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8/5/2025, 11:48:58 PM
>>534099106
I'd say Multiplayer is only hard if you have a competitive game like a competitive FPS shooter or a huge MMO that requires 10,000's of connections every second requesting insane amounts of calculations on the server.
For most indie games, even indie MMO's, it's not a big deal at all in terms of difficulty.
I say that, but depending on the game it can add in months to years or development on top just because of how complicated it is from the get go.
The project I came in on was a prototype I had to add multiplayer to. You don't actually add multiplayer to a game, you just make a completely new game. In 4 months, I finally got to the point where the prototype was. A prototype that took them a week to make. Of course a lot of that was also creating the gameplay systems, UI systems, that I had to make in order to have multiplayer. Need a game to do it. But still, I think it was something like ...
Okay I just went through my notes and time tracking software. Turns out Multiplayer was 16-20% of all the work I did. Which was the largest part of the pie by far. Although some of that was learning, so if I didn't have to waste time learning and going nowhere chasing bugs that weren't mine (I had to fix the networking package I used by fixing THEIR bug) then it would have been on par with generating the world (procedural generation) and right above implementing the GUI (which wasn't even done, but was a huge PITA to implement). Honestly, everything else takes very little time compared ot those three things.
Overall, I spent 176 hours learning and creating the server-client architecture needed to make an open world survival game. The same architecture you'd use to make a MMO (just the game portion of an MMO so without the database, login, web stuff, etc). If I worked full time, that's 5 weeks of work, but it took me 4 months total because I had to do all the other parts of the game at the same time.
I'd say Multiplayer is only hard if you have a competitive game like a competitive FPS shooter or a huge MMO that requires 10,000's of connections every second requesting insane amounts of calculations on the server.
For most indie games, even indie MMO's, it's not a big deal at all in terms of difficulty.
I say that, but depending on the game it can add in months to years or development on top just because of how complicated it is from the get go.
The project I came in on was a prototype I had to add multiplayer to. You don't actually add multiplayer to a game, you just make a completely new game. In 4 months, I finally got to the point where the prototype was. A prototype that took them a week to make. Of course a lot of that was also creating the gameplay systems, UI systems, that I had to make in order to have multiplayer. Need a game to do it. But still, I think it was something like ...
Okay I just went through my notes and time tracking software. Turns out Multiplayer was 16-20% of all the work I did. Which was the largest part of the pie by far. Although some of that was learning, so if I didn't have to waste time learning and going nowhere chasing bugs that weren't mine (I had to fix the networking package I used by fixing THEIR bug) then it would have been on par with generating the world (procedural generation) and right above implementing the GUI (which wasn't even done, but was a huge PITA to implement). Honestly, everything else takes very little time compared ot those three things.
Overall, I spent 176 hours learning and creating the server-client architecture needed to make an open world survival game. The same architecture you'd use to make a MMO (just the game portion of an MMO so without the database, login, web stuff, etc). If I worked full time, that's 5 weeks of work, but it took me 4 months total because I had to do all the other parts of the game at the same time.
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