Development on the Steam version of Anarchy Arcade is in progress. Many of the great new features and improvements to come required the design of Anarchy Arcade to be altered down to its core. Features such as multiplayer, user hubs, Steam Community, and security improvements. This is the 3rd time that this project has undergone a major renovation, and each time it has been substantially improved. With the new features & improvements coming to the Steam version, this will be the best Anarchy Arcade ever.
Getting Started – Week 1
Being greenlit opened the door to a huge amount of features available through the Steam network. The first week of development involved a whole lot of research and taking a hard look at what features would best benifit the players of Anarchy Arcade.
Other considerations such as multiplayer and security improvements also required lots of research to plan out fesable solutions to issues that are going to need to be addressed further down the road.
All of these design changes require a lot of effort to make sure they don’t clash with other areas of the design. As a programmer, this means lots and lots of flowcharts and UML diagrams. With that being said, there aren’t any flashy new screenshots to show off. However, the core design of the Steam version of Anarchy Arcade has been resolved and for the last few days I have been able to dive into actual C++ coding.
In the prototype, multiplayer was added as an after-thought. This lead to limitations in the prototype, such as not being able to spawn new shortcuts during a multiplayer game. The Steam version’s design sorts out all the logistics caused by spawning new shortcuts during multiplayer and will provide a far richer social experience.
I have been coding the backbone of how shortcuts are kept in-sync in multiplayer games. This starts getting complicated when you consider that some things (such as the location of a game’s EXE) are different for each user and not synced, while the URL of a website IS something that you’d want synced. Rather than bore you (even more) with flowcharts or diagrams at this stage of development, I’ll just get back to programming and work on moving the project to a more screenshot-friendly stage of development. 🙂