He looked into implementing splitscreen co-op. I simply never asked the question.” So when he first released Human: Fall Flat on Itch.io back in November 2015, he was rather surprised to start getting requests for multiplayer. “It was totally one device per computer and one player. He’d designed his game for singleplayer and to support RealSense, Intel’s Kinecty depth-sensing controller. I totally missed it,” Sakalauskas tells me. “I couldn’t see it right under my fingertips. But it’s what players asked for, so what could he do? And besides, he was pretty sure that online multiplayer was impossible. Human Fall Flat was meant to be a singleplayer physics-based puzzle game, a meeting of Portal and Limbo. Yet developer Tomas Sakalauskas never really saw his game like that. He’s ungainly and awkward to control and, for heck’s sake, Gang Beasts showed how funny that combination is when several players get together.

It’s a knockabout physics game in which you play as a wobbly non-Newtonian man. Obviously, obviously, Human: Fall Flat is primed for multiplayer. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games.

Human fall flat online