Finding each other.

Currently, to play with somebody else in Bientôt l’été, you enter the café on the dyke and go sit at a table. When you do that, the game checks if somebody is already sitting at a table somewhere, waiting, and if so you connect to them. If not, you wait.

I just realized that there’s a problem with this design. If the availability of connecting to another player depends their patience to wait, the window for finding somebody else will be extremely small. And given that Bientôt l’été is not the kind of game that will attract enormous crowds —so that there’s always somebody to play with— I need to increase that window somehow.

There is literally nothing to do while you wait either. I guess I could let you to have a virtual drink and smoke on your own, Dinner Date-style, but how long will that remain amusing without adding a lot more to the game.

We already have “a lot more”, though. We have an entire beach. So perhaps your “waiting” starts already while you’re alone on the beach. And then when somebody enters the café, you are notified of this and you can decide to join them. This notification should not be too personal, though (like your character’s cell phone ringing). That would conflict with the pleasant solitude of the beach situation.

Maybe the appearance of the café on the beach changes for all players when somebody has entered and is available to play together. So you would regularly look at the café and if, say, the light is on, you can enter yourself. If multiple players responded simultaneously, they can all be matched up in couples by the game.

Since you know that this light will go on in other players’ games when you enter the café, you would normally not have to wait too long until somebody connects to you —at least if somebody else is playing the game at that moment (which is a lot more likely if “playing the game” includes the beach scene, and is not limited to “waiting at the table”). So that makes it acceptable to enter the café even is nobody is there yet.