A separate thought on the networking side — because it ties into a much bigger design choice for me.
Adding multiplayer isn’t just a code layer bolted on top of an existing game. In practice it means designing entirely different levels, with different pacing, different failure states, different camera/UX assumptions. It’s close to building a second game. That’s why right now I’m focused exclusively on the single-player loop. Once that’s actually finished I’ll start thinking about co-op, but to be honest I don’t even have the shadow of an idea of how I’d structure it yet.
What I do know is that I’m done with combat-driven and competitive modes. The most toxic game I’ve ever experienced is League of Legends. I got hooked on it like a drug — I was worse than someone burning their paycheck at a Vegas casino — but the more time passed, the clearer it became that the problem wasn’t me, it was the game itself. The game is profoundly unhealthy by design: it actively damages the body, the brain, and — I genuinely believe — the future of humanity at scale, given how many hours millions of people pour into it.
You can call me naive for saying that, and I won’t take it personally. For whatever it’s worth, I’m credited in the acknowledgements of 11 published books, so I’d like to think my read on this isn’t completely off-base. My sincere conviction is that the way we behave intellectually inside a game does carry over into real life. The reflexes you train every evening — patience or contempt, cooperation or domination, generosity or score-hoarding — don’t politely stay inside the client when you close it. They become you.
So even if it sounds a bit naive, what I’m actually looking for is something where people laugh together, and that stays out of the LGBTQA++ vicious circle — which honestly, to me, looks like a passing trend more than anything else. Mixing all of that into something genuinely positive and genuinely funny is extremely hard. I try not to set limits on myself, and yet I systematically run into people who put walls in front of me — because no matter what style of humour I try, someone is always there to take offence. That’s what I find so frustrating, because to me humour is the most subtle form of intelligence there is.
On that note: if you don’t know who Joel Spolsky is, look him up. Most people instinctively reach for Steve Jobs or Bill Gates when asked who they admire in tech — I reach for Spolsky, precisely for that rare combination of sharp intelligence and real humour. And in case anyone’s tempted to dismiss him as “just a funny blogger”, he co-founded two companies that ended in major exits: Stack Overflow (with Jeff Atwood, another person I deeply admire) — sold to Prosus in 2021 for $1.8 billion — and Trello (with Michael Pryor at Fog Creek) — sold to Atlassian in 2017 for $425 million. So he’s not exactly the dreamer type either.
So whatever multiplayer mode I eventually build, it will be strictly cooperative, and it will try to make people laugh. That’s the only direction I find worth the years of work it represents.
One last thing. Old guys like me — yes, our brains slow down, we know it — also have something younger devs simply haven’t had time to accumulate yet: experience, and the scar tissue that comes with it. The suggestions I’m sharing here took me a long time to formulate; please don’t dismiss any of them lightly. I genuinely hope you get something useful out of it.
There’s an old French expression I always come back to: what matters is the engine, not the bodywork. And today, 99% of the people walking this planet would rather stare at the paint job than ever bother lifting the hood. I’ve always sat on the other side of that line — and I always will.
