I can no longer be called Particle Man. Over the last few days I have changed and evolved. I have become something more. I no longer remember the warm embrace of the particles I once began this journey on. More than man, but less than a god, I have become … MULTUIPLAYER MAN!

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I’m working on multiplayer now.

The idea for multiplayer came one late afternoon when Jackripperz, Artskillz, Dredex and I were working on the game. For idle chat, we would talk about things we would like to potentially add to the game. The idea for a versus mode came up and being the master coders Jackripperz and I are, we surmised that it would be possible to implement though a little tedious. Little did I know during that time, that Jackripperz would through me on it almost immediately!

It seemed like a daunting task at first, but Jackripperz laid out the game plan for me. I’m slowly implementing the systems that are in the main game into the versus with some minor additions. There’s a somewhat functioning select screen where a player one a controller and one on the keyboard can select a … colored block. The block will either be other characters or weapons. One both the players have made the only choice available to them (submit and die) a count-down timer appears and after it reaches 0, it goes to a stage like Final Destination from Super Smash minus everything from Super Smash. It’s a rectangle. The two player characters appear and it’s a competition to see who can fall off the platform as fast as they can. So far, the only systems I have implemented are the gravity and the ability to move left and right.

Long term with the versus system, the player and opponent should be able to choose their character, then their weapon set and duke it out on selectable stages based on the main game. The number of players fighting could be greater than two though this needs a bit of balancing and play testing before we make any solid promises. I have ideas of my own for multiplayer beyond just a versus system, but I need to pass them to the team before saying anything.

I’m working on the bare bones now, but if this goes well, we plan on adding in a co-op feature too. I don’t want to make any empty promises, but if we do decide to do co-op we would probably do enemy waves. The players would fight off waves of enemies with the occasional special or boss enemy.

It sucks that I can’t show anything from the current build of the game (You artists are so lucky!) but trust me when I say that its shaping up to be something worth checking out when the alpha rolls out.