Oh hey beekeepers!
If you're reading this it means either Ell accidentally left multiplayer in a build and spoiled the surprise OR we managed to successfully keep everything a secret until the MIX NEXT event in November! Either way, surprise!! We have multiplayer now :D
Check the trailer for more:
So.... yeah :D
You probably have some questions, so I'll try and answer them here!
WTF when did you build this?
A long long time ago when we first signed with Whitethorn and finished off one of the major updates the whole WT team played a bunch and all gave some really positive feedback for it! At the time Matt (WT CEO) mentioned that adding multiplayer with your friends would definitely be a bonus and they'd support me in any way they could if I wanted to give it a go. As you can imagine like 70% of our feedback has always been the ability to play with a friend so we've always had it there in the back of our minds but never really considered it (because hot damn it's a lot of work and stress).
Speed forward to around August time we had actually finished off the game apart from Localisation (being done by Whitethorn) and the Modding which was still being tested - but in terms of the actual game itself everything was complete! So we had a lot of time left...
There were some content updates I wanted to do for APICO but that was more post-release, so after twiddling my thumbs for a few days I decided what the heck lets give it a try.
After the initial test seemed to be promising I started working on it in more depth, and spent most of August and September tweaking and perfecting both the server and the in-game client stuff whilst updating the modding stuff and doing the LQA fixes.
What is the actual Multiplayer functionality?
APICO Multiplayer is an online multiplayer system where you can "host" your world and have your friend come and join you, using your "host code". Currently this is limited to 2 people per world.
Everything in the normal game you can do with your friend! The person who hosts uses one of their worlds (or can make a new one!), and the person who joins has a seperate player progress tied to that host. Your progress is seperate so you can work away at quests/bees separately, and share the results of any fancy new bees you find.
If consoles approve it, it will also be cross-platform as all builds use the exact same relay server and connection system - so fingers crossed!
We thought about local co-op but realistically our menus do not work to have 2 players on the same screen at the same time.
In future I'll probably add a local LAN connection alternative, and I'm also thinking about releasing the actual relay server we use as OSS - this way people can host their own servers and maybe tinker with it to do some weird stuff, but overall I'm really happy with it and it's super cute!!
Will it cost anything?
Yes you'll need to pay me 999 jars of honey every month to be able to use it >:D
Jokes aside, no, it won't cost you anything! If you own the game you'll be able to host your world or join someone else's world. The only exception to this may be on consoles, as I believe that under the Switch guidelines they may require players to have a switch online membership to access online functionality (even though it's our own server, thanks Nintendo)
Server costs will obviously get offset by sales (hopefully), and we'll probably run it for a good while before then letting people just host their own by making the relay server open source (as mentioned above).
Can I play it now / will there be a playtest?
Yes we will be doing another playtest!! This to help iron out some of the quirks that we might of missed in multiplayer, but is mainly to allow me to test the server infrastructure at a high amount of connections.
I did some stress testing early on but it's not the same as being able to have lots of actual real busy bees playing!
I'll post an update when we know how we'll be doing this playtest but it'll be the same thing, apply on Steam and you'll get added randomly as we add more people.
How does it work?
As some of you might know I'm a full-time software dev and have worked on a lot of boring SaaS stuff, so I've built some pretty gnarly shit before but I've never had to touch multiplayer so this was an absolute trek (will be posting devlogs for Multiplayer over the next few weeks!).
The main thing was that I wanted to check ways we could get it working before even potentially mentioning it - the last thing I want to do is promise something that turns out to not be possible/practical (and even now announcing this keeps me up at night), but after a lot of messing around I managed to make a system using a relay server that turned out to work pretty well.
Using a node relay (suitably dubbed "BeeNet") and the built-in GMS socket connection stuff I built out a sync system that let two people play together and keep track of each others movements and actions!
For the nerds; I didn't want to do UDP hole punching as it isn't 100% reliable, I didn't want to do direct IP connection (a la Minecraft) as having to open ports is a nightmare to explain to people (especially console!), and I didn't want a fully fledged server where worlds are hosted cos ya boys broke - so relay seemed the best option and the most reliable!
As mentioned, I'll be doing some deep-dives in the devlogs soon so keep an eye out for that if thats your sort of thing!
I think that covers most things but if you have any other questions let me know!
I'm super excited (and terrified) for you all to give it a try and just be able to be vibin' with your friends and the bees <3
~ Ell