I wasn’t totally sure how to title this post. It’s Week 1 of the second semester of re[Mod], and we’re gearing up to take this project from its current pre-production state to something final and complete by the end of April.

Over the break, we made a lot of plans for how we want to improve and finish this game. Some of them are a little loftier than others. Our ideas include up to 20 new weapon parts, three potential game modes, different maps for 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 player games, and a suite of environment and narrative changes. There are also several backend changes that I would like to make, including a total overhaul of how players find and connect to games. I am very excited to work on a “lobby” feature later in the semester that will allow players without any familiarity with the game to pick it up and play.

This first week is going to be focused on largely behind-the-scenes items though, including the ability to quit and join multiple matches without having to restart the executable. There was previously a bug in the way the NetworkManager was being cleaned up and reset between scene loads/reloads, with the result being that trying to join multiple games would leave the player stuck on a “Connecting…” screen without any way to get out of it. This turned out to be extremely simple to solve, but just hadn’t been a priority last semester when we were focused on getting a playable prototype ready.

This week is also the first real week of work for the newest members of the team, and it’s going to be an interesting challenge getting them all up-to-date and into the flow that our team uses. I am confident that by the end of the semester, we’re going to have some great things done!