Recently, GDevelop decided to add easier multiplayer which includes things like lobbies. This, in itself, is fine. It is good to see that GDevelop allows their users to create multiplayer experiences with ease.
GDevelop also has a leaderboard system for a pretty long time. This is also a great addition and I would use both of those features in my game if it wasn’t for one thing:
THE UI
It just does not fit into the games I make. I do not want to create games where it’s all colourful and pretty. What if I wanted to make a horror game?
Imagine someone opens it, plays it and then wants to see how long they survived compared to others. They open the leaderboard and they are greeted with a nice blue-ish and white leaderboard that looks like out of some mobile game.
How can they take my game as seriously as before after seeing this?
With the leaderboards, I can just make my own, it’s much easier than making your own, no IP leaking multiplayer though.
I would definitely try the multiplayer for one of my games if I could just get the lobby data and make my own UI. I do not like the style that it is now and I will not be using it unless I’ll be able to make my own. It seemed like a great chance for me to finally make multiplayer games because for some reason every other solution just did NOT want to work but the UI just throws me off completely.
The other thing I do not like is how you need to pay for the Pro subscription to customize the leaderboards more than just changing a few colours. I hope this doesn’t happen with the multiplayer customization too. Imagine you bought a Gold or Silver subscription to have multiplayer in your games but now you want to change how it looks and all you see is BUY THE PRO SUBSCRIPTION TO CUSTOMIZE …
I am not asking to give you something extraordinary here (or at least I think so). You already need to send the data to display everything, might as well provide some way to access the data itself, so people can freely customize how it looks.