Multiplayer Please Please

[[WEB] Blackstone]

Please add multiplayer. It would be so fun to play this with friends. There are so many possibilities like trade warfare and fighting monsters together. I really love this game and being able to play with friends would be amazing.

[SoftMonster]

Michal has been known to knock us over in surprise sometimes. However, I don't think he is planning any massive rewrites of code prior to his 1.0 launch release. So this could be off the table until later next year.

I would like to play a multiplayer world like a huge campaign map on a remote server where players could own multiple dungeons and invade other players who are retired. An enhancement to the existing dungeon sharing, basically. Trade and alliances would be a thing but players would not be playing in the same map sectors at the same time (a technical headache).

Thought I should help set your expectations, it isn't being planned as far as I can see.

[EpicD1CK]

No, this game should have battle royale instead k?

[SoftMonster]

Some games have done muliplayer by having a host game on Steam where your friends can click "join". The architecure is proven. My understanding is something like this:

Keeper's greatest asset is a mixture of strategy and turn-based play. However. turn based play would probably need to be ditched in multiplayer, or replaced with a realtime equivilent.

The "host" game would need to run a bespoke piece of server-like software, passing by firewalls, to communicate with all the players, and taking each player's commands and relaying them to all the other players (including the "host" player who is really just another player but with the server on his local computer). The server software would also monitor if the different players are out of synch and recover without glitching too much. I guess it would also need to handle all random number generation, so that the different players see the game evolve in exactly the same way. Make sure that each player is running the same client version.

Campaigns would also be a headache. Multiplayer would be more suited to single map games.

I'm not a games programmer, but there may be frameworks that actually do the hard work for you leaving just the formidable job of interfacing with the server software and making the other players appear in each other's worlds. However, the work to slot in a piece of bespoke game hosting software that manages all of this without breaking everything else, is too much to fit within Michal's rough timescales for the official launch.

Hopefully, you can see my point and it is helpful.

[Dester]

There's several way multiplayer can be added and some ways are easy to add as a feature:
1. The most difficult and most common method involves all players actively interacting within the game which usually involves one server being the host. This is probably too complex for this developer.
2. The second method would involve the developer creating an active online server which multiple players join allowing players to visit, trade or even attack other players. If a player is offline then their world is offline. This is probably too expensive for this developer.

*** Now for the methods which this developer could accomplish: ***

3. The developer could create a new special event which creates a magical portal once every 100 days which allows players to trade and attack other players. This magical portal merely collects the desired actions and stores them into a file and the player waits until all other players have reached day 100 adjusting the file for whatever they are planning to trade or attack. After all players have reached day 100 and updated this file they all add the file into their game and continue playing. Lots of Play By Email games have been done this way. Ideally players should be able to customize how often the magical portal appears as well as the resources required for using the magical portal.

4. The developer could create a feature which allows players to create their own separate server which keeps the game worlds separate yet handles the trading and attacking transactions between the players. As long as the trading and attacking is setup as a rare event which happens then the trading and attacking can move smoothly. If one player is moving too quickly across the timeline then his gaming world will obviously need to wait for the other players to catch up, thus allowing all the monsters and trading to arrive at the same game turn for everyone.

[Adversary]

Roguelikes, as a genre, tend to not have multiplayer outside of certain games like Demon and Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup which let you encounter the ghosts of other players. Even then, it's asynchronous at best because the only roguelike with online multiplayer which didn't involve beating the high scores of the posthumous actively stopped being a roguelike by removing it's turn-based component in doing so. At least, if you're someone who gives the Berlin Interpretation any semblance of validation.

That being said, someone cobbled together a mod which lets you play Dwarf Fortress in multiplayer - a similar game in and of itself, both drawing inspiration from Dungeon Keeper to some extent - and this was years prior to the involvement of Kitfox Games in the development process, so it is possible. Even then, succession games a la playing for a set duration then passing the save onward to someone else are still feasible. Just not as doable with a game that has a set goal in mind rather than one which is truly endless.

Just my thoughts on the matter, I don't really care either way myself as multiplayer is pointless to one such as me.

[Dester]

Originally posted by @:

Roguelikes, as a genre, tend to not have multiplayer outside of certain games like Demon and Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup which let you encounter the ghosts of other players. Even then, it's asynchronous at best because the only roguelike with online multiplayer which didn't involve beating the high scores of the posthumous actively stopped being a roguelike by removing it's turn-based component in doing so. At least, if you're someone who gives the Berlin Interpretation any semblance of validation.

That being said, someone cobbled together a mod which lets you play Dwarf Fortress in multiplayer - a similar game in and of itself, both drawing inspiration from Dungeon Keeper to some extent - and this was years prior to the involvement of Kitfox Games in the development process, so it is possible. Even then, succession games a la playing for a set duration then passing the save onward to someone else are still feasible. Just not as doable with a game that has a set goal in mind rather than one which is truly endless.

Just my thoughts on the matter, I don't really care either way myself as multiplayer is pointless to one such as me.

The benefits of multiplayer actually help even your games even if you don't play multiplayer. First games with multiplayer have lots more free custom content and mods created for the game. Some features I have seen arrive into other games by players included more monsters, more items, more skills, larger maps or even bug fixes. Also games with multiplayer have a much longer active community as compared to games which are only single player.
My relatives and I will buy the game if multiplayer arrives... hopefully suggestion #3 and suggestion #4 will be considered.

[Adversary]

Originally posted by Dester:

...

Fact of the matter is that roguelikes tend to not have multiplayer which comes in the form that you are wanting. This has been a constant since the 1980s, when the genre began to emerge after the conception of it's progenitor, Rogue, in the 1970s. It has more or less remained as such with the one exception coming to mind being TomeNET, a variant of Tales of Middle Earth with online multiplayer, and with Tales of Middle Earth being a variant of Angband - one of the original roguelikes, along with Nethack, Omega, Moria and Larn - as well as the progenitor to Tales of Maj'Eyal. Maybe KeeperRL game will be another one of the limited exceptions? Like I said, I don't care either way. Trying to persuade me otherwise will just get you me repeating such. This isn't a debate, and mistaking my devotion to facts as apathy towards an unlikely possibility is in and of itself a fallacy.

[Morkonan]

Games that are not originally designed for multiplayer don't generally get good reviews for adding multiplayer.

For games like this, "gamespeed" is one of the big multiplayer killers. Nobody is going to like either having gamespeed options, that force the other player's choices, or not having the gamespeed options, which end up with players getting entire groups dead before they can react.

The player-made dungeon that's added to player's games is likely the best multiplayer-like feature this game could have.

A "co-op" Multiplayer mode could "work" but there's still the gamespeed issue to deal with and I don't think players would not like having that option.

An Adventure Mode co-op multiplayer might be very "doable" as sort of a fun, very different in terms of gameplay, play choice. But, it's a roguelike... don't expect the other player to be alive for very long. And, that's a big problem with any sort of multiplayer roguelike - It's only multiplayer for as long as both characters are alive. :)