New Steam build

I’ve pushed a new build to Steam today. Since last week’s update the changes are as follows:

• Text boxes now allow cut, copy, paste, and other shortcut keys (e.g. ctrl+backspace to delete a whole word).
• Spent some time trying to fix the laggy Steam Overlay rendering – hopefully it is better now.
• The Knights window will now flash on the taskbar, if someone presses “Ready to Start” and you are focused on a different window. This is to get your attention so you can respond.
• Lots of tooltips and help text added:
  • Main menu and Start Game screens: hover text for all buttons
  • Options screen: various tooltips
  • Online Multiplayer screen: tooltip for “show incompatible games”
  • LAN games screen: static help text added
  • In-game screen: tooltips for inventory items, health indicator, and skulls
• Other text changes:
  • Rewrote credits screen (to simplify and shorten it)
  • Some tutorial messages changed
  • Removed several localized error messages, in favour of a single “Network protocol error” message, with a numeric error code (this reduces the number of messages that need to be translated)
  • “Vote to restart” text tweaked slightly, plus this text now disappears if the game ends (winner/loser screen active)
  • Some small updates to game manual and other text files (readme, acknowledgments)
  • Removed the “first time message” (a short text displayed when the game starts for the first time) – I think this is now redundant given the tooltips and other help for new players that was added; and anyway, a lot of people would probably have clicked through it without reading it.

Some questions:

• Is the hover text on the main menu helpful, or just annoying? I can’t make my mind up 🙂
• Is the Steam multiplayer game flow (creating and joining games) sufficiently clear and understandable, or do we need some extra help text or tooltips?

Remaining tasks:

• I still want to add some tooltips to the Quest Selection menu screen, if possible. (I think this could benefit from tooltips due to the large number of options and settings.)
• Need to do another pass on the Lua module system, following recent feedback from ImpassIve. This will take a few days probably.
• Steam store artwork, text, and a trailer video are still needed (I confirmed that Steam does require a trailer before you can release). Perhaps we can record a multiplayer game sometime, and use footage from that for the trailer (ZaRR did already make a video recently, but I’m not sure if we can use it, for various reasons). For the images, maybe someone from the community could be willing to help, or else I could have a go myself (or perhaps pay an artist to do it). We don’t have to think about this right away though – I have 1 or 2 more weeks programming to do first, probably.

As always, if anyone wants to help playtest, just let me know and I can send one or more Steam keys so you can access the private build. Look forward to seeing you in the dungeons!

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/.