I’m going to copy and paste this from a comment I made that’s buried deep in another thread. I’d like to have a discussion around this and come up with some kind of “standards” to make it better for us.
There needs to be a “Standard” for arcade multiplayer. Maybe there’s some API or resources that could be reused. Right now at our arcade, Elven Assassin, Arizona Sunshine, and Skyfront are relatively easy to get into. Actually, Arcade LA Deadzone is the easiest. Load up, shoot a character on the wall and everyone magically pops in … too bad the game stinks :-)
Of them all, I would say right now, Elven Assassin is the best example of how to do it right. Things it get’s right :
- Easy to understand “click on Multiplayer”
- Single box to check to make it private
- Customers can JOIN MID GAME.
Things it could do better :
- Ability to Change Playername
- 4 digit Private game code
- Ability to remove regions that are irrelevant to us.
- Base spells provided instead of leveling up. Right now my station 1 is highest level and everyone knows it and argues to play in it 🙂
So IMO, If you have a multiplayer option in your game, it should have these things :
- Intuitive “This is where you click to start Multiplayer”
- Ability to change my Character name
- Game handles all the networking and joining (No Steam Friends (I’m looking at you Battlewake) or external login cloud based thing to join)
- Ability to join an EXISTING GAME while it’s already running (I’m looking at you Arizona Sunshine! )
- Put all this in a section called “Local Multiplayer” … in case you have Internet Multiplayer with Lobbies and all kinds of different options.
- A human readable configuration file to set all these options so we don’t have to walk players through it. Just give us the option to make a different entry that is “Arizona Sunshine 4 player”, for example. I set all the options in a FILE.CONFIG and just pass it as a launch option when I create the entry in the Launcher Library.
That’s my 2 cents - who can relate to this??, “Noooooo!, don’t click start until everyone joins the lobby or we have to start all over again!” …. although I’ve heard there’s a config file for Arizona Sunshine? I need to research that …. {Set Horde Mode; Undead Valley; Playername; Go!}
Please add your thoughts. Who else feels this pain?
