The Quarry: Adding eight-way multiplayer to an interactive horror epic
Question: When is a game more than a game?
Answer: When it’s a full-on cinematic tour-de-force you can experience with friends—enjoying the story together like you would a movie, but also playing collaboratively to shape the narrative’s gruesome events.
That was the idea behind The Quarry, a 2022 interactive horror game from Supermassive Games and the spiritual sequel to the Sony-published 2015 PS4 smash-hit Until Dawn.
Online multiplayer, however, was a brand new feature for Supermassive Games. And so they turned to Room 8 Group—utilizing our technical expertise to bring the much-requested mode to life in line with their planned dev schedule.
The challenge
Multiplayer was something that Supermassive wanted as part of The Quarry. To meet that ambition, Supermassive needed a co-dev partner who could slot in seamlessly as an extension of their established team. One able to deploy the needed talent, deliver extensive multiplayer technology expertise, and work collaboratively over an extended time period to produce a mode for up to eight online players that fitted seamlessly into the final product.
That’s where we came in.
What we did
Hit the ground running
Having already worked with Supermassive on Man of Medan, we were in a great position to get going with co-development from day one. Onboarding was swift, and our team of engineers were soon up to speed on the ins and outs of their bespoke version of Unreal Engine 4, modified to include the company’s custom toolchain.
Took ownership of the entire multiplayer mode
As a narrative experience for up to eight players, our aim with The Quarry’s multiplayer mode was to give one player full character control while allowing the other seven to vote on key decisions. For instance, will you choose to save your friends, or run away from danger? With 185 different ending variations, there was incredible scope to play with compelling group choice and consequence.
Integrating the feature seamlessly would be no small challenge—necessitating complete ownership on our part. However, we soon realized our work had a bigger impact than just one title in Supermassive’s growing portfolio. Working in isolation would not be an option.
Operated fully in sync with client teams
When we joined The Quarry team, Supermassive had other projects in production that all ran on the same engine. With even small in-engine changes able to cause expensive consequences for other titles, owning the multiplayer mode meant moving carefully-often syncing with teams working on similar games to solve problems together, while working closely with The Quarry’s dedicated design team to ensure our work matched the project’s vision.
A key part of our approach involved performing regular code reviews-following Supermassive’s strict quality standards before pushing our changes to their local main branch.
Thanks to our collaborative approach, frequent communication, clear direction around goals and objectives, and a welcoming atmosphere of trust and support created by Supermassive’s leadership, we were able to deliver for launch—signposting for the company’s other teams how to build a compelling and feature-rich multiplayer mode on future projects.
Specialisms delivered
Co-development of full multiplayer mode, including:
- Design and optimization of core network logic
- Multiplayer decision system integration
- Multiplayer session management
- Game UI implementation
- Networking and gameplay support
- Network optimization support
- Bug fixing and optimization
Need support implementing an extra mode into your next release?
Whether you want to make your story accessible to more players, deliver time attack gameplay, extend your title’s longevity with a Horde-style option, add an additional card battler into your adventure, or integrate any other kind of mode you can think of, our co-development expertise can help you deliver—starting from day one of our partnership.
Curious what we can do for your project? Let’s talk.