Shadow Punk is an ongoing project I’ve been working on for over a year. Shadowpunk has been an excellent experience in multiplayer networking. Before the project I had only worked with single-player projects, having to create a system that was not just functional, but robust in a multiplayer context with multiple clients brought with it new learning opportunities. The Character sheet system in particular required multiple passes to get working just right. The final iteration used a series of event handlers and remote procedure calls to get the information accurate with processing and multiple sometimes contradictory commands from multiple clients simultaneously. 

​

While I am very proud of the product that shadowpunk is today. Its lengthy development can be owed partly to a lack of scope control by the game’s designer. The project was always intended to be a set of 3D map tools, but the multiplayer components and multiple game system support were gradually introduced over time. What started as a fairly simple project to share amongst friends ballooned out of control into a multi-year project. If I were to do things differently, I would’ve committed to a specific game system and scope much earlier into development. Months of progress could have been saved if the project started with a stronger initial vision.

Download