Since that is the case, I will be rewriting the master server communication code entirely in favour of using persistent connections instead of connection on-demand. This might take a while – a week or two, at worst, with lovely 13 hour school days coming back up – but it’ll lay the foundation for several exciting new features that can be added in the future. (To name a few: friend notifications and messaging, possible NAT punchthrough, and dedicated servers!)

So all in all, while this might take a while, please bear with me. It’ll increase the overall stability of the master server as well as open up for future development.

And boy, more than one thousand registered players, with almost 24,000 matches played, in which four and a half million enemies have been killed? I’m thoroughly impressed!

Thing is, I’m not entirely certain what that will end up being, so I’m going to let you guys help me decide.

Dedicated Servers

Would be released as both a Windows and Linux binary, hopefully. This would help combat self-hosted games behind a router without forwarded ports. Could also allow for such things as scripted gamemodes later down the line. Would take a medium amount of time

Linux Client

Simple enough – a Linux build of the game client. I’ve attempted this earlier, but it was a wee bit too hard for me on the outset. As such, doing the dedicated server first might prove useful in giving experience. This wouldn’t require all too major changes to the codebase itself.

Mac Client

And for those of you who have been asking, I’d love to do a Mac client, but here’s the problem: I’ve no Mac to compile and test it on! Otherwise, the time investment should be about as much as for a Linux client.

Friends System

Having a friends list, possibly with a messaging system. Friends list itself isn’t that hard and would only take a moderate time to implement, but messaging system would require pretty much a complete rewrite of most of the client<->master communication code and drastically increase bandwidth requirements, which I’m not all too keen on.

NAT Punchthrough

Since you’re probably going “what?” – NAT punchthrough would attempt to open a connection to a server behind a router without the need for port forwarding. Would not work with all router configurations, however, but the definite majority. Again, possible complete rewrite of server<->master communication code.

New Weapons

Ak-74:s! The Burning Seal! Ruger 77! This could take anywhere from a moderate time to very long to implement depending on how complex the weapons are.

Post your opinions either as comments here or in the News section in the forums for more in-depth discussion!

Anyway! The Release Candidate was just released privately. What does this mean? This means that the release is creeping very, very close. If you want a more precise indication, unless there’s any really horrible bugs that somehow pop up from absolutely nowhere, expect Seal Hunter to be released within the next week. I’m sorry I’ve been so bloody slow in developing this, but life in general has kept me awfully busy – and it is well known that all programmers are lazy.

So there you have it – expect some multiplayer seal hunting goodness to hit the ‘net in a week’s time or so. And on a final unrelated note, we totally won the Gamer’s Choice award with Eggnappers at SGA2010 as well! Thanks a lot to everybody who voted for us.

See you online very soon!

The last few months have been hectic for me, including a frantic two week crunch for our school game project (featuring the game’s scripting engine exploding a week before the final presentation), traveling woes, my  computer not doing what I tell it to, and Company of Heroes automatching. Yeah, I need a bit of fun on occasion, too. :(

Where does this leave Seal Hunter, though? As I’ve possibly mentioned earlier, the scoring system is truly the last little bit that goes into the game, and I’m still sorta waiting for a reply from the original developers on that particular detail (hi!). Not that receiving a reply would’ve mattered, anyway, as I’ve been insanely busy myself. :)

The statistics page is sorta-up, though (but not publicly accessible), and I’ve spent what little free time I’ve had to improve on that further. I really hope I’ll be able to properly release Seal Hunter this summer – it might not be in the most polished of states, but god damn it, you’ve waited long enough.

As I promised in the forums (you should totally go visit them), here’s the two game projects I’ve been working on across the last school year:

• Eggnappers – a party game for 2-4 players
• Dynasty of Zealots: A Legend’s Story – a singleplayer action-adventure game with ridiculously high system requirements

I’m greatly biased towards Eggnappers, myself, seeing as we had a lot more time to truly polish that one up. If you want to do me a great favour, go download Eggnappers and try it out with a friend or three. If you want to do me an even greater favour (and if you enjoyed the game, of course!), please click the Vote button beneath Gamer’s Choice, because winning the Gamer’s Choice award would be quite awesome indeed.

