they are familiar with and whose company they enjoy. Playing with random people over
the Internet is much less likely to be enjoyable if you only know these players for the
duration of a death-match game and then switch to a totally new set of people with
every new match. Players will never get a chance to know each other. Therefore, hav-
ing a game experience that encourages players to form clans or guilds that need to work
together to succeed will be essential to creating a more social experience for your play-
ers. Fostering relationships between players that last beyond the time they are playing
the game will not only benefit the players themselves but also the long-term success of
your game. Those players who became friends playing your game are likely to get
together to play as a social event in the future, assuming they still enjoy the game and it
allows them to strengthen their friendship while playing. These players are also more
likely to talk to each other on forums dedicated to your game, which can help build up
your community and attract other players to your game in the future. The community
surrounding an online game is even more important than the community for a sin-
gle-player game, and allowing players to have a rich social experience in your game can
help build this community better than anything else you could possibly do.
Every feature or play mechanic you add to your multi-player game should be exam-
ined to determine how it impacts the players’ social experience. Though not every
feature needs to be a social one (it is still a game, after all, and most likely a competitive
one), any feature that actively disrupts the players’ ability to socialize and work
together needs to be carefully considered to make sure the impact it will have on the
game will be worth the cost. Indeed, having features that do nothing to improve the
game mechanics directly but do help the players socialize will often end up improving
the players’ overall experience with your game. Allowing players to communicate with
each other is one of the most compelling aspects of multi-player games and is some-
thing that a single-player game will never be able to provide in any sort of meaningful
way.
Development Issues.............................
Beyond the unique design considerations that are raised by multi-player games, there
are also a number of development issues that teams need to be aware of. First and fore-
most, development teams need to decide what type of game they are making:
multi-player or single-player. With an online-only game such as a massively
multi-player RPG, the answer to this question is obvious. But for an action game that
includes a single-player level-progression based game, adding a multi-player compo-
nent can be approached in several ways. Many games have suffered when they opted to
add multi-player support midway through development. This is a decision that may
seem like it is not that big a deal, but in the end it may necessitate rewriting large
chunks of the code or reworking the game mechanics themselves to be more appropri-
ate for multi-player games. If the single-player game is significantly under way when
this change happens, this may result in redoing a lot of work that was perfectly fine
when the game was single-player only. OnCentipede 3D, we were encouraged to add
multi-player fairly late in development, but beyond the programming required to get it
working, we did not have the art or design resources to make it fun. Since it was not a
major priority for us, we ended up adding a cooperative mode and doing nothing to
Chapter 13: Multi-Player 251