Jacob: The biggest challenge is getting ready for scale. What are the challenges of launching a multiplayer game for the Google Homepage? 'The Great Ghoul Duel' has a fan community on Twitter and Discord that has remained active since 2018, and of course they were really happy to see the sequel. Millions of people played the Petanque and Halloween Doodles, and we also saw that a lot of them played multiple rounds, especially for Halloween. We also launched Celebrating Pétanque, a multiplayer game celebrating the French sport, in July 2022.

Since it was one of our most popular Doodles ever, we launched The Great Ghoul Duel 2 on Halloween in 2022. Jacob: Our first multiplayer Doodle was The Great Ghoul Duel, for Halloween 2018. Google Multiplayer Doodle for Halloween 2022 What multiplayer Google Doodles did you recently launch? How did they go? Anyone who visits in a browser or mobile device sees the Google logo transformed with a “play” button, and clicking it takes them to a multiplayer game.

Jacob: It’s an interactive experience that connects players together, so that they can play with their friends or other random users online. The original Doodles were static illustrations, but now we also create games and other interactive experiences. Jacob: A Google “Doodle” is a spontaneous change to the Google logo that celebrates diverse holidays, people, places, and things that have impacted and shaped local and global culture. We’re joined by Jacob Howcroft, who has been a software engineer on the Google Doodle team for the past seven years, and has been leading efforts into the journey the Google Doodle team has been going on into multiplayer Google Doodle experiences. But the question begets itself - what technologies are they using behind the scenes to power these games that are serving this global audience of Google users? And are those technologies available to the reader to build similar experiences? In recent years, we’ve seen them not only be interactive, but also multiplayer! Letting anyone who may be browsing the Google homepage play a game with one or more other people also browsing the same page. As anyone who visits the Google Search homepage may realise, there is often a surprising, creative and delightful change in our logo that sits above the Search bar.

Easy doodles