How should connecting to multiplayer feel? - Dev Log

[p]Hello Humans![/p][p]As we've been building the new King of the Hill team battle mode, our new Server Engineer has been making sure everything about multiplayer works smoothly. Scarlett has only been with the team a few months but it's likely you've already felt the effects of her work! We asked her a little bit more about the technical side of the game to show you what has been happening "under the hood."[/p][hr][/hr][h3]What have you been up to?[/h3][p]Oh gosh, so many things. Although my official title is “Server Engineer,” I work on a wide variety of things because we’re a small team. A big chunk of my time recently has been spent feeling like I’m cosplaying as a sysadmin, managing lots of computer systems and wrangling all the different servers and services we’re using behind the scenes. I’ve also been focusing a lot on improving the multiplayer experience, with fixing up our game servers and matchmaking alongside updating some things that had become a bit out of date over the past couple years. (Technology moves fast!)[/p][p][/p][h3]How are you improving the multiplayer experience?[/h3][p]Over the past month, I’ve been focusing on fixing our existing systems. Although we like to think about software as something that keeps working once it’s written, with backend services, it’s more like a car or an instrument: after it’s been in use for a while, it could really use a tune-up. Our matchmaker and game servers have finally gotten some of that much-needed attention. Now that we’ve gotten everything a bit more stabilized and back to where it was before, we can go from “it’s back to working as well as it was before” to starting on making it even better than it was before. That includes everything from new features like supporting team-based game modes, to improving how everything runs behind the scenes with adding more metrics and logging so we can proactively fix things without relying so much on player reports that things aren’t working quite right.[/p][p][/p][h3]What do we want matchmaking and connecting to games to feel like?[/h3][p]Ideally, it shouldn’t feel like anything at all. It should be one of those things that “just works,” so you barely even notice it’s there. When it is working, and we’re along that golden path, I think we do hit that mark. However, when anything goes wrong, it currently feels pretty… well, clumsy. You sit for a really long time staring at a connection screen that will never finish, before getting presented with a probably-unhelpful error, and then even if you reach out to support afterwards, it’s hard for us to help because we have so little information to go on. I’d really like to shore up that worst case scenario to make it feel a lot better, so that even when something goes wrong, you get useful messaging and aren’t stuck waiting around as long. (See our recent “multiplayer improvements” blog post for more details on plans for that.)[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Even though some of the things you’re working on won’t be visible to players, how will they experience the effects of your work?[/h3][p]Hopefully, players will feel less friction when playing multiplayer. But beyond that, the work I’m doing will help enable the team to make a lot of the updates and changes we have planned. To use another analogy: being a server engineer is sort of like working on the plumbing or electrical wiring in a house. It’s really important work that everything else depends on. And yet, it’s also hidden behind the walls and floors and ceilings, where people don’t see it. You definitely notice it when things start going wrong. But when it works well and it’s easy to maintain? You just have a good, frictionless experience that you don’t have to spend time and effort actively thinking about.[/p][hr][/hr][p]Thanks Scarlett![/p][p]If you’d like to join the King of the Hill playtests, make sure to watch the development live on Twitch![/p][p]While we're talking servers, we'd like to say thank you to our Russian players for their patience and helpfulness! Right now there's still no clear way for us to directly connect Russian players to the game because of the blocks in place. We're still thinking about what we can do to change the situation but for now the community has been really active in finding ways around so they can play, so please visit the Discord if you'd like to ask for help![/p][p]Have fun in the Danger Zone,[/p][p]The Doborog Team[/p]