Well we had our Knights multiplayer testing session and it was very successful and great fun! We had 7 players at the same time at one point. Thanks to everyone who joined in.
I think we established that Knights works very well in multiplayer, in fact I think it was even more fun than the two player game. We had a few disconnections / error messages but those should be solvable I think.
One issue was that certain quests do not work very well in multiplayer. For instance the destroy book with wand quest seemed to go on forever. One suggestion was that we should show items on the map after a certain time, e.g. show the wand after X minutes and show the book after Y minutes. Perhaps we should try that sometime.
The “gnome book” quest also did not work too well: with five or six knights flipping the switches all the time it was very difficult to actually get access to the book! Maybe it would have worked better with a different book — with some of the gnome books you only press the switch once and then the door stays open (it doesn’t close again when the switch is pressed again) so we wouldn’t have had the same problem.
The quests that worked best seemed to be the “escape from dungeon” type quests, especially with a few gems or a guarded exit point thrown in.
Another problem was that some players were at a big disadvantage due to having a bad starting position. Perhaps players should be able to change their starting point during the game (as rpr suggested). Or maybe players could just respawn into a random start point each time, instead of having the same one every time?
Another excellent suggestion was that potions/scrolls should respawn. (They get used up very quickly if there are a lot of knights about.)
Anyway… I will try and get a Knights forum set up soon. There is also now a #knights IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (courtesy of Dukey).
Thanks again everyone and I hope we can do this again sometime!
Sorry, I completely forgot about this! Glad it went well. I agree that certain quests are probably going to work better with multiplayer than others. Might be an idea to “lock-out” the quests that don’t work in multiplayer so as people aren’t disappointed. Or, alternatively, I suppose some all new quests could be created for multiplayer mode. 😀
There are tons of new quests we could add to a >2 knights multiplayer game. Like a Zombie Survival mode, where you have to face a horde of zombies and team up with other knights to survive. Or a Capture the Book Mode… and and and.
If there’s a discussion board in time, I will probably write down my ideas for some game modes.
And I will also provide a small game server, if a stable version of the multiplayer version is out. 🙂
Matty: sorry you missed it, maybe you could join us next time. I agree in principle with “locking out” bad quests, but the trouble is, there are so many combinations of settings that it’s difficult to know exactly what to lock out!
Dukey: yes those are great ideas and I’m sure there are many others. I look forward to discussing them on the forum 🙂 I’ll try and get that set up tomorrow…