Red Wizard

Hey!

I basically work on this game in my free time.  It is an inspired online version of the arcade-only game Deathball, built "ground-up" in Rust with Bevy.  If you like it, let me know!  If you love it, find a Deathball near you and give that a try.  No, I do not plan to build an exact clone -- I have my own end game in mind 😈

Default controls:

• Local Purple plays with WASD + Space
• Local Green plays with arrows + Enter
• Online plays with WASD+Space irrespective of whichever color you are

There are quite a few known issues with this.  I've been working on this since May ' 22, so I know most of them and won't exhaustively list them.  I'm interested to know if you encounter desyncs: who was playing on what kind of device (CPU platform/OS), and what was going on when it desynced.  It desyncs because it is using peer-to-peer rollback and there is no central server beyond the match-making one.

Known executable/build issues:

• This executable is not digitally signed on either Mac or Windows, thus both will complain it is an untrustworthy application (and, depending on what you think about me, it probably is :-))
• The built-in Windows Defender and other Anti-Virus software may quarantine the executable due to a false positive on the dependency on WebRTC.  This is how the networking works and I will not likely be addressing it.  I assume signing it, releasing through Itch/Steam, or submitting false positive reports to Microsoft will eventually resolve this.  I have it safelisted on my Windows machine.
• The Linux build is dynamically linked against GLIBC (like everything), and since this does not have the nice Steam emulation layer for libs, you may be up a creek in that regard.  Let me know, I build it on an older Ubuntu image to hopefully cap the version to GLIBC 2.29.
• The Mac build is untested and won't work on M1/M2 devices.

Known gameplay issues:

• Desync between CPU platform architectures (e.g., Mac M1 vs x86), OSes (Windows vs Linux), and  web vs native clients (i.e., the page vs an exe).  It currently limits across build targets (sorry, I know this sucks!)
• Desync when a goal is scored.
• Bubbles do not have true bounces you'd expect, nor behave correctly in the wraps, and do not yet interact with players correctly either.  It is the next white whale beyond desync issues :-)
• The text UI is extremely "just enough info to show what is happening in the backend" and scales wrong, is bad generally.  More game HUD will come later.
• Assets do not scale correctly per pixel.  They're all placeholder stuff I drew, or are public domain assets.
• Physics are not "right".  Less of an issue and more of an FYI.  In time it will get tweaked.  Speaking of tweaking...

Some stuff you can "mod":

• You can adjust the physics values by changing the game_settings.ron file with a plain text editor (note: both players must have the same values or else it *will* desync)
• You can edit all PNG assets, but their sizes are hard-coded still -- this will not cause desync.
• You can edit your own maps using LDTK.  Again, both players need the same map or else it will desync.  The maps can be as big or as small as you want, but because of the prior point (asset sizes are hardcoded) it may not scale as desired.  Also, only one map file is supported at a time right now.  Long list of TODOs, but getting the online/physics/rollback not desyncing is always top priority (otherwise there is no point to this)

- csc