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I have been starting a new online multiplayer game project this week and as the title says - Is it better to implement the Multiplayer feature right away, or is it ok to implement it when the game already has some other stuff, like maps and physics?

juanSenna
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  • Right away. You don't even want to think about the complexity of implementing it later on, and then having to reimplement all your logic around that. – Engineer May 08 '20 at 06:46

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How you implement the network will inform everything else you do in the game. Implementing networking later is always a bad idea.

Here's an example of a released game with local coop and what happened when they tried to implement networked coop later:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/408410/discussions/0/1697176044371195631/

Unfortunately, despite our multiple attempts and best intentions, we have not delivered the online version of the co-op game mode. The main problem with the game is that it’s heavily physics based and it affects gameplay, thus we would have to make the physics 100% predictable or to completely rework the whole framework for it to be able to send physics information in multiplayer. Unfortunately, this would require 6-9 months of work for 2-3 programmers and so we decided that we won't be able to pull it off.

Almo
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