Developer Log 8

Cleaning up the Lobby

This week I’m reporting in for Alex who has been hard at work on our new lobby system. This new system is going to provide a number of great benefits for our development pipeline as well as the future player base.

As a small development team we rarely have enough players for a full match of Constelleum. Because of this we often need to play with unconventional game configurations like two versus one. In order to do this we needed to restart the server with new parameters which just slowed things down. More recently we’ve been using this very simple lobby system depicted below.

This worked well enough for our last playtest, but is too feature light for our future needs. While Constelleum will largely be focused around its main gameplay mode, allowing players to create lobbies to fit their more specific needs has always been a part of our long-term goal. Enter the new lobby system.

Ooooo Ahhhhh.

As per usual this is a work in progress, but it’s a big step forward in having a lobby system that is more flexible and comparable to what you’d find in other games. With things like timer length, team count, and players per team users will be able to set up games for the number of players they have and play at the pace that they want. And for us developers it means less messing with the server and more time testing. A win for everybody!