I took a little break from Don’t Blow It this week to explore one of my simple game ideas via prototype. The basis of the idea was for a multiplayer game which takes player reaction time into account when resolving combat. So, I set to work making a two-player combat video game similar to Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Button Battle puts two players against each other, attacking and blocking until one player is left standing.  The combat is turn-based, where you choose to attack or block high/middle/low depending on how your opponent is attacking.  The quicker you react to block an attack, the more damage your next attack will do.  If you block correctly, you still take damage, but only half (no infinitely long games here).

After fulfilling my design goals rather quickly, it was clear that this would be a great candidate for testing my hand at networking integration.  Don’t Blow It will have networked multiplayer, so this would make for good practice.

I’ve been looking at RakNet for some time, since I’m not totally in love with my own networking library (and it’s so much work!).  RakNet does things in very much the same way that my own library does them, except with different names, more features, and fewer bugs.  It was no trouble at all getting it working (after fiddling to get a Linux build).  Here’s what it looks like now:

Okay yeah, that’s the same image as above.  What did you expect?  It’s just networking!

Button Battle also happens to be my first attempt at joint animation.  That system is pretty much limited to this game, but yeah, it works.

So, this game is good news for Don’t Blow It.  I have to slap on a title screen and credits and control setup, then it’ll be ready.