Cross Purposes - a multi-player adventure game

hightreason

Made this little multi-player point and click adventure for Adventure Jam:

https://gamejolt.com/games/crosspurposes/340843

It's meant to be played by 3 players simultaneously. Although you can play it with 2 players or even as a single player. I'd recommend finding at least one other person to play it with to get the intended experience.

PhM

Look great! I'll try with a friend ASAP.

Can you please share about multi-player with AC?

PhM

Finally got there

Discussions are working nice on LAN. 

Looks like you used the Unity networking standard package.

How did you manage player vs NPC on each session?

hightreason

In a nutshell:

The NPC replacements (for when a character doesn't have a player controller) are separate NPC characters. All cutscenes in the game are parameterized, and I run them with code, sending in the characters as parameters. The game knows who is being played by a player and who is not, so if they are not, it sends in the NPC version, if so, it sends in the player version.

For the different players, it's a bit more difficult. They are all instances of the same prefab which has 3 different hotspot components on it, one for each character they could be. When the game starts, it decides which character you are and it removes all the other hotspot components and changes your animator to the one for your character (on the server side of course so this propagates to all clients). The player in the settings manager is not set at all, and the player prefab isn't tagged as "Player" I apply the "Player" tag with code only on the one client that controls that character, so it doesn't try to control the others as well.

There's a bunch more stuff going on but that's the basics.

PhM

Thank you some much!

I start to understand but it takes some time  

Just to let you know: I had a bug once throwing only a blue screen and the 2 actions (stealth,lockpicking) when playing at the first time (and looking for a way to go faster to action when reading the text).

There's no switching at all when using multiple players? Wouldn't it have been easier? Or you tried and it doesn't work with networking?

hightreason

hmm ok. Yes I'm sure there are bugs. It was a 2 week jam game after all. If you have more info on exactly what caused it, let me know and I'll look into it.

You mean AC's player switching functionality? No that doesn't work. All network objects need to be instantiated by the server, not locally on the client as AC would do it. So there needs to be only one player prefab that represents all the characters, and then its characteristics are changed based on the character you are.

PhM

Actually I can redo the bug:

To throw it: ESC to the menu (plus network).

Create a new server and it comes back to this "scene".

hightreason

Ah yes. Actually I knew about that bug. You should quit and restart the application if you want to start a new game. You shouldn't even be allowed to quit back to the menu, but it's built into the Unet lobby and I need to remove it. I'll do that in a post-jam release.

PhM

Thanks again! I understand more and more.

Was it a jam where you can share the source by any chance?

Late last night I ended in front of the house, giving steak (and booze, and a cat, even chrome painting) to sleep the dogs but couldn't do more except release them. Too bad we can't save

Is saving a network issue too?

PhM

Was it a jam where you can share the source by any chance? 

That was a joke. Please don't feel pushed to share. I didn't want to hurt in any ways.

hightreason

I wouldn't really have a problem releasing the code except that it's not all that well structured honestly, it's kind of just loosely held together with bailing wire to get it out quickly for the jam. maybe if I decide to run further with this idea I'll create a Unity package that turns AC multi-player. But no promises on that.

And yeah saving would have been an enormous amount of work, and kind of doesn't make sense anyway since the game is multi-player. What if you load up a game, but the other players that were in it aren't there? and how does it know which player was who, what if they're playing from different IP addresses than they did the first time? All kinds of problems.

SPOILER: Giving the meat to the dogs is right but two people need to do it at once to distract both dogs. If you're playing single player, give some meat to an NPC character and they will automatically hold one of the dogs. Then you just need to get the other one.

PhM

Thank you for the help!

As one player, I tried that before but he didn't feed the dogs. Maybe I didn't do it right or didn't wait enough. Nothing's happened.

Even the project as is would greatly help, but, again, feel free to post it here, or MP or whatever.

hightreason

You may have tried giving the meat to the wrong character. Give it to Celestine. The Les NPC won't take it because he's the one who has to investigate the house once the dogs are distracted. Ideally I would have had a lot more messages pointing people in the right direction on this kind of thing, but... 2 week jam game. Barely got anything that worked up at all :-)

PhM

It's already a nice game. I'd be happy to get this in 2 weeks instead of spending months on blocking details