Play it with friends: online multiplayer in every vbgnt game

Until now a vbgnt game was something you sent to a friend. As of this week it can be something you play with them. Ask for a game "with online co-op" or "versus, for four people", and the studio builds the lobby, the room codes and the invite links along with everything else. One player hosts, the others type four letters or click a link, and the match runs between their browsers with nothing to install on either end.

This post covers what you get, how to ask for it, what kinds of games it suits, and the honest list of what it does not do yet.

What a multiplayer game looks like now

Every online game the studio builds has the same three moving parts, each in the game's own art direction rather than a bolted-on menu:

• A lobby. Host or Join, a name, and a player list. The host sees a room code in large type and a Copy link button. Guests type the code or arrive through the link and land straight in the room.
• A room code. Four letters, no vowels, so it never spells anything and never confuses an O with a zero when you read it out across a table. A room lives as long as the host's tab is open.
• An invite link. The game's own play URL with the room code on the end. Paste it anywhere. Whoever opens it joins the match, including from the arcade page, where the link opens the game and joins in one step.

Games with online play show an Online badge on your arcade, so people know before they press play that they can bring someone.

How to ask for it

Say it in the brief, the same way you would say "top-down" or "pixel art". The studio reads the request, designs the game for the player count you name, and builds the lobby as part of the first playable. A few shapes that work:

• "A two-player online tank duel on a small arena, top-down, 90s shareware look. First to five wins."
• "Four-player online co-op: we defend a lighthouse from waves of sea creatures. One shared health bar for the lighthouse."
• "An eight-player online party game: everyone controls a bouncing blob, last one on the shrinking platform wins the round."
• "Turn-based online, two players, a card game about trading spices. Show whose turn it is very clearly."

Name the player count. A game designed for two feels wrong when eight people pile into it, and the studio sizes arenas, cameras and spawn points to the number you give. If you leave it out, it assumes four.

You can also add it later. "Make this playable online with a friend" on an existing single-player game gets you a lobby and a second player, though the studio may push back on games whose rules only make sense for one person.

The other thing worth saying up front: two people on one screen is not the same request. "Two-player on one keyboard" or "split screen with two gamepads" is local multiplayer, and the studio builds that without any of the online machinery. Ask for whichever you actually want, and say "online" when you mean online.

What plays well over the internet

The match runs on one player's machine, the host, and everyone else sends their inputs to it and gets the game state back. That is the model almost every co-op and party game on a console uses, and it shapes what feels good:

Rooms hold up to eight players. In practice two to four is where most games are best, and the studio will say so if you ask for eight in a genre that does not want them.

What the studio does behind the scenes

The interesting part is not that the games have networking. It is that the agent building them has a networking layer it knows how to use, the same way it has an asset pipeline and a browser to test in.

Godot, the engine under every vbgnt game, ships a capable high-level multiplayer system: remote procedure calls, spawners that mirror objects to every player, synchronizers that stream state. What a browser game lacks is a way for two players to find each other and a connection between them that works through home routers. So the platform provides exactly those two things and nothing more: a small room service that hands out codes and brokers the connection, and a relay for the minority of networks where a direct path is blocked. Game traffic goes browser to browser over WebRTC, the same technology video calls use. Nothing about your match passes through our servers once the handshake is done, which is also why running it costs almost nothing and why there is no per-match server to spin up or fall over.

On the agent's side this arrives as a skill: a document that tells it when online play is the right answer, how the lobby should behave, how to split the game between host and guests so that only the host is ever the referee, and the mistakes generated games tend to make when they sync too much or the wrong things. It also gets a new test. The headless browser that plays every build before you see it now opens two browsers for a multiplayer game, hosts a room in one, joins from the other, and refuses to ship the build unless both sides report a live connection and both screenshots show the same match. A lobby that looks right but never connects does not get past that step.

Exports and cross-play

The Publish pane exports multiplayer games like any other. The web build plays online exactly as it does on your arcade. Desktop and mobile builds get the native WebRTC library added during the export, and they join the same rooms: a friend on the Windows build can host, and you can join from the browser on your phone. The itch.io push works unchanged.

The honest limits

This is the first version of online play, built for playing with people you know. It is worth being precise about what that means:

• No matchmaking and no accounts. There is no button that finds you an opponent. You host, you share the code. Names are whatever players type in the lobby.
• The host is the referee. Their machine runs the match. For a game between friends that is fine; for anything with stakes it means a determined host could cheat, and there is no leaderboard that resists tampering yet.
• If the host leaves, the match ends. Guests are sent back to the lobby with a message. There is no hand-off to another player in this version.
• A refresh drops you out. Rejoining is one click with the invite link, but you come back as a new player, not into the seat you had.
• Eight players, and the host's upload speed. Every guest's view of the game comes from the host's connection. On a weak connection, host with fewer people.

Ranked play, persistent progression and matchmaking with strangers need a server that no player controls. That is a different piece of infrastructure, and it is on the list for when games ask for it. Until then, the studio will build the friends-only version and tell you so.

Try it

The quickest check is two tabs in one browser: press Host in one, type the code in the other, and watch both screens update. Then send the link to someone who is not in the room with you, because that is the point.