While additional content will continue to come your way separate from multiplayer, its addition is the next major milestone for us on the tech side of development. I’d like to briefly go over our plans for multiplayer, what it will look like, what is already implemented, and what work remains to be done.
What Will Multiplayer Look Like in Salt 2
Those of you that have played the first Salt game will already have a good idea of what to expect. The purpose of multiplayer in Salt 2 is to provide a way to share in the adventure with others. This is intended to be the same game experience as single-player mode, but with the addition of your friends.
Games will be player-hosted and have no dedicated servers. You will be able to start a party in the game and invite others through either your Steam friends list or by join code. You can join others on your current save file or you can create a new save file, as long as everyone is using the same world seed. Your progress, whether playing as the host or not, will be saved locally just like in single player mode. This means you can alternate between single player and co-op as much as you please without having to create a new game.
The maximum number of players in a single party will be subject to testing. However, the general idea is to design around having 2 to 4 players.
Our goal is to make the game tailored to the single player / co-op experience. As such, we will not be focusing on player-vs-player mechanics. It is possible we will add a way to allow damage to other players, but you should not expect any complicated modes or other similar content built around that playstyle.
Progress So Far and What is Left
For a while now, we have been making progress on multiplayer implementation in the midst of our other updates. Many of the core features have already been implemented: such as basic syncing of characters in the world, combat, scene transitions, effects, boats, and many more.
What remains are a few major tasks and many smaller ones. For example, character avatar visuals and handling of situations like character disconnections are some of the larger tasks on the to-do list. Additionally, numerous smaller details need to be synced properly across the network, such as boss fights with special mechanics and the various puzzles scattered throughout the world.
Lastly, there is testing and fixing any issues that arise.
When Will Multiplayer Release?
While we still don’t have a specific date, the current state of multiplayer in our internal testing is increasingly playable. It is possible we will have an incomplete yet playable version available by the end of the year, but it could be longer depending on how smooth things go. Like a lot of our updates, multiplayer will likely first go through a lengthy opt-in test stage (probably a specific test branch on Steam) so we can get help from the community to iron out balancing issues and bugs we may have missed before doing an official public release of the update.
We are still working on more content updates that will be released between now and the multiplayer update. During these updates we will also let you know about progress on multiplayer and as soon as we are confident about an ETA on the testing stage, we will let you know.
We really appreciate your support and patience through the multiplayer process.
Insight into Implementing Multiplayer Later
One question that has arisen multiple times is why multiplayer wasn’t implemented from the beginning. Starting with multiplayer is definitely optimal and we hope to do that in future projects. In our case, it was a financial decision. Implementing multiplayer from the start would have required significant additional work, which would have delayed our Early Access release substantially. We needed to ensure that we reached a release stage quickly enough so that both of us could continue to work on the project full-time.
We look forward to bringing you more content updates and progress updates for multiplayer in the future. Thanks for reading!