Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog! We are posting this a bit earlier than our normal schedule to coincide with a special announcement: Dandelion Void will be supporting multiplayer!
The venerated YouTuber and friend-of-the-team MrAtomicDuck has dropped a new video today with a great overview of Dandelion Void. It also includes footage of never-before-seen features, enemies, and hazards! If you haven't watched it already, please find it below:
If you're reading this and not subscribed to MrAtomicDuck, make sure to do so! He's even got a Dandelion Void stream planned for this Thursday, at 11am EST / 4pm GMT.
You & Me Against the Void
We listed Dandelion Void as a single player experience when we launched our preview page last May. Multiplayer had always been something we hoped for for the game – it’s survival-crafting, after all! – but as seasoned game industry veterans, we believe in responsible scope and schedule planning. Back then the game was just our game director Brian’s side project, and a single player experience was what he had time to make.
After it became clear that we had an audience, we scaled up our resources considerably (more info in our previous post!). Brian went full-time, along with several new team members! Multiplayer was of course among the first features we thought of as we expanded our vision for the game, but we weren't ready to make the plunge until we were happy with our demo’s single player experience.
Flash forward several months, and we are now extremely satisfied with how our demo is testing! We’d been going back and forth on when to make the multiplayer announcement, when Duck serendipitously mentioned he was working on a Dandelion Void video. He asked us whether multiplayer was on the roadmap, and we figured it was time to confirm that yes, there will be multiplayer!
In a real sense, our team had to become multiplayer first before our game could. Our colleague Roland has extensive experience with networking in video games, and will be helping to lead this transition! He started with us part-time last year, and will be coming on full-time in the coming months.
Multiple Choice Questions
We’re sure you have some follow-up questions, which we have done our best to answer below! Note that some details will have to wait until the game is closer to release.
How will adding multiplayer affect the game's development?
Adding multiplayer is no small task. Very soon, the multiplayer conversion will be the full-time focus of our entire engineering team. We have given this task a generous amount of room in our schedule to reflect its complexity.
During this period, these devlogs will be a little lighter on gameplay features. But we will still have plenty of treats to show you from the art side!
How will multiplayer be hosted?
Our plan is to have player hosted, peer-to-peer multiplayer.
How many simultaneous players will be supported?
The exact number will depend on a number of technical questions that we are in the process of answering, but we hope to support as many as possible while still maintaining a stable and well-balanced game experience.
Will couch co-op be Supported?
While we love us some couch co-op, we don’t think it’s a proper fit for the gameplay we are pursuing, and it would be a big technical lift for developers (and future modders) compared to a relatively small number of players taking advantage of the feature. We won’t stop you from setting up a proper LAN party though!
Will Multiplayer be co-op or PvP?
Like many survival-crafting games, co-op is our main focus for multiplayer. You and your friends can work together to build bases, scrub areas of harmful vegetation, and cover each others’ backs in combat!
PvP will exist in the sense that your attacks can hurt and kill other players, but it will not be a major design focus for us. We believe a big part of survival is co-operation, and we’d like to explore mechanical incentives and rewards for players banding together against the hazardous environment of Dandelion Void
Going AFK (brb)
That’s all for today! Please look forward to more updates and stories on the development of our multiplayer features on this blog in the coming months. In the meantime, take care and have a great week!
– Robin and the Manzanita Interactive team