Devlog Devlog #6: Why Is Drift Multiplayer?
I'm often asked when talking to other game developers why I made my life harder by building a multiplayer game as my first title. I've struggled with a definitive answer and want to explore it here.
As you may or may not know, making multiplayer games, specifically online multiplayer games, is very hard. For every feature you come up with, you have to decide how that will be talked about between computers and account for any number of bad things that could happen to that message along its way. So why would I add this extra burden to my first commercial game?
Drift is not the first game I've worked on or even the first game I've tried to finish. But it is the first game that inspired me enough to quit my job and pursue it full-time. And I believe the multiplayer piece is a large reason for that passion. For me, games are an experience beyond the time I spend and the challenges I face. I often remember how I played as much as what. For Dragon Age: Inquisition, I mirrored my monitor to the TV so my wife could follow along as she was working, usually with a PRIMA guide nearby to save me having to look things up. When I played Minecraft, she would join me, solve my constant need of food by setting up an appropriate farm based on the mods I had installed. And in more recent years, my daughter (who demanded a pink computer at 3) would join me in any game she could - Raft, Minecraft, ARK, and more. To her, she wasn't playing with Dad, she was playing with her video game friend who would sometimes join her worlds.
For me, these experiences shape how I remember the game. I didn't personally love ARK or the design choices they made, but it had dinosaurs and was infinitely customizable which allowed me to create these amazing expriences to have with my children, who saw this virtual world as another playground. And I loved every second of it. Sure they could have sat on my lap and played, but there is something special about solving a problem together and teaching them to navigate a new system that makes it even better.
I think even if the market for online co-op games was small (it's not) and the genre didn't usually include multiplayer (it does), I would still be slogging through debugging netcode because at the end of this, I want a game I can sit and play with my family. I hope you end up sharing this experience with yours as well.