Developing Multiplayer Games in Godot

Multiplayer games are among the hardest software systems to build, requiring developers to synchronize state across unreliable networks while maintaining fairness, performance, and a responsive player experience. Latency, cheating, server costs, and debugging distributed game logic all introduce complexity that single player games never encounter. Domekeeper is a minimalist tower defense game with rogue like elements where players must protect a fragile glass dome from relentless waves of alien attackers. The game was developed with the Godot engine and released in 2022. More recently, the development team embarked on the challenge of adding multiplayer to the game. Renee Haberman is the founder of Bip n Bits and the creator of Domekeeper. Chris Raidenor is the founder of KAR Games, which is a Godot focused studio that developed Drift, Space Survival. Chris is now working with the Domekeeper team to bring multiplayer to the game. Renee and Chris join the show to talk about the origins of Domekeeper, developing the game, and the process of adding multiplayer to a Godot game. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's Mod. And game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Rene, Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me today. Hello. Thanks for having us. Hello. Glad to be here. So let's kick off with, I guess, an introduction from you two folks for anyone who's not familiar with your work. Rene, do you wanna start us off? I did actually, once upon a time, study computer science and then work in IT, but my heart truly lies in game development. So, eventually, I I always did this on the side by working in IT. Eventually, I made something that was at least impressive enough to publish our refury to fund the project, which is when I immediately left the IT industry. And when making games full time with the company, I found that Bipin bits, We made the first game, Dumpkeeper, was quite successful, and now we are working on some new titles. And the biggest one announced is PVKK, planet, which is a nice name for English speaking people to pronounce. Yes. We'll probably get to talking about PVKK. I will not attempt to pronounce the full name. So I'm glad that we've got that in there at least once. Some editors, you can just paste that over every time I say PVKK going forward. And, Chris, how about you? Virtual journey? Yeah. I spent about ten, twelve years in the startup world doing various startups as kinda founder and CTO living in that, like, web world. But like Renee, my heart was really in games, doing it on the side. And a few years ago, decided to just make the jump into a full time indie. We have one game on early access …