Hi there, here is another rare progress update on this game.

The development cycle of Party Animal is reaching it’s conclusion, and I am almost ready to begin trying to publicise it, although I don’t have much experience in that area, so it will hopefully be learning experience for me.

Quite a lot has been developed since I last posted, too much to mention in one post, so I will just try and tell you about a few of the more interesting ones;

Sounds and Music

A big improvement to the overall atmosphere of the game is the implementation of sounds and music. There are now sound effects for almost every aspect of the game, such as items bouncing, player movement, and obviously UI interactions. There is still around 5% of sounds left to implement, but that will not take long to finalise. I uploaded a video to youtube demonstrating some of the sound effects, which you can watch here. Keep in mind that this is an older version of Party Animal, so things have changed since this videos release.

Multiplayer Improvements

Another big feature implementation, which I feel was necessary to include before the games release, was the ability for players to request and receive resources from a server they are joining. These resources include maps, as well as the objects in that map, including the object’s sprite. This feature allows players to now join any server, without needing to first manually download and install the map being ran on that server.

All these objects and their sprites would be sent to a client that joined this server

Story Mode Completed

Finally, the biggest part of the game that has been finished is the development of the “Story Mode” maps that will be released with the first build of the game. If you are interested in seeing the process I used when developing these maps, I also uploaded a timelapse video of me using the improved in-game map editor tool to make one, which can be viewed here . These maps work in conjunction with the “Story” gamemode to offer a short solo gameplay experience. Keep in mind that this was never intended to be the main aspect of the game, and has been developed in order to offer a gameplay experience to anyone who is not able to properly enjoy the multiplayer side of the game. It takes an average of 50-60 minutes to complete, and offers a variety of examples of some functionalities and types of objects that can be created using the in-game editing tools.

I am proud of the effort I put in to making these parallax backgrounds

Whats next

The next few areas to be completed are mostly regarding multiplayer. Things such as hopefully implementing the Steam API in order to allow players to connect to multiplayer games through steam, as well as fixing a lot of bugs and optimising any lag that exists are going to be my main focus from here on out, while still doing minor adjustments and improvements to existing features.

I am aiming to release a finished game by the end of 2018, but I am not confident enough to set that time-frame for certain. If you are looking for some more consistent posts and updates, I try to post something at least once a month on our dev-blog. Hopefully this will be updated more often as I approach the release date of Party Animal.

Thanks for reading!

Infernobomb
twitter: theInfernobomb