No Honor Among Thieves

No Honor Among Thieves is a game developed by an 11-person team as part of a college capstone project alongside help and advice from Iron Galaxy Studios. The original idea for the game actually stemmed from a misunderstanding with the computer science capstone program on campus, resulting in a team with a huge number of programmers. The original team count was 8 and 6 of those were purely programmers, so we wanted something that could be very technically heavy but didn't need a lot of art assets. This talk eventually lead to us doing an online game, as that hadn't been done in any of our classes by anyone because it was supposed to be very programmatically hard. When it came time to choose roles, I was looking forward to doing something more challenging, as my last project had programming on the back burner due to production work, so I stepped up to lead the networking side of things. 

For the networking on this project, I used Photon's Unity networking solution. After looking around, this seemed to be the best for our purposes, as well as free to use for our size. As we wanted a playable prototype as quickly as possible, I worked to get a lobby system and synced players within the game as soon as possible, which took about two weeks. From there basic actions were networked for a prototype soon after. At this point, networking seemed like a breeze compared to what everyone was saying, but the real fun was yet to come. As systems were updated, I had to go back and update their networked versions every time, so I updated all the existing scripts in inherit as best as possible from their non-networked versions. This worked to some extent, but networking was still a lot of updating of elements people would test in their own scenes. Eventually after some discussion, we shifted over to everyone learning a bit of the networking code and implementing their own code into the network with me ready to help if need be. This allowed me to focus again on core systems that needed networked and the numerous bugs that continually pop up within networked games. Towards the back end, I was primarily on bug-fixing duty, getting the game running as best as possible before launch, which ended up being a huge success! 

Unlike networking, my contribution to player interaction wasn't huge. I most just handled basic player interaction in the initial stages and then helped get the new features syncing properly to all other players after they were implemented, such as player pushing or object throwing. These interactions would be minorly changed a lot so having me there to bug fix as quickly as possible when they were added to our main online scene was paramount. In the end, we achieved a very fleshed-out, fun, and minimally buggy player interaction system we were quite proud of.