Just a quick note to say what I have been working on for the last couple of months.
I’ve added a “reconnect” feature to the game. Previously, if a player left a game for any reason, they would just be removed from the game entirely — and would not be allowed to rejoin. Now, if a player leaves, their knight remains in the dungeon, but they appear as “(Disconnected)” in the player list. If they later reconnect, they can jump back in and resume from where they left off. Meanwhile, the other, non-disconnected players can continue playing, until one of them wins the quest in the normal way. (Players could also kill the disconnected knight and take their stuff, but some might consider that unchivalrous!)
Unfortunately, one side-effect of this change is that it is now quite hard to actually “abort” a quest and start a new one. (Pressing ESC-Q no longer works, because that now just makes you leave the game, with a possibility of returning later, instead of actually ending the game.) I was thinking of adding some kind of “Vote to restart” feature to address this. Basically, one player would click a button to call a vote, and if enough players agree, then the current quest would be abandoned, and the game would return to the quest selection menu. (This isn’t done yet, but hopefully I can add it soon.)
The other thing I’ve been working on is beginning the integration with Steam’s matchmaking features — or at least preparing the ground for this. I have been working on creating the concept of a “lobby” in the code. A player can create a “lobby” on their local machine, which encapsulates the state of a Knights game. Other players can join the lobby, and the lobby state can also be transferred from one machine to another, allowing for host migration. This is still work in progress, but is going reasonably well. Once I get that working, I will try hooking it up to the actual Steam APIs, so that, for example, a player could create a game and invite a friend to join it, or allow other players to join via Steam’s matchmaking system. (This will also mean creating the actual Steam app id for the game, which I think costs $100 at the moment, but that shouldn’t be too big of a deal.) This is probably still a couple of months away at least, but it will be cool to see it finally working!
Thanks for reading. I’ll try and keep posting updates here every 2-3 months or so.
About Knights
Knights is a multiplayer game in which players must explore randomly generated dungeons and race to complete various quests. For more information please visit https://www.knightsgame.org.uk/.