I have created a Knights forum, here is the link: http://www.knightsgame.org.uk/forum/
For now it’s a pretty basic SMF install, we can customize it later perhaps, but for now let’s just see how it works out.
Please feel free to test it out, and let me know if there are any problems!
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!
I have been working on a version of Knights that allows more than two players in the dungeon at the same time. This has been requested by a quite a few people now. The new version is going quite well, it just needs a bit more testing/debugging, and will probably be ready in 1 – 2 weeks.
Before doing an “official” release of this, I’d like to do a beta test, both to iron out any bugs, and also to find out how well the game actually plays with many knights involved. My brother has agreed to join the testing but obviously we are going to need to recruit a few more players…
So… if you’d like to join in the first ever online multiplayer game of Knights, then please sign up below. We also need to organize a time so if you have preferred dates or times then please indicate this in your comment.
By the way – currently I am just using the normal quests from the standard two player game. So, for example, in a gnome book quest, there will be one gnome book, but a large number of knights all trying to take it back to their home 🙂 However, I imagine a lot of new quests will become possible in a multi player setting. If anyone has ideas for good multi-player quests then please feel free to post them below…