Cypher

It’s been a while but not without some work being done! Today, I’m announcing my Capstone project. Here at ATEC (UT Dallas), students are required to submit a Capstone project during their last semester, think of it as an independent study. Of course we have plenty of guidance from our professors and faculty but what we want to do is completely in our hands!

For me, the one experience I haven’t gotten from game design/development sense is a view of the networking stack within games! I have no idea how it works! So I thought, while it might be hard given Unity’s deprecation of the high level network API, this would be a good time to explore a bit! While I do have moderate experience with networking in general through my CS classes and projects there, within games is still a total mystery! So without further ado:

Cypher is a multiplayer, 3v3, first person shooter. I aim to explore Unity and Photon with this project to help me get a better understanding of networking and net-code in multiplayer games.

Cypher is unique in its take on the popular game mode “control.” “Cypher control” (the game mode) focuses on team communication rather than area denial due to the way the win objective works. Rather than basing the win objective on capturing a common location on the map, both teams will vie for unique information that is gained by reading off of a common “console” in the center of the map. Teams will have to read off the information, communicate it and enter the information in their appropriate bases all while preventing their enemy from doing the same. The players are each meant to have different specialties and will aide the objectives in different ways.

For now, that’s all folks! Expect to see information about Cypher on the blog with a WIP title for now! Pre production information should be rolling out fairly soon!

-Kshaya