Tiki Tandems - 1v1 Couch'd

This was a journey and a half for me. I've mentioned M3DS here before; An indie gamedev/academy that teaches various development cycles (Mainly for 3D artists, non/organics, Scene renders and 1 year is reserved for Game Development).

I've personally known some of the people working there and I was contacted to join their team to help with development on their internally developed video game titled Tiki Tandems. To be more specific, I was to help with developing the multiplayer system for the game. I've also been tasked with aiding the team help students in need, that have issues with their projects, specifically for Unreal Engine related issues.

It was a big challenge for me. I've had tinkered with network connectivity and both the EOS/Steamworks APIs before, but never on this scale. From the initial planning phase, what we could conclude was the following: The project itself had to be rewritten to make up for the lack of replication (with this comes optimization, bug-fixes, etc.) and we had to create a plan for the release of the game on multiple platforms (Add a tutorial level, new character, skins, achievements, etc.).

The first part was the rewrite. Since the assets remain the same, we had half of the team work on new assets for the game (New UI elements, the new characters design and combat idea, concept art, fonts, etc.) and the other half work on rewriting the entire codebase with multiplayer in mind.

While the rewrite was in-progress, our part of the team was tasked with remaking the GameDev Academic year to account for the new changes and adding the multiplayer segment as part of the studies. I've never actually recorded classes or videos of the sorts before, so it was a fun new experience for me.

Unreal Engine is very multiplayer friendly, you'd be surprised. Making actors multiplayer-ready is as simple as turning on a few switches, but making them work properly is a whole different story. To spare you the details, all of the multiplayer logic that is required to make 2 actors talk between themselves "properly" lies within the engine itself, but outside of the Blueprints system. For this, we had to write a plugin in C++ that enables multiplayer crossplay and implements the various systems that both Epic and Steam work with.

Thankfully, Epic and Steam had detailed documentation for implementing the various systems they have, so it wasn't that hard to implement their systems in our game. We've implemented an authentication system, achievements, online save-game sync and crossplay capability. We wanted to implement voice/text chat, but considering we were targeting multiple platforms at once, we nixed the idea for the time being.

While we were nearing the completion of the project, the Rookies 2024 competition was starting yet again and we decided to use the game as an entree: Tiki Tandems

With the project completed and the game officially released on both Steam and Epic's Store, we had a small release party prepared where we had a small presentation about the development of the game, as well as several booths where you could come and try out the game yourself. Here are the links to both the Steam and Epic releases: Tiki Tandems - Steam and Tiki Tandems - Epic

After finishing the project, I moved onto creating an AI system using Unreal's AI system for NPCs for an internal project that's still ongoing, but due to leaving the company I cannot divulge any further details.