Six years ago, Don’t Get Got was just a scrappy game jam prototype: a horror concept that put players in a tense standoff with a growing horde of killer dolls. The twist? Players couldn’t hurt each other directly. They either had to work together to survive, or turn on each other to escape alone.
Bossa Studios loved the idea but the technical overhead of building online multiplayer made it too risky to pursue. So the concept went into deep freeze, filed away as Prototype #249 in a spreadsheet of over 350 playable experiments.
Fast-forward to late 2024. Over a holiday break, a team of just three developers at Bossa brought Don’t Get Got back to life and released it publicly in under three weeks. What changed?
The answer: coherence
"There are some ideas we stayed away from… good ideas, but not fantastic enough to justify the effort of implementing it in multiplayer," said Henrique Olifiers, Bossa’s CEO and Gamer-in-Chief. Don’t Get Got was one of those ideas. Multiplayer had simply been too costly and time-consuming to prototype.
That changed with coherence, a networking engine designed to make real-time multiplayer development as simple and seamless as possible. Henrique explained, “Prototyping for multiplayer was far more expensive… until we found coherence. Then the cost of prototyping multiplayer became very close to prototyping single player.”
With coherence, Bossa could remove the usual technical friction. Even designers like Luke Williams, who isn’t a network engineer, could peek under the hood and understand how design choices would impact the multiplayer systems. As Luke put it, "It lets me be a little more open creatively with the design. Just a little bit can be the difference between a good idea and a great prototype."
Over the Christmas and New Year’s holiday, one programmer and two artists decided to resurrect Prototype 249. In just under three weeks, they delivered a playable multiplayer horror experience with:
Henrique said, "I’ve never heard of a multiplayer game going from idea to launch in two weeks. That could only be done with Coherence."
The result was creepy, chaotic, and fun. And despite the fast timeline, the launch went smoothly. "The game performed at launch flawlessly, which is a rarity in multiplayer games to begin with," he added.
Bossa’s development model centers on creativity through experimentation: hundreds of ideas, tested through game jams and rapid prototyping. But historically, multiplayer made many of those ideas too expensive to explore.
"We have what we call the deep freeze storage… 350 prototypes built over 15 years," said Henrique. "Some are great, some are terrible, and some were just too risky to justify implementing in multiplayer."
Now, with coherence, that barrier is gone. Henrique explained, "coherence enables the game design to be more daring. You can allow yourself to take chances you wouldn’t otherwise, because failure is no longer prohibitively expensive."
And if the first version doesn’t work? No problem. They can try again without breaking the budget.
- Henrique Olifiers
After their experience with Worlds Adrift, which was shut down due to technical constraints related to a third-party vendor, Bossa made it a point to never let a beloved game disappear again.
That became a non-negotiable requirement in working with coherence: the game had to function even if the service ever went away. “We told coherence: we will use it, but only if you develop a peer-to-peer solution,” Henrique said. “And so they built that with us.”
The peer-to-peer fallback allows Don’t Get Got (and future Bossa games) to keep running without relying on coherence Cloud Hosting (or any other hosting solution). And that required coherence to shift their own business model to not only be valuable for developers but also for players. “That is as rare as something can be in the games industry today,” Henrique said.
Henrique believes the future of game development will be led by small, nimble teams using powerful, accessible tools. “Big games will be made by teams of five. That’s how the industry is going to take shape in the next five years,” he predicts. coherence fits directly into that vision. For Bossa, it’s not just a tech solution, it’s a platform that unlocks the kind of development they want to do: fast, experimental, collaborative, and sustainable.
- Henrique Olifiers
What started as a long-forgotten jam game project became a polished multiplayer prototype, built by a skeleton crew and launched to the public. With coherence, Don’t Get Got wasn’t just possible—it was fast, stable, and creatively freeing. And for Bossa, that small experiment proved something bigger: multiplayer doesn’t have to be a blocker anymore. It can be the spark that brings ideas back from the dead.
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