I've finished the most recent minigame, Motoracing. It took almost a month to get done, with everything that's happened over the past month or so, things have definitely slowed down, but that's not to say I gave up. The Lucky Hive is nearing completion, the game is feeling better than ever and I am really excited to finish this game.

The motoracing minigame is a ton of fun and honestly, I'm probably going to use its code for a future game. It feels absolutely incredible on controller, and I can't think of an arcade racer that uses motorcycles outside of bikes being used in a normal racing game (like Midnight Club 3).

The last minigame is currently called "Pokerology". It's like a wizard-esque style slot machine but with poker hands that you have to click and answer as fast as you can, attempting to rack up more points than your opponent before the time expires. It's a mental game to see how fast you can read a hand.

Once Pokerology is done, I'm going to overhaul the character behaviour and interactions to massively refine their AI in decision making, minigame play, gesturing & interactions with human players (and each other) when making decisions. Currently they sit stiff like automatons and suddenly get really emotive once they win a hand or get eliminated, but they should feel super emotive all the time. I've been playing Poker Night at the Inventory and it's given me a ton of feedback on what makes that game great and character interaction is number 1 on that list.

As for marketing, I haven't done anything serious yet. I'm going to start writing a script and recording more footage of the dev process for this minigame. I find it super daunting to want to record and put a video out there, but I know it needs to be done.

Anyway, I've pushed the game's release date back a bit. I was hoping to have it done by July 10th, but that's almost a month ago and work has been pretty full on lately too, so hoping to get the game done by EOY.

My beloved cat, Kubrick, passed away at 9:16am this morning. I flew home to my parent's place yesterday after being told he was diagnosed with large cell lymphoma and was not responding well. He was given opioids and steroids, but it didn't change anything.

He was so cold this morning. I carried him around the backyard, showing him the places he used to love rolling in, lying in and sitting in. He was ready to go. I'm just glad I could be there with him.

I was there the day we got him, I was there the day he left us. He was only 12 years old. God have mercy on his soul, I can't bare the thought of him being gone. I've had many down days in my life and even just the thought of him has brought me back. I don't know what how I can live with this.

Rest in Peace Kubrick, I'll never forget you.

First Minigame Going In

I've decided to improve the gameplay of The Lucky Hive by adding in fun minigames with challenge modes to increase the PvP aspect of the game. I'm thinking of adding in 5-8 minigames on release, maybe 2-3 for the demo. These games are designed so that you can verse someone to gain chips, steal their hand, force them to fold or to get back into the game once eliminated (there's a waiting period for eliminated players, then perma-eliminated if you get ousted twice (I'm also thinking of making you get about 25% of the starting amount back once you get eliminated)).

All Demo Maps Done

Got 4 maps coming on the release of the demo. I rewrote the codebase so that everything wasn't bundled into one map, but instead is self-contained, so the environment and cutscene cameras can be scene specific. This enables for better containment of code, but also re-use in different maps. Working on an old school PS2-style game map selector with a little video preview to show you what the map is like. I'm pretty happy with 2 of them, one feels a little bland but I think that's just because of the fact there's little geometry outside of the skybox and planet in the distance.

These added maps also let me learn and experiment with new mechanics (namely day/night cycles, lighting, Godot's limit for large scenes (such as drawing shadows at extremely long distances) and more optimisation stuff.

Polish & Rush For June 4th

Just trying to cram in as much content as I can for the demo. Steam gave me some feedback about the build and the demo store page, which definitely needs a full overhaul, particularly once one or two of these minigames are completed. There's so many little things that I need to capture for the store page that games do, like UI-less shots of gameplay etc.

Anyway, here's some screenshots of those maps and a little WIP demo I had tonight learning IK stuff within Godot (also learned how badly I've handled animation libraries and animation mixing in the game so far, practically have to rewrite the whole thing before demo launch).

I haven't posted an update in almost a month, but the gameplay trailer has been released and I've submitted the demo for review for Steam's NextFest!

Super keen to keep making updates to The Lucky Hive, expanding the gameplay in particular. I am placing a ton of focus on getting emotes, more AI character dialogue, events, multiple maps and character customisation options in before the demo is released in about a month's time. If I can hit all of these targets, the game will be almost fully complete, which would be unbelievably amazing.

Wishlists have stagnated, which is kind of sad, but I'm not super fussed over it since I'm mainly focused on just making a game that I am proud of. It doesn't really matter if people buy it or not, just that the people who play it like it and I am proud of it.

Here's the link to the trailer as well, hope you like it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-akp9v4lIAg

So we have a new game intro, new features in The Lucky Hive (like game chat, some new animations and cutscenes) and a slew of bug fixes. Alongside this comes more and more playtesting from our close friends, which is all gearing up for a demo release, trailer and participation in NextFest this June.

