Playing Crawl Online with Parsec...
Online Crawlin’
We’ve recently been trying out a service called Parsec which allows you to stream a game and have friends play along remotely, and we’re happy to be able to give it the Official Powerhoof™ Severed Thumbs Up of Approval®!
Parsec lets you stream a game and have friends watch and play along with their own controllers. Latency was my biggest worry, but it wasn’t a problem when we played, certainly no worse than our dodgy indie implementation of online multiplayer would have been!
If you want to try it out yourself, there’s more details here.
Powerhoof Official Discord
In case you hadn’t noticed the fancy widget, we now have an official discord server. Come chat to us about things, or find someone to play Crawl with!
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I’ve used this myself in the past, and my laptop is absolute garbage. Works absolutely fine. I totally recommend Parsec to anyone playing Crawl.
wooooooooooooow!
Love this game~
Do you ever plan on making your own multi player co-op mode in the actual game in the future or not. I would 100% prefer your version of that once fully implemented instead of using some weird site which I first have to download and still then create an account and then wait for my friends to do the same. I will wait for the steam multi co-op no matter how long It would take you guys. There’s no rush but as a side project please do something about that. If not please explain why this is an issues so I can have a better understanding of your team’s situation thanks.
Alas, we have no plans to integrate online multiplayer in future. We had hoped to early on, and worked on the feature for a while, but it’s not a trivial feature to add and officially support, and unfortunately we had to decide to leave it out.
Thank you for your honesty. I hope 1 day in the far future you may reconsider, I would also like to know more such as the main issues and challenges of implementing it that made the team come to this final conclusion. I would also like to know what are the future plans of this great game and others to come.
Online multiplayer is notorious for being the most difficult feature to implement, particularly in an existing local-multiplayer framework. This article touches on some of the issues- https://www.polygon.com/2014/3/11/5491146/why-you-dont-want-an-online-mode-towerfall
But basically, all interactions in the game have to be re-written and re-designed with networking in mind for it to function well, and it would just take way too long (as in, we could make a whole new game in that time instead) and either be quite a different game, or not play that well. Parsec is a pretty good way to go really, the only issue really being that you need pretty good bandwidth to play.
Thanks again. I wish you and the team the best of luck in making games and in life.
You know what u guays should do implements MORE WAYS TO PLAY THE GAME MORE TRINCKETS , WEAPONS ,ITEMS NEW THINGS TO DO IN THE GAME OHHHHHH BCUZ THIS GAME HAS THE POTENTIAL I LOVE THE GAME I like the way it’s plays ESPECIALLY LOVE THE INTENSITY OF THE VOICE OF THE NARRATOR
Ha ha, thanks 😀 We’re leaving crawl as it is for the time being, it’s definitely the sort of project we could have kept adding stuff to forever, but kinda had to draw the line somewhere 😉
So, I’ve gotta say, I was really hoping for some updates with additional bosses/monsters/items/weapons etc., I would gladly pay for some DLC. Wasn’t the plan to have closer to 5-6 bosses in the final release or just at some point in the future? I guess I was expecting that to happen :/ I thought I read that somewhere, hell I can’t remember lol. Anyways, thanks for making a great game! We’ll always enjoy it regardless 🙂
Yup, we were hoping to have more bosses, unfortunately the second and third bosses each took a good 6 months of solid work 🙁 Delaying things by 6 months for one more, or a year for 2 more didn’t make sense to us, and frankly would have driven us crazy after the years crunching to get everything ready for launch!
I still have a big pile of boss designs, it’s more a matter of giving ourselves a holiday from the project we drove ourselves a bit crazy on for 4 years, and getting a chance to play with new ideas. Currently we’re pretty deep in our new design ideas, but the love for Crawl is still there, and every day away from it helps to unwind all the stress that built up trying to get it finished, and moves me a little closer to thinking I might want to dip back into it all again 🙂
Yeah, Zizz, I’d be willing to pay for a DLC as well, with some new creatures and stuff.
Would the most work be with an additional boss?
I think maybe skipping a boss and instead put 3 of those powerful statues with level 4 units in there would be ok. Or putting like 7 of the regular spawning points and let the last player alive win. Maybe some chaos god stuff.
What’s the next game your working on?
Early days yet but Barney’s been working on a stylish combat platformer thing, and I’m messing around with a thriller adventure game project. We’ve been doing little game jam things too, have another one this weekend! I’ll have to post an update on here soon!
I only just started playing this game on switch (which is what it was MADE for good Lord) and I gotta say dayum! it’s hard to find that couch co-op competition with the hectic pace and array of options as something like smash bros. I’m rooting for you guys to definitely come back to it at any point. Anything is welcome, doesn’t have to be new bosses, just new visuals (a different styled dungeon) and another track would freshen it up, variety is the spice of a “crawler” game like this played over and over. A coupla new monsters (though you did great there, plenty!) a customizable hero (pixels are small and hard to see but hats and helmets would be cool!) there’s so much potential here. I’m surprised this game isn’t bigger than it is, especially on Switch, it fits like a glove, take anywhere and slay away! Thanks immensely, put an update whenever you make a DLC and I’ll preorder it yesterday!!
I thoroughly enjoy this game but I wish there were more than 3 big bosses to fight
i agree