It’s been a long 3 months of working on backend services, but I’ve made some excellent progress and am finally ready to show off this major update. To build on Devblog 9’s real-time multiplayer update, I’ve now incorporated full character persistence, authentication, matchmaking, and online services.
Character Persistence
Character progress can now be saved and persist through multiple sessions. Upon logging in, all characters belonging to an account will be displayed. A preview of each character will load with their respective gear and details, and once chosen, the character will be reloaded into the game with all of their previous data. This includes gear, stats, level, experience, and appearance. Spell and item slots will appear exactly as they were left during the previous session.
Authentication
In order for persistence to actually mean anything, authentication and player accounts must also be configured. Players can now use their defendthenightgame.com account to login to the actual client. Upon first login, a new game account will be created, and account properties like character slots will be assigned.
Matchmaking
In addition to saving progress between sessions, the client will now sync character progress between scenes, and these character properties will be visible to other players. Upon loading into the game, players can now speak with an NPC to queue for either solo or co-op Survival games. Solo games will start right away in a private instance, and matchmaking services are now being applied to the co-op queue to join characters of similar level. Once loaded into a co-op event, the game will wait for each player to join before starting the countdown to match start.
Bringing It All Together
These updates complete the full, networked game loop. It’s now possible to authenticate to a game server, create an account, create characters, explore the world, and play solo or co-op game events all in a continuous loop. It’s even possible to play events over and over until the max level of 50 is reached, and this can be achieved in one or multiple play sessions over time. Of course, there are many more game components and much content to still be added, tweaked, and optimized, but the core game loop is now complete. From here, I’ll finally be diving back into content creation and working on building out the character classes, various game modes, and environment art for new areas. I’ll also be working to refine combat and replace some of the placeholder art you’ve seen in earlier videos with new models, animations, sprites, and effects. With the heavy backend work out of the way, updates should come much more frequently now, and working on content will give me many more opportunities to share gameplay, so stay tuned!