Rounds and map vote

Warning

Sword Masters was abandoned in October 2024, and many of its assets belong to the group that owned it, so this system can’t be shown running.

Sword Masters is played in rounds. You wait in the lobby, vote for the next map, get teleported onto it, and play until time runs out or there’s nobody left standing.

How it works

• Each intermission lasts 30 seconds. Halfway through, three of the six maps show up on screen and everyone votes. The map with the most votes wins, and the numbers update live as people vote.
• If nobody votes, the server waits for the next intermission instead of picking a map on its own.
• There are three modes. PvP is last one standing, zombie hunts ask the whole server to kill a number of zombies that grows with the player count, and Mountain Top is a boss fight.
• When a round starts you play with the skin and the sword you have equipped, and an objective panel tracks your progress.
• A PvP map won’t start with a single player on the server.
• A full cycle, from intermission to the end of the round, takes between four and six minutes depending on the map.

Under the hood

The loop is a state machine with five states, and each mode only adds small pieces to it, so adding a map is mostly adding data. If something breaks during a round, the server restarts the loop once, and if it breaks again it closes so players can move to a working server. More details, including the bugs I’d fix today, in the portfolio version.