Description
Build local multiplayer games without reinventing the plumbing.
VIDEO SHOWCASE
Unreal ships great templates for single-player, but the moment you want two-to-four players on one screen you’re on your own — writing player-join logic, split-screen management, controller pairing, reconnection handling, and per-player HUDs from scratch. Couch Coop Toolkit gives you all of it as clean, Blueprint-ready systems.
Players join by pressing a button on any free controller. They drop out without breaking the session. Each gets their own split-screen slice and HUD. A shared camera can frame everyone at once, a lobby lets them pick characters and ready up, and a reconnection system pauses the game the instant a pad is unplugged and resumes when it returns.
The entire framework is exposed to Blueprint through GameInstance Subsystems and placeable actors — you never touch C++. A fully playable example project shows every system wired up.
Player join & lifecycle
Press Start to Join: an unassigned controller presses a button → a new player joins mid-game with automatic split-screen.
Drop-in / drop-out at runtime; the split-screen layout re-flows automatically.
Explicit “attach controller to slot” lobby flow (bind any pad to any slot, in any order).
Two join modes (gamepads-only, or keyboard + gamepads), switchable at runtime.
Keyboard player support.
Gamepad & reconnection
Hotplug detection with connect/disconnect events.
Device→player pairing queries.
Soft-pause on controller loss + auto-resume on reconnect, with events you can hook for UI.
Camera
Shared dynamic camera that frames all players (Lego / Castle Crashers style): auto-dolly by FOV, smoothing, rotate-toward-movement, pitch/yaw limits, world-bounds clamp.
Manual pan / zoom / rotate layered on top — wire it to a stick.
Tether that keeps players within a distance so the camera never loses anyone, with an optional “don’t drag the idle player” mode.
Camera-relative movement helpers: plug into any pawn in a single node so “up on the stick” means “up on screen.”
Lobby & character select
Data-driven lobby that survives level travel: one slot per player, ready-up, character selection from a roster Data Asset, per-player colors.
Start → travel → each player spawns as their chosen pawn (via the included GameMode base).
You build the widget; the toolkit provides the model, logic, and events.
Per-player UI
HUD widgets that appear only in the owning player’s viewport.
World-anchored markers that fan out to every player’s screen (split-screen aware, edge-clamped), parameterizable per instance for color/icon/label.
Configuration
All defaults exposed under Project Settings → Plugins → Couch Coop Toolkit.
A playable example project demonstrating every system.
Technical Details
Number of C++ Classes: 13 (6 subsystems, 2 actors, 1 function library, 1 GameMode base, 1 Data Asset, 1 settings class, 1 viewport client) + 1 Blueprint interface
Network Replicated: No (local multiplayer / shared-screen; not designed for online play)
Supported Development Platforms: Windows
Supported Target Platforms: Windows (tested). The framework builds on standard engine input/split-screen APIs; other platforms are untested and unsupported in this version.
Engine Version: 5.5+
Current Version: 1.0
Dependencies: Enhanced Input (engine plugin)