When creating so much content in a small team like ours the challenge can be keeping up with all the different meanings that an item may have in different cultures. Working on Hamster Playground's Game Modes Things that are perceived merely as a trinket in central Europe can have a lot of cultural meaning in America, for example. Multiplayer mode is limited to racing, for now at least.
Because the Hamster House module and Racing module are so very different at their core we could limit our multiplayer efforts solely to the races. We took a similar approach to fighting games in terms of matchmaking and user experience. When you do something that has been done so many times before you encounter very few challenges in development and have a lot of tools at your disposal. The main challenge in developing a multiplayer is to start building your online component early in development. It is a common mistake that many devs make and we've made it too many times before ourselves – adding online to an offline game. Races are online from the get-go and that lets us avoid tons of problems we would otherwise encounter. Races in Hamster Playground are fairly simple at their core thus they do not require too much attention in terms of player synchronization or net code optimization. Simple update at certain parts of the track is enough to keep everything in check. Balancing is made solely through a matchmaking component. A straightforward hamster house level comparison is enough to initially match players with similar skill levels. We can filter them further by comparing win to lose ratio, a stat we do not show in the game to take out the hardcore competitiveness from the racing mode but keep hidden somewhere in the back, just in case. Technical challenges lay where the porting to different platforms begins. All platform holders have their own backend solutions for online connectivity.
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