgenesis.com/
Related: PROJECT GENESIS Releases Ambassador Playtest Video
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