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Playing together
No friend lists, no invitations, no accounts to look each other up with. Multiplayer here is one person making a room and handing everyone else a link.
The idea
Most online games solve "who am I playing with" by making everybody register first. That is a reasonable answer for a game you will play for two years, and a terrible one for a game you will play for eleven minutes at a table in a café.
Flying Penguin takes the other route. A room is a four-character code and a URL. Share the link with the people you want to play with. Rooms are temporary, and there is no game account to create.
Making a room
- Open Flying Penguin and press Versus on the title screen.
- Set the shape of the match. Mode is single swings or Rush x5. Players is two, three or four. Win target is first to 1, 3 or 5 round wins — first to 1 is a single decisive round, first to 5 is an evening.
- Choose whether the game asks everyone for a name or assigns P1, P2, P3 automatically. Typed names are capped at twelve characters, which is enough for a nickname and not enough for a manifesto.
- Press Create room. You now have a room code, a QR code and a copyable link.
- Distribute it. The QR is for people in the same room as you; the link is for everyone else, through whatever messaging app you already use.
- When the seats are filled, press Start. Only the host can — everyone else sees a note saying so.
Joining one
Opening the link goes straight to the room. You will see what you are joining — the mode, the number of players, the win target — then type a name and press Join.
Three things can stop you, and the game says which:
- Room is full. Every seat is taken. Ask for a bigger room.
- Already started. Matches do not accept latecomers mid-round. You can still watch.
- No such room. The code was mistyped, or the match is long over. Rooms are not permanent.
Watching instead of playing
Watch puts you in the room as a spectator. You see the lobby, every round's table and the champion screen, and you take no seat — useful when five people turn up for a four-player room, and useful when someone just wants to see what the fuss is.
When there are not enough people
Fill with Comp puts the computer into any empty seat so the match can start. Three humans and one Comp is a perfectly good four-player match, and it beats waiting for a fourth who is not coming.
How a match is decided
Everyone plays the same round at the same time, and the round posts every distance side by side. Whoever is longest takes the round. First to the win target takes the match, and the final screen crowns a champion with everyone's longest distance beside their name.
A tie at the top. If two players would reach the target together, one more round is played to settle it, announced as a final round rather than quietly resolved.
Everybody whiffs. If every player scores 0m, the round is void and played again. A round nobody won is not a round somebody should win.
If the host leaves
The match keeps going. Rounds advance by themselves after a pause rather than hanging on somebody who has closed the tab, and the final screen says plainly that the host left. What is gone is the rematch: Play again needs a host to press it. Someone else opens a room, sends a new link, and you are running again in about fifteen seconds.
Playing together, slowly
There is a second kind of multiplayer here that needs no room at all. After any solo run, Share produces a replay link, and whoever opens it can watch your run play back before taking their own.
It works across time zones, group chats and people who were asleep. It is also the cheapest possible way to prove a distance, since the recipient watches it happen instead of taking your word for a screenshot.
Formula Warriors and Block Pong
Formula Warriors and Block Pong are single-player, but both can hand someone a result: Formula Warriors shares the tier you cleared, and Block Pong copies a link that replays the run. Competition there is asynchronous and slightly smug, which is the correct register for a high score.