I came into the game jam late so I quickly came up with a concept of an endless Breakout style game. The concept was finished in a day, but seemed boring and simple. So over the next day I added power ups and faster gameplay over time.

Gameplay still felt uninspiring so I thought I’d experiment. The last 6 hours or so were spent adding a multiplayer layer. I thought I’d play with bypassing Unreal’s networking and going for utilizing a REST API backend using Node.js with the idea of being able to scale a game into 100s of players.

In the end I submitted the unfinished base single-player version. The backend worked but crafting a UI for the large number of potential players was a design challenge I didn’t have enough time for. I was happy with the backend though, theoretically it should have been able to scale to handle a large number of players, the code itself would just create a string of the player state and send it up, the server would compile a packet of updated player states into blocks of players and send that block to players in chunks, updating their state. In games with a large number of players there may be some noticeable lag as players would only update in chunks so the final idea that was implemented was the other players states would always be behind one update from where you are in the game, so the other player’s board would update on your next board update but it would be the other players update before your own. That way all other player screens could be updated the same time your screen sent a new set of blocks.