single-player experience will be much simpler. Also, personally I feel that developing a
fun multi-player game is a much bigger challenge than building a single-player game,
since you as a designer have so much less control over the experience. Thereby, devel-
oping a fun multi-player experience fundamentally takes longer than an equally fun
single-player experience. In some ways, designing a good multi-player game is all
about realizing what players will attempt to do after playing your game for a while and
how you can better support that with deep game mechanics. The longer you have play-
ers playing your game, the more you can balance the play experience. Thus, focusing on
your multi-player experience early on will give you a better fighting chance of develop-
ing a solid game at the end of the day. Both Ensemble with theAge of the Empiresseries
and Bungie withHalo are known to have deliberately focused on getting their
multi-player experience right from the start, before working on the single-player expe-
rience. Thereby, they have both managed to deliver titles that have very well-balanced
multi-player experiences while also including peerless single-player games.
Playtesting and User Feedback .....................
As you develop your multi-player game and observe people playing it, you will quickly
find that you never can anticipate what players will attempt to do. Anticipating what
players in a solo play game will do is hard enough; doing the same thing for a
multi-player game is all but impossible. For example, inCentipede 3Dwe saw the
multi-player experience as strictly collaborative, where players would be able to play
through the various levels together. Thus the two players the game allowed were
immune to each other’s weapons fire. But as soon as we got the multi-player code
working and started playing the game, the first thing players tried to do was shove each
other into the water, since the water is deadly to the players’ “shooter” ships. Due to
the game’s light but robust physics, pushing the other player around was an enjoyable
experience made even more amusing when it led to the other player’s death. I had cer-
tainly never imagined this outcome, but it is hardly surprising given players’
tendencies to take a cooperative experience and make it adversarial as quickly as they
can. Another interesting emergent behavior that players quickly discovered was the
ability for one player to jump on top of the other and ride him around, rotating which-
ever direction he wanted and acting as a turret. As I mentioned, onCentipede 3Dthere
was literally no time dedicated to designing the multi-player gaming experience so
there was nothing we could do to fix, adjust, or even encourage these interesting
behaviors since we only discovered them a week before we were scheduled to ship.
Even more so than in single-player games, playtesting your multi-player game for
as long as possible before it is released to the general public is essential. However, that
testing can only tell you so much. For this reason nearly every massively multi-player
game has included an “open beta” as part of its development. During this period, the
developers take a large though still limited number of the general public and let them
play the not-quite-finished game for free. The number of people attracted during such a
test is much greater than the number of players that can possibly play as part of an
in-house testing effort, and thereby provides a much closer simulation of what the
game will be like when it is finally released to the world. The players who sign up for
such open betas are typically particularly dedicated and mischievous gamers, and as a
result will push your game’s systems to the limit. Obviously, this is a good thing.
Chapter 13: Multi-Player 253