Help! Turning a single-player tool into a multiplayer product?
Hey folks,
Last year we added a couple of team features to our originally 'single-player' product OpinionX, mostly just that users could invite and collaborate with other people when designing their projects.
It's never really been a smooth feature and we lack a lot of what we need for team collaboration to actually work (like workspace resource directories, per-seat pricing, domain-level permissions, etc.).
Has anyone got any experience building this sort of stuff for their product? How hard did you find it? How long did it take you? Only thing I could find online really was this blog post by Pastel about their transition from single-player to multiplayer saas in 2018...
Would really appreciate any help!
Hey, this sounds like a great idea.
I have been looking into this exact problem recently - adding multiplayer support to an existing single-player application.
The collaborative team features can easily become complicated unless you focus on what matters to your product. For example, Figma (the design tool) do multiplayer extremely well. They have realtime multiplayer cursors and editing. In reality that's probably massively overkill for a normal SaaS though! This blog post talks about their transition.
In my opinion it is worth adding multiplayer "properly" if you are going to do it. Otherwise you can end up with a lot of spaghetti! I found this Bullet train blog post very useful because it gives a very sensible data structure. Also, this related BlitzJS documentation is great. The ideas in these posts are universal - you don't need to be using Rails or Blitz.
Hope it's helpful. Good luck!
This is the exact answer I was hoping to receive. Thanks so much Jordan, will dig into those links and if I have any follow-up questions I'll DM you directly. Appreciate the help!
Sure thing!