On that note, I’ll be attending the Swedish Game Awards Game Day Expo later on this week down in Stockholm. Come by our hope-to-be booth and say hi!

For all Russian players, I’d like to tell you about a new Russian fansite that has been finished up fairly recently – sealhunter.ru! If you’re one of those bear fighters from the east, you might wanna give it a gander.

While progress has been slow, I’ve spent most of what little free time I’ve had lately trying to iron out the last few not minor bugs left in the Beta, as well as streamlining most of the interface and menus. Optimistically speaking, we are relatively close to a public release. (At least I can promise it’ll be out before 2012, because, y’know, the world’s gonna end.)

What’s been keeping me busy, you ask? A school game project we’re polishing up before submitting it to the Swedish Game Awards, cleverly enough named Eggnappers (if you want to register an account and become a fan of our game, that’d be all kinds of nice of you, and it’ll help us more than you might think). In about a month I’ll be entering another game project, so yeah, my schedule has pretty darn hectic lately.

Regardless, I promise I’m truly making some progress on Seal Hunter – I suppose you could label me as a kind of a perfectionist, and I really don’t want to release a half-arsed game, because you guys deserve better. I’m sorry for taking so long, though, and for a lack of updates – I hope the finished game will make up for it.

And for a laugh, if anybody would be up for it – let’s have a Q&A session! Simply put, if you have any question related to Seal Hunter (the more complex the better!) ask it in the comments of this post and I’ll be sure to answer them all in a Q&A newspost later on!

…Please?

Anyway – the Seal Hunter beta is progressing quite nicely at this point -  so far there’s been a total of 12 major beta revisions released. A whole load of bugs has been ironed out, many features have been polished, and quite a bit of balance/stability testing has been done. Currently, what I’m trying to focus on is the balancing of three player games – it’s way harder than what is reasonable (I wouldn’t be surprised if the difficulty of this will force me to limit the game to a total of three participating players – technical issues contribute, too). To make matters worse, I’m in the process of adding a few new weapons, as well.

One of these new weapons would be the Carl Gustav – a high-tier recoilless rifle that packs a lot of raw power while lacking in splash damage. To make envisioning this weapon a bit easier, for $9500 you get a weapon that currently deals approximately 700 damage at its epicenter. It currently has somewhat of a support role, much akin to the AWP, but trading bullet penetration for area affect. It’s still very much beta material, so expect some tweaking to be done on it before the final release. (And maybe even get rid of my programmer art for it.)

Something that I had planned out for quite a long while and then suddenly ended up implementing on a whim was the addition of achievements. There’s 60 of them in the game as of this moment, and they’re all pretty ‘hardcore’ in the sense that many are kinda hard to actually earn. I’ll most likely end up extending the number of achievements even further before the final 1.0 release.

And to abuse the segway – the final release, while not exactly close, shouldn’t be crazy far away any longer. Keep in mind that I’m the only person doing the actual production and coding for Seal Hunter, and with school effectively keeping me busy from 7 to 7, working on SH isn’t my top priority. I am working on it; my time is just severely more limited nowadays.

Again, sorry for not keeping you updated as frequently as I’d like to. If you have any suggestions for future posts, please do tell – I’ll happily accommodate you!

• I’ve finished the game intro cinematic. Yes, there’s a whopping 60 second long intro cinematic, and it’s fairly awesome.
• I’ve rewritten the music player. I ran into some issues with AllegroOGG, so I’ve now switched over to irrKlang for music playback.
• I’ve attempted updating my network library to the latest version twice, and horribly failed in doing so because of some teething issues with a major new update to RakNet.
• I’ve added the Punt Gun. About time!
• I’ve worked on the statistics website and finished the experience system. Leveling up is awesome.
• I’ve made the master server send Rank/Unlock/Title data to the client upon logging in. While this sounds fairly innocent, I imagine it’ll make beta testing a lot easier come certain aspects, and it’ll allow for dynamic content updates, albeit in a very limited fashion.
• I’ve started school again. PlaygroundSquad is awesome, but it reduces my free time during the weeks to a whole 3 hours. Thus lack of motivation.

