Today's update introduces two new minigames - Plinko Panic, and Tile Bangers, along with refinements to Candy Brawl, Bubble Bumpers, Sumo Balls, Balloon Busters, Faceball, and other misc fixes. Party Panic is now translated to Turkish!
First up, the new minigames!
In
Plinko Panic you fight against your friends and collect goober heads falling from above!
Tile Bangers (great name right?) is a mix of two other minigames. In this one you're in a bubble and have to roll over the tiles to active them as your colour, gaining you points, while banging into your opponents!
Refinements
Candy brawl always stood out to me as one of the less interesting games, so in an attempt to make it more intense I added BOMBS!

The refinements for the other games (Bubble Bumpers, Sumo Balls, Balloon Busters, and Faceball) are all redone with a new, and in my opinion improved, networking model. While it still has issues all these games play much better online as you no longer have to wait for the server to receive your inputs before you see your player move, now you move and it feels responsive. However, there was a tradeoff that had to be made for this responsivenese and that's sometimes you'll see your players 'pop' or jitter a little bit when the server disagrees with where you should be and corrects your position.
I'm still working to improve these games more, but having: Responsive controls, minimal lag, responsive collisions, and physics that stay in sync on every players screen is a very hard problem to solve. I'm not sure I can solve all 4 of those things without giving up one. This is a problem every networked physics game has, and these minigames have given me a lot of problems to get working well online, but I'm not giving up!
Anyways, I think these physics-based ball minigames play a lot better now online. This version of Party Panic is built on Unity 2017.1b7, and while it's a beta version of unity, it was the first version to expose the physics things I needed to try and improve the game. This beta is very stable, and the only minor issue I've found with it is _sometimes_ one sound effect will randomly play a bit louder than others, but it's infrequent and not really an issue for now.
In addition to the minigames, there's also a few other minor things. See the update notes for a full list of changes
Patch Notes
- New Minigame - Tile Bangers
- New Minigame - Plinko Panic
- Minigame Changes - Candy Brawl bombs
- Minigame Changes - Faceball online physics
- Minigame Changes - Faceball online physics
- Minigame Changes - Sumoballs online physics
- Minigame Changes - Bubble Bumper online physics
- Minigame Changes - Balloon Busters online physics
- Matchmaking - Connect timeout increased from 15 seconds to 60 seconds
- Matchmaking - While attempting to join a game, the time left until timeout is displayed to the player
- Decreased the frequency in which the goobers would make random sounds from ~25s to ~40s
- New Language - Turkish
For more info and previous patch notes see the forum thread
here
//Dylan
[ 2017-06-22 14:04:26 CET ] [ Original post ]