Here's a teaser of our new game intro cutscene

It's been a while since my last post, so here are some updates regarding The Lucky Hive's developments. These include:

1. Lots of new multiplayer features and quality-of-life improvements for latency and animations

2. A whole new Showdown system (v4)

3. New UI components, generic functionality for notifications and other system-level information players might need to know about

4. New animations and sound effects for different events, mainly relating to the Showdown and gameplay

5. A new winner's podium cutscene with facts about the gameplay, best hands of the game and other cool stuff

6. Mid-joining of games and leaving

The game is in a really good spot now. It's nice and stable, performing really well on my Steam Deck, the game feels smooth, which means I can now focus on more gameplay ideas at improving the aspect of Poker and adding in more mechanics.

New winner's podium is going into the game. This is the room where, when players have won, they will be taken here with a cutscene or two playing before their stats, podium finishes and other fun facts are handed out by the dealer. This is supposed to be a really joyous occasion, considering I would imagine the average game going for at least 15-20 minutes, if not longer in some cases (especially with really large starting chip amounts).

Overall the game has been going really well, I've finished the new Showdown V4 system that I rewrote from scratch again, so that was fun. The game is in a really healthy spot now and I'm super happy with how things have been progressing. Very keen to get a demo out on Steam in the next month and get onto marketing the game!

Poker Night at the Inventory was just re-released on Steam again after being off for years and years. What a great game. I've been watching a lot of old footage of old Poker Night games and have been really impressed at how much fun they are. It's given me a lot of inspiration in improving The Lucky Hive's animations and general world interactions between players and NPCs. It's also made me want to challenge myself to replicate the level of polish that those games have.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer is almost done. I have been making tremendous strides in understanding how Steam's relay networking system works vs a true P2P experience, so that has been a lot of late nights debugging and learning the hard way. Syncing has been a massive issue, alongside coordinating what data/decisions/actions peers can own vs what the host takes control of (things like timers, money amounts, animation emitting, handling of player data in general).

I believe the only thing that is needed now is handling sudden disconnects, players quitting mid session (and during their decision), host lag for receiving decisions and just unplanned/undefinable behaviour at the network level.

Player Eliminated Logic

One big thing that is important is what happens when a player gets eliminated. Obviously that player cannot play the next hand, but do we offer buy ins? Do we allow them to queue up their buy in for the following hand? What about just quitting the game straight away? All questions that need to be answered very soon.

The screenshot I've attached is part of the Slugman's nonchalant response to being eliminated.

Animation System Revamp

There's a lot to do in terms of improving the animations in the game. Not only do a lot of animations generally need some tuning, but the way that animations get played in game need much improvement. I started putting in animations by just playing the animation directly through its animation player. If you know anything you'll understand why that's a terrible idea. The dealer and other worldly objects with animations all use state machines and blend trees, but not the characters. So this is something that is definitely getting some focus over the coming weeks.

New Ideas

I've had a flurry of new ideas for The Lucky Hive over the past couple of weeks. New game modes, cutscenes, character selection methods, multiplayer mechanics and other things that improve the fun and flow state for the game.

These changes will definitely be implemented in the game, especially the things that improve the worldbuilding and gameplay within the Hive.

Demo Release Planning and Trailers

Once I've finished this round of development (by round I mean large sweeping changes of the end-to-end experience, I'll probably look at making a trailer and getting a demo of the game setup. Will have to learn how to market a game because I've never done this before, let alone been any good at selling).

I will be making a dev log video on YouTube about this probably today or tomorrow, but essentially I'm learning the hard way that you should absolutely build multiplayer games with multiplayer logic first. Making the entire game work with dummy AI characters first and then trying to retrofit it with MP-oriented code will not work well.

Essentially I'm going to have to rewrite the entire codebase for The Lucky Hive to work with multiplayer by mirroring file names for things like singletons and scripts, then implementing it with RPCs, then attaching that new script to the scene to take over. Once that's done, we should be good haha.

Always build multiplayer games with multiplayer-focused code FIRST.

Spent a weekend in Sydney learning Remote Procedure Calls and getting a working demo for The Lucky Hive up and working (just lobby wise), building upon the video demo in my last post.

Now that it's up and running, I've built the new lobby 3D assets and am working on getting it all scripted and running. Sound effects are, funnily enough, probably going to be the hardest thing to get right since I've got the visual design for the game well defined now.

Will post more updates when things are ready. Once MP is done and I can start playtesting, I'll issue some beta keys to some friends, we'll see if the game is fun and then the announcement trailer shall commence.

Below is a screenshot of the WIP new game lobby (before cutscenes are hooked up and UI elements are made).