Behind the monstrous challenge of "just adding multiplayer" to Salt and Sacrifice

gamedeveloper.com:

Ska Studios struck gold in 2016 with the release of Salt & Sanctuary, an early entry in the "Souls-like" genre that wore its inspirations on its sleeve. The brutal combat and high-stakes cost of death and resurrection meshed nicely with an original ocean-inspired horror art direction that hammers home the fact that the sea is absolutely terrifying.

A less visible element of the game's success was its evolution out of the world of XNA game development that powered Xbox Live Arcade. Studio founder James Silva began his career as an indie developer on that platform, making cult games like The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, and Charlie Murder on a game development framework that would fall out of Microsoft's good graces with the move to the Xbox One.

Seven years later the studio is back with Salt and Sacrifice (which just launched on Steam and Nintendo switch after an exclusive stint on the Epic Game Store), and lo and behold, Ska Studios is still carrying the torch of XNA-inspired game development—with its co-owners flexing their muscles with new co-op multiplayer mechanics that let players take on the game's monstrous bosses together, all while navigating complex ability trees aligned to the game's factions. All of this was done on the back of the MonoGame framework—one of two code frameworks that lets developers work in an XNA-inspired environment.

In a call with Silva and Ska Studios co-owner Shane Lynch, the pair shared some insight on what it took to make a highly polished multiplayer game with so few resources—and mused on the notion that indie developers who might be searching for new game engine options may want to adopt XNA-inspired frameworks for their next game.

Salt and Sacrifice's multiplayer features exist largely in