I see so many indie devs take interesting elements of larger games, and expand them into fascinating little single player experiences that fully flesh out the mechanics. I want the exact opposite of that. I want to take little interesting pieces of indie games and bring them into multiplayer experiences. I get why that's so hard for indies to do. Multiplayer dev is a nightmare. Which is why I've pointed literally my entire career in the direction of being able to do it in the indie space. I LOVE multiplayer. The depth of human interaction and competition I find endlessly more interesting and enjoyable than even the deepest, most well crafted, most interactive, most endless or poignent single player experiences. I love that 15 years later I can still log into Team Fortress 2 and have a conversation with someone, play against people I have never seen before, see new strategies and tactics in their playstyle, be forced to adapt, be forced to coordinate with my team, and just interact with people.
I make friends being stabbed in Mordhau, getting a mech dropped on my head in Titanfall, in coordinating a round of Counterstrike. I still have friends I talk to every day from growing up on a TF2 server. And so much I see multiplayer moving in directions that make that impossible. I see purely social experiences, like VRChat, that don't interest me at all. I see it's value, but I still can get that by going to real life experiences that feel much more natural to me. I see purely co-op play, which I find difficult to play without friends of my own. It lacks the interest of a human opponent I really value. I see the COMPETITIVE side of things move away from voice chat because the game design encourages toxicity. (I have a whole theory of game design around this point in reaction directly to my experiences in Overwatch, Rocket League, and Counter Strike.)
But what I so rarely see is cool, independent, pro-social, competitive experiences. The best example I have in years is Due Process, and it's sadly sitting in some mix of early access and publisher abandonment hell that has lead to a sad slow decline of playerbase and lack of updates.
And yeah, you get the audience you design for, so I need to design for positive social experience. It's fascinating the way you have to actually build that into both game design, community management, and product management. You have to give players the ability to build the community, and you have to build the way players can and will interact in and out of your game.
I cannot wait to talk about my next project publicly.