Diary #1 - Conceptualization

13 November 2023

This is going to be a quick project, should not take more than a week's long worth of work (except maybe for Networking, which is something I'll learn on the way). Obviously with university work in the way it'll take a bit longer than that, but here's the idea:

The idea is to build a lightweighted soccer game of where two teams of food items, with each human player controlling one entity, play a 2v2/3v3/4v4 match. I probably won't monetize this project, especially in the wake of the announcement of Unity's controversial pricing plans, which is the engine I'll be using to build this. The intent is to make a casual and fun game rather than a complex competitive game, so no rankings or pay-to-win or any of that with a light touch of comedy.

Players would only work with three to four controls (analog move, pass, shoot, maybe a third type of passing), and initially we'll have walls so the ball will never go out of bounds, though free kicks, penalties, and other set pieces and rules could be worked on post-release. 

I'm still weighing the options for what sort of networking methods we could use, as I have never worked on an online multiplayer game. I could go for a client-to-server method as it makes contextual sense here, but then we'd have to deal with the expenses of hosting a dedicated server and later the burden of maintatining it. Peer-to-peer or LAN could be a feasible options, though we'd run into problems if we start working with groups of players that are not within a certain circumference. I'm mostly inclined to having a client-hosted server model, which is similar to the client-server model but the main difference being that one of the machines connected acts as both the server and the client. 

I could see networking being a real pain down the road. The next steps here would be to make a few 3D models for the game, so we have something to work with and can prototype straight away.