Month: February 2026

Just a quick note today, to say that I’ve logged some issues in GitHub, representing potential future work items for Knights.

https://github.com/sdthompson1/knights/issues

A couple of things to say:

• Including an issue doesn’t mean I will definitely work on it. It is more like, “I want to write this down so I don’t forget about it” 🙂
  • But at some point I’ll want to go through the list and prioritize what to work on first. If you have a “favourite issue” that you want done first, let me know 🙂
• Of course, anyone with a GitHub account is welcome to add new issues, or comment on the existing ones.
  • Or if you don’t have a GitHub account, leave a comment below, and I’ll paste your comments into GitHub for you (with attribution of course).
• There’s also a bunch of stuff that I didn’t bother to add to the list because I plan to work on it over the next couple of weeks. For example:
  • Steam overlay seems a bit laggy, investigate
  • Maybe display “(typing)” when someone is typing
  • Allow copy/paste in text boxes (shouldn’t be too hard to add)
  • Various other stuff! (hopefully not too much)

I guess the plan would be – let’s try and release on Steam fairly soon (once we’re confident most of the bugs are solved) – then think about planning future tasks!

Until next time…

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/.

Progress on Knights continues. In the last (roughly) two weeks I added the following:

• Fixed various bugs, e.g. fixed a crash on the “Loser” screen at the end of the game, and the “desync” error should be fixed now. Also fixed some issues with non-English keyboard layouts.
• Added support for Steam’s “recently played with” feature (View -> Players in the Steam client).
• Added an option to disable the screen flash effect from wands and pentagrams.
• Changed the in-game font. I now ship a font file with the game (as opposed to getting a font from the OS) – this simplifies the code and also means that the look of the game will be consistent between different OS’s.
• Work on the Lua modding system is ongoing. For example, each mod now has its own self-contained folder on disk (in knights_data/modules/). The Lua require and module functions were removed (in favour of a new depends.txt file) and mods can now include localized text in different languages.
  • Eventually the plan is to connect this up to Steam Workshop so that users can easily browse and download mods for the game.
  • This does mean some slight changes to existing mods will be needed, but that shouldn’t be too hard to do. Ideally I’d like to get the existing community-made mods (e.g. spiders, telewand, rat rider) working again and available on Steam Workshop before too long.

There now isn’t that much left to do before the first release, but I want to do the following at least:

• Need to do some artwork for the Steam store/library pages. I will probably just take some images from the game (e.g. the “Winner” image) and slap the word “Knights” over the top and see what that looks like! (Unless any graphic designers are reading and want to help me with this? 🙂 )
• I still want to add tooltips to the game. I don’t want to put tooltips everywhere, but putting them in one or two key places might help, e.g. it might help to have tooltips to explain the various quest options (like “Type of Book” or “Number of Gems” etc).
• I want to do a “text pass” and update some of the in-game text strings, “credits” text, and so on.

See you in the dungeons!

P.S. If anyone would like to try out a pre-release version of the game, just email me and I can give you a Steam key.

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/.

After a “month off” in January, I have been back to working on the upcoming Steam version of Knights. Here is what was accomplished so far this month:

• Restart game feature: You can now press ESC then R in-game to vote to restart (i.e., end the current game and go back to quest selection). A majority of players must vote for this to happen. This provides a way to “abort” a quest without everyone having to actually leave and then rejoin the game.
• Chat filtering: Chat now passes through Steam’s servers, and offensive words are filtered out, according to your Steam settings.
• Localization: The in-game UI now supports Unicode characters, and almost all in-game strings are now in the localization.txt file. This enables the game to be translated to other languages – maybe some people will volunteer to do translations 🙂 (I think ZaRR already mentioned he might be willing to help with a Russian translation.)
• The LAN Games option has been added back into the Steam version. I also reworked it somewhat, e.g. the LAN discovery code now uses mDNS instead of broadcast packets (this makes it more likely to work with modern routers and firewalls).
• The Connect to Server game option was removed.
  • I did think about keeping this option, but in the end, in view of things like the Online Safety Act (in the UK), and increasing focus on online safety generally, I don’t think it makes sense to support game servers run by random people on the Internet any more. The main venue for online multiplayer Knights, going forward, should really be Steam. This allows users to take advantage of Steam’s safety features like user blocking, chat filtering, user reporting, etc., which should hopefully mean a safer experience for everybody. (Of course, the Knights community has been very good and completely non-toxic in the past, but we don’t know what will happen when we open the floodgates to Steam players 🙂 )
• Some bug fixes were done, e.g. I fixed a bug where the display would not update properly after a player was eliminated in a wand of securing quest. Also some extra security checks were added to the network code.

The remaining things that need to be done are:

• Mods: I want to at least have a plan for supporting Knights mods (through Steam Workshop) in the future. There were a lot of good mods made by the community back in the day (rat rider, spiders, teleport wands, etc) and it would be nice to make these available again. This might not be in the release on day one but it should be part of the plan.
• Tool tips: I had an idea to add tool tips to the UI. This might e.g. help explain to new players what all the different quest options do. (Especially since no-one reads game manuals any more, so we do need some way for players to find out what the options do!)
• Bug fixes: There are still lots of bugs and other small tweaks that need to be dealt with. For example, I’m currently looking at a bug with non-English keyboard layouts that ZaRR mentioned to me.
• Playtest: Probably we should get a few people together for a playtest, in a couple of months time, once I have fixed all the bugs I already know about 🙂
• Steam store page: I still need to come up with text and images for the Steam store and library pages. I’m also not sure if Steam requires you to include a video, or if it’s optional – will have to look into that.

But, to summarize, it’s mostly just small tweaks and bug fixes to be done at this point. I guess it will take around 1-2 months to get these done, but we’ll see how it goes. Exciting times ahead!

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/.