Connected Game Development Blog #6 (28/04/2026)

Since I already smoothed out the vast majority of bugs and glitches that were plaguing Mechanical Mayhem over the past couple of days, I decided to try and polish it up a bit before the final submission this evening.

Since I never got round to implementing animations for the player characters, I took a stab at that, only to find that every animation save for the Idle animation lacked a rig for the player model, which meant that the Idle animation would be playing forever on repeat during the game, which I suppose is an improvement over complete stillness!

We did one more playtest this afternoon in order to record footage for the assignment submission, which - after having my player killed early in one game, forcing me to wait around and occasionally spot other players wandering around - made my idea of having each player be in control of a team of units instead of just one that much more appealing, especially since there being four players maximum meant that the splash damage of the Bazooka didn't mean much when the Sniper Rifle could do the same damage as it with much greater accuracy at infinite range, which led me to think that I should have given it a limited number of uses per game.

Despite my regrets, I knew that due to me being the sole programmer of the group and having this project be my first ever online multiplayer game, I was already at quite the disadvantage, which, in retrospect, led to development feeling rather stop-and-go, with our pitched idea for the game being just a little too lofty for me to achieve on my first try.

Nevertheless, I was proud of what we managed to achieve on the last few days leading up to the deadline, especially with this game being my first real endeavour into the world of online multiplayer game development.