Happy Birthday Polystrike!

On June 1st, 2017, I published the first build of “Blocky FPS”, a simple first person shooter that I made simply to have a little fun with friends, especially since I couldn’t play “our” game. It was on a small little website I made with this free website builder just so I could easily host the files for my friends. Then as we were playing it something happened that hadn’t happened with any of my other crappy games I made. We were actually having fun! I then set forth to add more features to Polystrike, and eventually it turned into Build #010, which was a programming disaster due to my inexperience at the time.

Right, enough history, let’s talk what’s new!

• Completely redesigned UI

• Completely different networking system. We’re using Photon Unity Networking (PUN) rather than the built in Unity Networking (UNET). This means servers have almost 100% uptime!

• New guns, AK-47 (Modeler: lightpower26) and P-2 (Modeler: StephenTAM30). I’m trying on some modeling and it’s doing ok…

• Broken ladders! (Not on purpose, we just didn’t make code for them yet :P)

• Character control is definitely a lot smoother

• Localization! We noticed that Polystrike was being downloaded from several other countries and decided to let you guys play in your own language. Note that other players’ usernames may not be in your own language

• Polystrike will be on the Windows Store! We submitted our application on the 29th of May… ran into a few roadblocks but we should be on there by next week!

• Due to Windows Store requirements, we had to answer a few questions to get Polystrike rated by several rating boards. I won’t list them all, but ESRB has us officially rated as Everyone 10+ (Fantasy Violence), and PEGI at 7+ (Mild Violence)!

Here are a few noted bugs. If you ever find a bug while playing, PLEASE PUSH Shift+Alt+B!! It will send us a detailed bug report sending the specs of your PC and a snippet of the console log.

• Up and down rotation of the character will break after switching weapons

• Other players may be jittery or slow to move

• Walking, running, and jumping animations do not load

• Sometimes you are suddenly jerked out of the connection. May be caused by slow internet. Haven’t tested that yet.

Also, to celebrate Polystrike’s birthday, we published a separate package containing the first build ever made of Polystrike! No dedicated servers will be made for it, and it is very limited. It will be taken down on the first of July.