Week 4 - Daniel Correia

This week we started by receiving 2 new members in our team, a pair of game writers.

Afterwards we focused this week on the core technical challenges of our game and prototyping, we started by discussing which game engine we would use to make the game and concluded that we would use Unity. Then I was tasked to tackle the technical challenge on how players would join our game, meaning how we would implement a multiplayer system.

There are 2 main ways to have communication between 2 different computers, one is by using a dedicated server that relays the communication between the 2 computers, the other is by using a peer-to-peer connection. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but the main ones are that to have a dedicated server you need to host one which costs money and to have a peer-to-peer connection due to NAT both hosts need to be in the same network or use some complex techniques in order to bypass NAT.

While searching on how to implement multiplayer in Unity I found a asset called Photon Unity Network 2 that gives you an option to have a dedicated server for free allowing up to 20 simultaneous players online. This seemed a good option to solve our multiplayer problem.

To test it would work well for our problem I was tasked to make a low fidelity, high functionality prototype where 2 different players could join a same room. Although it took some time to understand how to use PUN2, in the end I got it working and made a UI to create and join rooms based on similar coop games I recently played. The end result was a working prototype where nobody had troubles joining the same room.