It's been a bit since I've posted in regards to the development of the game, so I've decided that I'm going to start doing, at the least, bi-weekly devlogs. So hopefully I'll be able to start detailing more of what's going on, and showing off some of the progress we're making. 

At the moment, I've been a bit busy trying to get the team together, so we can start taking a lot of the placeholder stuff out, and putting actual content in. So far we've got quite a few super talented people working on the project, and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to post some of their stuff here soon.

Other than that, one big thing this week has been multiplayer. I recently released a build for everyone on the team to test out and give me their feedback on. Its main purpose was to show off a lot of what's already completed. One thing that was missing was the game's multiplayer mechanics. While the basics were working internally, I hadn't hooked them up to any kind of gameplay mechanics, as they weren't quite ready to show off.

This week not only have I been working on the fleshing out the multiplayer as a whole, but also integrating it into the game. While definitely subject to change, my current plan is to introduce a fusion between a standard multiplayer system and Dark Souls' summoning mechanic. Players will be able to connect to each others' games via hexaltars, where they can opt to "tether" their world, or in other words, let other players connect to it.

Once tethered, other players can see the open world, and join it through the same hexaltar.

The plan is to have players that join another's world receive unique rewards. This might occur when a co-op player helps defeat a tough enemy, boss, or complete some other event. Co-op players could get runes and weapon upgrades that are unique to co-op, although there might be some other, usually harder way to get them, given that some players may not be playing with a connection.

The best part of this is that it is all done via the multiplayer game coordinator, so there is no need for server setup or port forwarding. People should be able to connect to friends and randos super easy.

Direct co-op isn't the only planned mechanic I have so far in terms of multiplayer. Although PVP is still tentatively on the table for the demo, I have a few ideas for other mechanics that make use of the centralized game server. For example, one idea is to have a buff that spreads from player to player while they are connected. Something like, a player has increased health and damage, but if they die, the buff would go to the nearest online player, regardless of whether or not the players are actually playing together. Another one is to have a boss that grows stronger or weaker, depending on how many players the boss has killed. Or perhaps have players that were killed by the boss show up as ghosts that fight alongside him during the fight. Weird stuff like that.

Tune in next (next) week for more shit.