With all that behind, what’s left?

• The fucking walrus. Yeah, I still haven’t added this bad boy yet, but I’m in progress of doing so at the moment.
• Miscellaneous account statistics in the main menu. I love menu coding. So much. This would be stuff like a killcount. I’ll probably just end up tucking on a link to the statistics site though, because I really do prefer presenting data in HTML.

And that’s about it for now; until next time!

… And before you ask for a release date, I still don’t know. When it’s done.

There’s actually been some progress since last time, but sadly nothing that’s actually really easy to, uh, take a screenshot of and show off to the public. Most importantly, matches are now submitted to the master server and inserted into the main statistics database. That alone is a huge feature, now (almost!) all finished up.

In close relation to the submission of the statistics, they are also passed around amongst clients for the ugliest debriefing screen in the history of… uh, menu coding. Did I mention I hate menu coding? I think I did. As can be derived from the above screenshot, though, there’s still no functionality in place to track score – which is pretty much what is left to do. Plus adding the walrus, finally getting around to making the boss code not suck too hard, and fixing some minor bounty related bugs with explosives. And damn, I still need to add the Punt gun.

… I’m still lazy, okay? ;)

That being said, I have with the help of a fella named Cory managed to finish up the last of the sprite/strip related work which I swear to God is the most boring thing about this entire project. Basically, all the fancy animations have been imported properly from the original game now, so I don’t need to bother with those any longer.

So what’s done? I just finished adding the turtle enemy, which leaves the rather infamous final boss – more dirty code hacks will most surely follow in that particular bastard’s path. Parts of the internal bounty code has been rewritten, too.

But what’s left? For now: said endboss (aka the fiercest predator in the world!), statistics submission and validation of said data, some boss fight code improvements, a statistics menu in-game, and more importantly, a quick draft of the game balance with 3 and 4 players (for 1 and 2 players SH will match TSH’s structure).

I can’t give an estimate of how long all this will take, since I’d most likely end up disappointing you anyway. Let’s just say my motivation is dangerously close to zero for the time being, which makes me a very lazy coder. I’ll try to keep updates more frequent (maybe even – cough, cough - get a Twitter), but for now, this is just about everything I’ve done. I’m looking forward to the private beta testing as much as you guys probably do, but I don’t wish to give out a rather broken and unpolished prototype – even if it is, as aforementioned, merely for private testing.

‘Till next time.

So it’s with pride that I today announce what I’ve been working on for the last month or so:

Seal Hunter MMO Edition!

(Since some people don’t seem to notice – this is a joke. Click Continue reading for the actual content.)

Apart from now supporting over 200 players in a single server, these are the main new features:

• Over 20 realms with support for 10,000 players on each and every one
• Monthly subscription fee totalling 19.95 EUR
• New exciting quests, such as killing enemies in a specific order, looting them for new weapons and raw materials.
• Form your own career by making clothes out of your victims, or even start up your own Fishing Corporation!
• Voice chat built in for easier communication between players!
• And much more!

Or maybe not – and this is yet another proof of how bored I really am. ;-) If you hadn’t guessed already, that was a rather terrible joke and nothing that will ever happen. Well, not anytime soon, at least! But yes, the screenshot was taken in-game, with a truckload of bots firin’ away into the fray, so have a gander at that, regardless.

The latest additions to the game itself have been the turtle and the walrus, of which both are currently being implemented. In addition to that, much work has been done in order to construct a reliable database and backend design in order for me to be able to make progress into a public or private beta testing round.

However lazy I might be and however slowly we’ve been moving forward lately, we’re now pretty darn close to the point where we might expect a beta not too far away. (Remember that “not too far away” should be put in contrast to the fact that this project has been in development for over a year and a half.)

Please leave your comments here or on the forum, feel free to come up with new weird weapons and statistics to track, and ’til next time!