I’m making a party game in unity, I will be using gamejolts API for the multiplayer (as I don’t need low latency and it’s free and easy to set up).
I’m planning on making the game similar to JackBox (aka. one player hosts the game and shows the screen to everyone, this player would require all fancy animations etc. Then the other players just join the game and use their devices as input, which wouldn’t require as much content). Thus it would make sense to have a separate build for the host and the players, however how manageable is this to do?
I’m not that experienced with using asset bundles but should I use those?
You can include different scenes for different builds. Assets referenced by scenes get included in builds which include those scenes, and won’t be included for builds which don’t use those scenes (with the exception of a Resources folder, which gets included in every build).
looking at this link, https://jackboxgames.happyfox.com/kb/article/68-can-i-play-jackbox-games-remotely/
it seems like the host streams their game view to other players,
so then at that point, those other players are just watching video´/image stream from the main host (their client doesnt have any game assets, probably just networking stuff).
it mentions steam remote play as one option to host a game, so if you are making a steam game,
then you just need to support that, and other players can join the game “stream” without installing huge game at all.
if you are doing it from scratch, you could stream that data yourself, or send just image(s),
or even request clients to load required assets (bundles) from cloud when needed.