by platforms and we are trending towards teams which are not bigger than what we have today,” Henrique suggests. “Games will have to be made by smaller teams costing less to produce or they won’t be viable anymore. In that context, if multiplayer games are something that will prevail, and they will because players love multiplayer games, something like coherence is a big piece of that puzzle because I can’t build games with small teams in small budgets with traditional old paradigms of multiplayer technologies.” In recent years, we’ve even seen big studios, publishers and


platform holders struggle with developing multiplayer titles, shutting down projects that have been a huge investment quickly after release. This highlights that the need to be able to prototype and iterate quickly is needed right across the industry. “coherence enables us to move faster in the production of a game but even faster on concept and prototyping stages,” Henrique explains. “We use coherence in two games now and one of the games we were able to come from idea to launch in a mere two weeks, and that’s a multiplayer game. I’ve never heard of that before. That could only be done with coherence.” Henrique becoming an advocate for coherence is surprising, given


what Bossa has dealt with in the past when it comes to third-party solutions. He points to the infamously controversial business model change Unity tried to implement in 2023 and how disruptive that was for developers across the world. “To embark with a partner on a technology that underpins your project is a very serious decision and we in the past had very difficult experiences with that, that led to the entire cancellation of a successful game.” Why then, did the studio end up working with coherence and


using it to create Lost Skies? “When we developed Surgeon Simulator 2 we created the entire multiplayer stack from scratch ourselves and it was a very performant multiplayer stack. But the problem is that every minute that I spend developing an underlying technology is a minute that I’m taking away from creating the game itself.” Henrique explains that he would rather the studio put all its focus into player-facing facing features, which is ultimately what matters. “Players don’t care about network solutions,” says Henrique. “They just want it to work”. Coming to terms with this reality combined with a relationship


with coherence that developed over time. “Bossa did not even want to use a vendor for their multiplayer as they had a bad previous experience,” Dino remembers. “We initially went to them to learn about their experiences with multiplayer. They’ve given a lot of input over the general design of the tools, largely driving us to make it easier and easier to use, so they could have almost all of their development team networking their own features, which meant more people could focus on actually building the game instead of the networking aspect. Then, there were some significant challenges around being able to support Lost Skies since their vision was so huge: a massive, open and persistent world with lots of physics-based gameplay. So we had to design coherence to be super efficient right from the start. They had specific needs like ‘World Origin Shifting’, which enables very large words in Unity and over the network. This was a great challenge to implement and this has since been made available to everyone.”


“The team was very game-centric in terms of where they came


from,” says Henrique, offering his perspective on the relationship. “They knew the pain points that we knew of. They were building something that was very well suited for the kind of challenges that we have on the day-to-day. We started to build more trust in the team that was building it. So the natural moment came for us to embrace it beyond prototypes. That’s how the decision came about to adopt coherence for Lost Skies.” coherence addresses another key problem that is becoming


increasingly prevalent in the industry and that Bossa itself had been a victim of. “One of the big things that they wanted was related to the deep commitment they wanted to make to their players,” says Dino. “Since their previous title got shut down, Bossa wanted to be able to make sure their players could keep playing the game no matter what. We already had Peer-to-Peer support in the road map, so this feature, which could solve their problem, got fast-tracked. Now, Bossa can run both coherence Cloud Hosting for the most flexible experience, with both low latency and large world support. But they can also run the game in Peer-to-Peer with distributed physics. Basically, the SDK is free to integrate and use,” Dino continues. “Then, studios can always self host or use our Peer-to-Peer deployment options. So if the studios closes, the publisher closes, or even coherence closes, the game lives on. That’s the vision. We make great technology that puts the control in your hands as a development team.” With the fantastic reception to the Lost Skies demo and other public


partners now being announced, such as Vampire Survivors developer Poncle, Dino is excited about the growing awareness of what coherence is and what it allows developers to do. “We are finally able to speak about our ongoing projects publicly, in more detail,” says Dino. “It’s so critical to be able to point to real, launched projects that people know. When developers look at a physics-driven open world like Lost Skies, they start to understand what our platform is capable of. I’ve just come home from GDC, and I can really feel how working with these respected studios has put us on the map.” “We are definitely looking to build on what momentum we


already have and we will work with more developers to bring more multiplayer games to light,” says Dino on coherence’s future. “Our solution is extremely flexible. This is one of our key features — we adapt to your game development instead of forcing you to adapt to a certain way of doing things. This establishes two things: it is easy to start a multiplayer project and, as you are finding the ‘fun’, you change coherence to fit your needs.” Dino points out that coherence is also perfectly placed to help developers and publishers extend the life of their back catalogue — an important consideration as holding players on your title becomes ever more important and the tendency for players to stick to older games for longer increases. “You can even easily implement multiplayer using coherence after the game launches, as the flexibility of the system allows you to do that even after the fact.” For Henrique, coherence is a vital part of the future. “This, already


for us, is fundamental,” he says. “I don’t see us making any other game that doesn’t employ coherence going forward.”


April/May 2025 MCV/DEVELOP | 27


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