The same day I published that essay, I started building the exact thing it warned me about.
The multiplayer section was a list of reasons a solo dev should stay away: cheating, balancing forever, running a live service with no end date, and the cold-start problem where an empty lobby quietly kills a perfectly good game. I believed all of it. I still do.
But one finding from the research wouldn’t leave me alone. A solo game’s danger gets solved once and then runs on autopilot. By the fifth time you meet the same trap you’ve stopped reacting and started going through the motions. Other players never let that happen. Nobody plays the same way twice, so the threat stays a threat. That unpredictability was the one thing I could never fake on my own, and multiplayer hands it to you for free.
So Dashline goes all in on it. It’s a top-down arena where you move, dash, and grab pickups, and the main thing that kills you is a bomb another player placed. You charge bombs by collecting shards, and the blast radius is painted on the floor for everyone to see, so dropping one is really a guess about where your target will bolt. Your dash has a sliver of invulnerability, so a clean one punches straight through an explosion. Killing someone with your own bomb pays far more than anything you can farm quietly, which is the whole point: playing it safe is the losing move.
I haven’t solved any of the problems the essay listed. I’m hedging them. Bots fill an empty arena until real people show up. The server runs the entire simulation and the client only sends inputs, so there’s nothing to cheat. Runs last about ninety seconds, so a bad one costs you nothing. And a daily challenge seeded by the date gives you a solo run with its own leaderboard, the feeling of company without needing anyone else online at the same time.
It’s rough. It’s also already more fun than anything I ever finished alone, which makes me think the research was pointing the right way, even while I was using it to argue myself out of this exact thing.
It’s live, so judge for yourself: play today’s run.