Using the power of MLAPI, I added multiplayer to my single-player game in a little over a day.
2:29 AM (AEST), October 2nd, 2021
Now that the progress updates are out of the way, it's time to talk about the next project I started, and that's getting back into the development of An Infestation.
An Infestation is a game I worked on almost exactly a year ago. It was one of the first projects I started working on in Unity after finishing university and I am very proud of it. Sadly I hadn't developed it further until this week because of a lack of motivation and ideas for how it could be fun. One thought that came to mind to address the fun problem was multiplayer; for something supposed to be scary, it might be fun to turn towards a player-versus-player experience like murder in the dark (A game I cherish from my childhood).
To get started, I needed to figure out how I would implement networking in my game. After a lot of research and experimentation with different techniques in Unity for multiplayer implementation, I settled on a simple solution called MLAPI, which seem to be the (new?) official system for doing networking in Unity. That's almost where this post ends; after a 15-minute video, I had it working! Obviously, the multiplayer isn't working 100% but still very impressive for something I was worried would take weeks.
Currently, the multiplayer of An Infestation consists of two player-controlled characters connecting over a network. Players can move and rotate independently, including the arm, and affect the Fog Of War of each connected client. The next plan for multiplayer features is full Field Of View and Fog Of War support with the vision cone (Players torch/light source) for each player, giving the game a sense of darkness and presence of other players in the world.
I got started in MLAPI by following SRCoder's video he published as a part of a series on MLAPI. I only watched the first two parts for what I needed, but I highly recommend his videos, found them very helpful!
Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYaNsGvyvIupxpecr4rZY9A
MLAPI Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJMXv5J4wf4
