Halloween 2018: First-ever multiplayer interactive game Doodle

Bengaluru, Oct 30: The search engine giant Google dedicated doodle to Halloween day on Tuesday. Halloween is a celebration observed in a number of countries on the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows' Day.

The annual Halloween Doodle marks a wickedly exciting milestone: The first-ever multiplayer interactive game Doodle, powered by Google Cloud! Users could join in as ghosts around the world gather to play their own version of Trick-or-Treat: The Great Ghoul Duel!

Ghosts can team up and compete to see who can collect the most wandering spirit flames before the moon is gone....but not without some unexpected twists along the way.

Players around the world join forces on one of two teams of four in the Great Ghoul Duel. Exploring one of several spooky maps, players must collect as many wandering spirit flames as they can in two minutes and return them to their homebase. After time's up, the team that has collected the most spirit flames wins.

But beware! - opponents can intercept spirits from one another as they bring them back to homebase.

As an added BOOOOnus, ghosts who collect the most spirit flames will unlock special powers such as speed boosts, night vision, and much more! Players can also share personal superlatives awarded to them at the end of the match based on their scary good - or just plain scary - performances.

In a Doodle first, players can choose to host a game with up to seven friends and family via a custom invitation link OR just play with randomized players around the globe.

The team built several systems to enable this multiplayer gaming, all running on the Google Cloud Platform, including a highly-scalable matchmaker service by Open Match, an open source framework developed jointly by Google Cloud and Unity.