Dino Patti's mission to trigger the indie multiplayer revolution

gamesindustry.biz:

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Dino Patti wants to see more interesting and unique multiplayer games – and he believes those will come from the indie space.

Alongside his ongoing work at Jumpship, the Inside and Limbo producer is co-founder and CEO of a tech startup Coherence, which has developed a Unity SDK of the same name to make it easier for indie studios to add multiplayer functionality to their games.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz ahead of launch, Patti laments the "lack of innovation in the big games," noting that so much attention goes on the technology, that the core idea is often underwhelming.

"But with indies, just looking at what people have in their minds, if you get a game like Papers Please, it's single-players that fuck with your mind," he says. "How would that work if you gave Lucas Pope this technology where he could do multiplayer?"

Given his own experience with single-player games, he acknowledges that working on multiplayer tech may look like "such a weird shift" but insists it's the next natural iteration for his career.

"If indies knew they could make multiplayer and just get the idea out, we'd see so many crazy ideas"

"Single-player games lie so deep to my heart. But I have also been looking up to games like Journey," he explains. "The way you have this game that's essentially a walking simulator but the multiplayer part... ask any person about their experience there, they'll talk about the person they met. If I were to make a new game, it would be with user-generated stories.

"I kind of thought I could make games using user-generated stories or I could build this tool and do something that could revolutionise the way game developers look at