Seeing as I only just now received a comment urging me to post more updates, I suppose it’s only fair to officially dub myself a lazy bastard and try to alleviate this by giving you a new post straight away!

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!

Not much has been going on lately – high school finals and graduation and whatnot has stolen most of my time away and after about two years worth on working on this codebase I reached the point earlier this month when I felt way to fed up with it working with it. Not to worry though, I still fully intend to try and get a beta going during this summer, but it’s sadly looking more and more unlikely that it’ll be out before July as time goes on.

A big coding bottleneck that’s currently bringing my motivation down is the addition of unlockable ranks and statistics tracking – which gives me a reason to smoothly transition on to the second purpose of this post. What kind of statistics would you like to see tracked? I’ve all the obvious ones planned in, such as the most popular weapons (down to seeing exactly when and where a weapon is purchased the most), top scoring matches, match details, and quite a bit more.

Designing a database to hold all this isn’t the easiest task there is, and even though refactoring it will probably be inevitable at one point or another I’d like to ask you readers for any especially obscure statistics you’d like to see tracked so that they can be implemented on the database level straight away. Can be pretty much anything, so hit me with your ideas and I’ll see if they’re worth to consider for implementation. You can of course just post ’em in the comments of this blog post, but remember that the forums are still lurking about, just waiting for your nimble fingers to type out topics in. Looking forward to ’em.

Most work done on Seal Hunter lately has merely been about polishing the overall first impression of the game and making things a bit more logical. With a prototype version having been sent off to PlaygroundSquad as my work sample (and after doing some serious code crunching) I’m rather relieved and miscellaneous UI elements is all I’ve been working on lately.

As well as this bastard of a menu which was an utter pain to code. Or well, at least utterly boring.

In a vain attempt to explain this rather muddled menu and its purpose, as mentioned earlier players will be limited to carrying only a certain number of weapons at once – or rather, only being able to buy these weapons during a game round. The weapons carried make up the player’s loadout. This magical number has now after some contemplation been set to five, which means that players are able to pick out five weapons (or less, if you’re hardcore enough) before starting a game – and they can then purchase these weapons during the game. Easy enough, right?

Some of you might not like this, but there are two major reasons for this design decision:

• To avoid cluttering the buy menu. The buy menu in Seal Hunter is a small window that pops up in the bottom right, after which you can either use a number key or your mouse to purchase a weapon of your choice. There’s of course also the traditional “auto-buy” feature from the original game that purchases the most expensive weapon available to you. Since there will be quite a few more weapons in Seal Hunter than in The Seal Hunter this was vital in order to not make the buy menu all too intimidating.
• To encourage players to specialize. Seal Hunter is first and foremost – at least that’s the way I perceive it – about multiplayer co-op fun with friends and strangers alike. Players will most certainly grow accustomed to certain weapons while despising others, and this is a method of easily making one’s preferences clearly outlined to other players. For example, in multiplayer you might have somebody concentrating on explosives to take care of smaller victims using the splash damage, while one of your friends act as a form of more concentrated damage output with weapons such as the AWP etc.

Why five weapons? A player rarely purchases more than three weapons during a game, so technically I could’ve limited it to three or perhaps four, but I didn’t want to become too strict on the player. Should something unexpected arise during the game (…as if) the player should not be penalized all too much, but should instead be allowed a sort of second backup plan if things would go utterly haywire.

Also, I need your help to come up with rank titles! Pay the forums a visit and give me a hand; it’d be very much appreciated. :-)

There hasn’t been anything exciting enough done lately to warrant a blog post, but I suppose showing some sort of life signs is a good thing. For a bit more personal stuff, my high school graduation is drawing closer, which means an excessive amount of school work – which includes a project report with full documentation on Seal Hunter. Yay! Boring as all hell.

Apart from being my graduation project, Seal Hunter is also going to be my work sample submission for a fancy Swedish games programming school; this means that the any progress made lately has gone into the possibility for the game to actually end – in other words, with the player losing. Yep, that’s right, this wasn’t implemented up until a few days ago. Procrastination is fun!

There’s also a bunch of very very boring network code to couple up with that, so I don’t feel overly motivated at the moment with the increasing workload of school also directly contribution towards that. Sorry for not being more detailed, and I’ll try to whip up something in order to show you soon enough!

Despite not being entirely finished up, I’d like to present two of the new weapons that are planned for Seal Hunter. Again, please do note that Seal Hunter is not finished by far and everything is still very prototype-y. What I’ll be showcasing in this post might be changed or removed entirely in the future, so please be considerate. ;-)

Anyhow, I’ll try to keep this short’n’sweet! Above, you can see the frag mines in action and this particular flavour being the proximity mine which explodes whenever a creature comes in contact with it. After planting the mine, there is a grace period before the mine will activate (this is to maintain a healthy game balance, as you might guess) and react to enemy contact.

There is also currently a second variant of the mine above currently dubbed “timed mines”; this will explode after a set time no matter what. This means that it can be used to more effectively cause splash damage to enemies without requiring a direct contact, but if mistimed you might end up doing no damage at all.

All of this is still very experimental, and further balancing coupled with the exact details on how the mines will operate will be worked out when the game is nearing completion – more importantly, while I might be able to balance it somewhat decently in singleplayer, Seal Hunter is meant to support up to four players.

Remember that you can further discuss this in a more educated fashion over at the Seal Hunter Forums. Until next time!

And a special thanks to Baneriukas for making the weapon sprites. Whoop whoop!