Road to VHL #3: The first real multiplayer session

Road to VHL is a short series retracing three years of development. This part covers September 2024.

There's a moment in every online game's development that separates "a game with multiplayer plans" from "a multiplayer game." For VHL, it was September 2024.

Multiple players connected to the same rink and skated together for the first time, starting with local tests and then a proper LAN session. Passing to a human. Stealing from a human. Chasing a loose puck against someone who wants it just as badly. None of that can be faked with bots, and all of it changed how the game felt instantly.

It also marked the start of a different kind of work: synchronization, latency, and collisions between players who each think they got there first. A fast game on ice is an unforgiving place for networking, and this session was where we started learning that for real.

By spring 2025 this had grown into full-lobby stress tests with matchmaking and server-side metrics. But it all started here.

Next: Part 4: The VFX overhaul.