Spoiler Disclaimer: If you’re like me – then you don’t want any spoilers about a game until you boot it up for the first time. In that case, I suggest to not read this blog! I promise to make important release / playtest information as separate posts.
Co-op
Feedback System
Happy New Year friends! 🎉🎉🎉And if it wasn’t a new year for you, then Happy Old Year! We’ve been busy as usual at Washbear so let me catch you up:
Systems like Co-op have a funny way of breaking if you ignore them for a long time while working on other aspects a game. We’ve spent the last few weeks getting Co-op back to a stable state and beyond! If you’re familiar with game development you know Co-op can be an endless nightmare. Let me share a few quirky and challenging aspects to what we’ve been battling with:
First we just needed to get our players connect through Steam, invite, joins, etc – and of course this means ensuring you and your partner have the head nod.
Synchronizing the train between players was a challenge. One of the fun aspects of Railborn is getting picked up by your friends..,.
...and subsequently left behind to die.
Synchronizing all building on the train! Your partner decides to start working on a 2nd story to your first platform – well, we better check you can destroy the floors under them. 😊
Why bring a friend along if they can’t mine copper for you? This means having in world resources disappear when harvested, and spawned remnants also sync between players.
Go. Stop. Go. Stop! All machines on the train, controls, farms, need to pass information between players of their state. Here you can see a fight over the train brake. Note: The animation of pulling the brake isn’t implemented, but this Gif shows two players changing the brake state.
This monstrosity of a train is from a private multiplayer test. The game crashed a lot for these poor souls. Notice the safety room to ensure the client player didn’t even interact or look with any aspect of the train to avoid risk of hard crashing. lawlz.
Feedback System 🗎
What is the point of asking folks to play Railborn if they aren’t able to easily give us their opinions on the game? Low and behold our feedback system! Players now can tell us about a bug they find or (more importantly) give us a suggestion. Don’t worry, all the information is anonymized. Our hope here is to receive as much feedback as possible to make Railborn the best version of itself.
/ItsHappening.gif!
Smashlore & Taky
Disclaimer: Any features we write about might change before and during Early Access.