Driving a Car in Polkacity & Multiplayer concepts

3 min readAug 31, 2021

Driving in Polkacity, the first draft

The car you see in this video is a simple concept model to try out the driving mechanics, in the first draft of the Polkacity game. The finished and polished game will feature better cars such as taxis, Lambos, and other NFTs. When an owner enters a car, the camera will switch to the street view and the owner will be able to drive their car in Polka City. As always, you will be able to switch views back and forth. In the video, you can see the car stopping next to a Hotel, a Gas Station, and an Electric Station. These models will be polished further as well.

Multiplayer

Many blockchain games are simply boring card games, some of them sell land, some of them sell art. Polkacity is a fully-fledged desktop game with blockchain NFTs. Our game will have multiplayer features as well. We will use Photon SDK to enable multiplayer. A good example is Albion Online, which is an MMORPG:

Polkacity game will have buildings, NFT assets, in which the user’s avatar can move around freely and interact with other players. These buildings will act like social hangout spots where users can socialize with each other.

For the scope of the first draft, we will consider clubs as an example. In a club, users can socialize and watch private dedicated streams for Polka City. As there can be a large number of players inside a club, we’ll be limiting the total number of users inside the club to maintain a visual experience by avoiding clutter and to keep performance intact. In case of the club’s users capacity is maxed out, new users joining will be placed in a new but similar instance of the club, which will have its own separate users capacity. So technically, we’ll be creating a new room for the club when the previous club’s room has reached its capacity.

Similarly, the whole polka city, during the city view, will act as one big room where a lot of players will join and they can see each other walking around. We expect the city to be large, so there will be a lot of users roaming around in the city. The user count can easily be over hundreds, so there is going to be a lot of network traffic. The network traffic is judged on the basis of messages per second. To keep performance a priority, the photon suggests keeping messages per second less than 500. It means that it will require intense optimization to make sure the city roaming phase is a performant and smooth experience in terms of multiplayer.