Connected Game Development Blog #3 (29/03/2026)

After we all settled on our level concepts, the designers of the group started working on their block-out of the levels and I got to work on making the game itself. Since there weren't any written tutorials on the Photon website that fit what type of game we were making, I looked to their tutorial series on YouTube that covered the creation of a 3D multiplayer head-to-head platforming game.

Unfortunately, these tutorial videos were published a few years ago and since then, both Unity and Photon Fusion have both went through a number of updates which drastically changed how each of them looked and worked - I discovered this the hard way when attempting to follow along with the tutorial in a current version of Unity 6 not being able to get a crucial Photon Fusion script to work with another via the Unity Editor.

Since I felt that I had wasted enough time on bumbling about with Photon Fusion and Unity, I decided to follow the YouTube tutorials more-or-less word-for-word, installing the exact version of Unity 2022 (2022.3.19f1) that it recommends for the project, despite it being one of the versions of Unity with the infamous security exploit, which I felt wasn't worth worrying about at this stage (but could be worked on if I were to publicly publish the game).

Screenshot of an early version of the Temple level. The material for the trees were corrupted in the process of the level being sent over to me, which is what causes them to appear pink in this image.

After finishing the first video in the tutorial series, I received early versions of the desert town and temple levels from my group's designers which I used to test the functionality of the project thus far. Once I had tweaked the temple scene and some other parts of the project to allow for the level to be loaded through the in-game UI, I was able to create a build of the game to send to the group for them to test with me during an online meeting we had on 2nd March, and we were pleased to find that online interactivity between players appeared to work very smoothly, even though all the players could do at this stage of development was jump and move around.

Following our online meeting, one of the designers went straight to work on our group's multiplayer design ideation video, recording short clips of the build in action to demonstrate our current state of progress. After seeing the other groups' presentations the next day and noticing how polished most of them looked compared to ours, I was filled with a new sense of determination to continue work on the project and went straight back to following the tutorial series as soon as possible.

Screenshot of an early version of the Desert Town level.

Over the next few weeks, I implemented a level select tab in the main menu to allow the player to pick which scene they want to play in, added default player spawning locations, copied a projectile-launching input from a prior version of the project to the current one, assigning it to LMB (Left Mouse Button), and made a variant of it mapped to RMB (Right Mouse Button), with LMB launching a projectile that destroys itself upon colliding with anything and RMB launching a projectile that bounces off anything it collides with and explodes 5 seconds after being thrown.

I decided to make these actions act similarly to Worms' Rocket Launcher and Grenade weapons as a way to test how weapons would work in-game (even changing the model of the RMB action to a hand grenade), and I plan to change the mapping of LMB to act more like a traditional Fire action that Fires whatever weapon is selected, and will remove the RMB action once I've implemented a proper weapon selection menu.