Hey everyone!
Big one this time.
**Highway Station Sim is becoming a four-player co-op game.**
This is something I'd looked at before and backed away from, because I was worried about missing the release date. That pressure eased up, and once it did there wasn't really a good argument left against it. This game is a lot of small jobs happening at once — pumps, shelves, orders, the register — and that's exactly the shape of thing that gets better with other people in it.
**What it looks like**
Up to four of you run the same station. There's genuinely enough work to go around, and genuinely nothing stopping all four of you from doing the same job while everything else falls apart. Somebody can join whenever they want — you don't have to start over, the station just keeps running and they walk in.
Everyone gets their own body, and there's a name tag over everyone else so you can tell who's who across the forecourt. Anybody can save the game to their own machine, so the station you played tonight isn't locked to whoever happened to be hosting.
**Why this took a while**
I want to be honest about the size of this, because "adding multiplayer" sounds like a feature and it really wasn't.
The game was about 25,000 lines of code with exactly zero networking in it. Not "some networking that needed improving" — zero. Every number that matters, money, fuel, the clock, stock, the power grid, lived somewhere that only existed on one machine. If I'd just switched multiplayer on, the second player would have joined a station that was permanently stuck on day one with a full tank and $1,000, forever, no matter what the host did.
So most of the game underneath got rewritten. All the shared state moved somewhere both machines can see. Every interaction — picking up the nozzle, stocking a shelf, taking payment — now gets checked by the host instead of just trusted. Every random roll in the game had to be moved to one machine and the result sent out, because otherwise two players slowly drift into different versions of the same day without either of them noticing.
The save system got rebuilt too, and picked up some things I'd wanted for a while: multiple named save slots instead of one, an autosave that can't be overwritten by accident, and a proper load menu.
**Things that turned out to be funny**
The first time two players connected, the second one got stuck on the loading screen forever. The host was fine. Turned out the "world is ready" message was arriving a fraction of a second *before* the joining player had finished building their own loading screen — so it got told the loading was done before it started loading, and then sat there.
I also spent a while confused about why players were invisible, before realising the game had never had a character body at all. It's first-person. Nobody had ever needed to see one.
**What's left**
The lobby, where you'll gather up and pick your look before the shift starts. A lot of testing — this is a big change and I'd rather find the problems than you find them. And the animation work, because right now everyone walks like they're delivering mail.
Single-player isn't going anywhere, to be clear. It's the same game, you're just alone in it.
More soon — wishlist the game to follow along!
— Erdem