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You don't actually need to pay the $100 or publish anything to use Steam multiplayer, that's the whole point of Spacewar (AppID 480). It's Valve's public test app, and you get Steam's networking + their relay for free, so P2P works without hosting your own servers. Just note it's meant for dev/testing not shipping (everyone shares the same lobby pool so you just make a filter for your own), and players need Steam open. Bit of a shady rep since pirates abuse it, but for jam co-op it's a free, legit way to get real online multiplayer.

Honestly I'd bet Valve would rather have jammers using it than pirates anyway. A jammer who makes something good might actually publish on Steam down the line, so it kind of funnels people toward them.

Thank you so much! 😁
Yesss you found it, stacking stuff to reach higher ground is exactly what I was hoping players would try.
So glad the riddles landed, my only fear was I went overboard on the forced rhymes that might have not made sense in some cases.. 😬

Yeah you're right about Steam, its P2P goes through the Steam client so everyone does need Steam open and logged in, no way around that. And you do need an App ID, most people just use Spacewar (480) for testing but you'd want your own to actually ship if you plan on a proper release.

EOS is the exception, one of its policies lets players log in anonymously with a device id so there's no account or client they need running.
They made that for crossplatform compatibility.

Worth mentioning all of this is for downloadable builds by the way, if it's a browser game on itch none of it applies, that's a whole different setup (WebRTC/websockets stuff).

Bit late to be handing out advice now that the jam's wrapped, but I saw a few people wrestling with co-op so figured I'd share some stuff.

I actually skipped co-op myself this time. For a physics game, hashing out netcode bugs in a jam timeframe is a nightmare. But if you're set on it, you don't need to stand up your own servers. Both Epic and Steam offer free peer-to-peer connections, so that side of things is pretty much handled for games like these.

For testing, I built an Unreal widget earlier this year that makes multiplayer QA testing way less painful. It launches up to 4 separate PIE processes signed into 4 separate Epic accounts at once, with the Epic overlay enabled on each respective window. And it's not faking anything with null networking, all the traffic actually routes through EOS from inside Unreal, so what you're testing is the real thing.

I keep meaning to release it and I'll get it out one of these days. If that sounds useful, follow my account and I'll post when it's up. Might do a video walking through it too.

Thanks for the feedback 😁😁

Followup  question, are we allowed to upload screenshots after the fact, does that count as description 😬😬

I was sweating bullets for the last 30 minutes, I will have nightmares of unreal's UI widget blueprints for the next month, im still not 100% sure they will scale properly on different resolutions 

Insanely good game