He also suggests that making Nidhogg playable online, both on PC and across the broad swath of PSN, offers interesting opportunities for Messhof to cultivate and guide the game's evolution as a competitive fighting game now that arcades are on the wane. "Even I don't just play local multiplayer games," says Essen, "I have a lot of fun playing games online.I still get rivalries going, and I think it’s worthwhile." When I suggest to Essen that Nidhogg is perhaps at its best when it's limited to being a local multiplayer experience, he agrees - to a point. I’m not sure how they did it, but it seems pretty good to me." "There were little things to fix, like if collisions felt wonky we’d have to figure out what Game Maker did and replicate that. I have a lot of fun playing games online.I still get rivalries going, and I think it’s worthwhile."that sort of mimicked Game Maker," says Essen. “Basically emulated Game Maker, using my scripting and building up another engine around it "Even I don't just play local multiplayer games. Essen agrees, and takes pains to praise the work Code Mystics did in working with him to keep the idiosyncrasies of Nidhogg intact as they were effectively rebuilding it from scratch. Rolling your own Game MakerAuthentically replicating the "feel" of a multiplayer fighting game like Nidhogg while porting it to a new network seems key to satisfying its established community of players, many of whom play it locally with friends at home or at game industry events around the world. They also completely rebuilt the game's engine, in part because they began before Sony partnered with Yoyo Games to streamline the process of porting Game Maker projects like Nidhogg to PlayStation platforms. The partnership worked out, as Code Mystics rewrote the Nidhogg net code to make cross-platform multiplayer matchups possible across the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation Vita, the PlayStation 3 and Sony's recently-released PlayStation TV microconsole. " had done the net code for some Mortal Kombat console port, so it sounded like they might fit." "We wanted to change our net code around a bit, and have someone else take a crack at it," says Essen. The story of how it happened holds some intriguing lessons for indie developers: Messhof started talking with Sony just over a year ago about the potential of porting Nidhogg to PlayStation platforms, and Essen says it was Sony who reached out to the port specialists at Code Mystics. When Messhof co-founder Mark Essen released his two-player fencing title Nidhogg on Steam in January after roughly four years of work, one of the more surprising additions was a suite of new multiplayer options that catapulted the title - which had long limited PC players to local multiplayer duels - into the realm of online fighting games.īy all accounts, Nidhogg's networking code comported itself admirably - indie developer Teddy Diefenbach even made a point of praising it while discussing his upcoming four-player fighting game Kyoto Wild earlier this year.īut now Messhof has released the game on the PlayStation Network with cross-(PlayStation) platform multiplayer, relying on a third-party studio to tackle the challenge of replicating the game's precise fencing mechanics (players die with a single hit) in a multiplayer match between duelists who are potentially playing on two different types of PlayStation hardware with miles, countries or even oceans between them.
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