Polystrike
An online multiplayer first-person shooter, created in collaboration with Team Vulcan.
An online multiplayer first-person shooter, created in collaboration with Team Vulcan.
Polystrike is your run-of-the-mill first-person shooter, but blocky! Go head-to-head against other players and AI-controlled bots and rack up those kills. An alternative to traditional shooters for those strict families as it is made without the blood or gore in mind.
Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
I discovered Polystrike while searching around for online multiplayer games on Game Jolt. What caught my eye was the simplicity of the game's design. During the time, all I had was my laptop which could only run semi-demanding games. I downloaded the game and ran it. I then realized that it runs under player-hosted servers, but they had a Discord server. I joined their Discord and that is when things start to fall into place.
The leader of Team Vulcan, known under the alias "lightpower26" (referred to as Light), was looking for people to hop into the project as Unity Developers. Me, the naive hobbyist developer, wanted in. I helped them fix a few bugs here and there, but one day I introduced Light to Photon Unity Networking (PUN). PUN is a multiplayer-framework that uses one server to host every player's game. No more needing to port-forward or depend on players to host servers.
I started the new Polystrike project and began to workout a concept that worked with PUN. Light liked it and we were two programmers for the project. We pushed build after build. At one point, we got the game onto the Xbox One marketplace (under the Creators Program). However, days went by and development started to slow down. Some members in Team Vulcan had life knocking on their doorstep. Development was halted, with no official cancellation.
Polystrike is still available to download and, hopefully, to play. It is unknown what the fate of Polystrike will be. Most likely, the game will be shelved completely.