Multiplayer

As you hopefully know, the plan for the game is to be a single player experience. There are many reasons for this, the most important one being that multiplayer complicates pretty much everything. It is sometimes said that making a game multiplayer triples the development time, ain't nobody got time for that, especially not for an over scoped game on a shoestring budget. It also limits what you can do, it would be very difficult to have battles with tens of thousands of units or more if it was multiplayer for example.

It is however one of the top requested features, and I get why. It would just be awesome to fly around with a friend, show off your custom dragon, race each other, etc. So I've been thinking of ways to make it work without sacrificing the core game mechanics. There are two different ways of including online functionality that wouldn't require degrading other parts of the game, other than losing development time for those parts. The first is to just be able to share your creations with others, similar to what you could do in the game Spore. You can download dragons/characters that others have made and show off your own. This could definitely be done, there are no barriers other than it taking time to make.

The more ambitious way is to have two separate modes, single player campaign and multiplayer mode. The multiplayer mode would be a separate game mode designed for multiplayer, avoiding all the complexity that would arise from making the campaign multiplayer compatible. For example, you could host a game in a region that you have discovered and a friend(s) can join your game and there are a bunch of multiplayer-friendly activities to do there that are not tied to the single player campaign. Each player could play as their favourite character, maybe you could race each other in the ring trail activity recently shown, or there might be a hostile fortress you can burn down together. The hardest part of making this work is making the dragon multiplayer compatible. The flight sim could definitely work, the animations may be complicated since they are pretty unusual.

Both of these will be looked into at some point to see what can be made and how much time it would take. The game will still be referred to as single player for now since there is no guarantee either of these will be added, but they are on the list of possibilities!