Why is multiplayer taking so long?

Today I pretty much finished putting all of the graphics into a sprite sheet for the game. Unfortunetely this doesn’t give me much to show you.:) They’re not in the game, they’re in the sprite sheet:) Instead I wanted to answer a question that I’d be asking if I was following the development of the game: Why is multiplayer taking so long? Here’s the simple answer: We pretty much had to start from scratch.
When we first started tackling multiplayer we began by refactoring all of our code. We found time and time again that all of our code was built with the assumption that there was one game hero and an entire world that only one person could manipulate at a time. Simply put it just wasn’t designed with multiplayer in mind. We got to a point when we realized that the easiest way to do this would be to start from scratch and bring the old code over as we went. It was a big decision that we made pretty early in the process. There will not be a need to start from scratch like this again because all of the other features are easy to just add on to the game. If we had designed the first release with multiplayer in mind I’m confident we would have been done a while ago:)
The next question you might have is why we didn’t design everything with multiplayer in mind? Well we had talked about it early on but decided to focus on a single player game. Then when we went to steam greenlight the most popular feedback we received was that we should include multiplayer. We figured we should either add it now or never!
At this point all of the core systems are in the game and functioning. We are adding back in all of the content and bugfixing like crazy. If everything goes great we’ll have the next release out in a month or two. As soon as we feel confident we can give an actual release time frame, I’ll be sure to let you know! Stay tuned for more screenshots in the next few days.