Hi everyone,
Good news! Today I'll be releasing update 0.8 for everyone (playtesters and demo users!). It's got lots of bug fixes, a new bit of content, and most importantly: native multiplayer!
Before we get into what's new, I highly recommend checking out this hilarious 4-person cooking stream from Briony.
Multiplayer
This is the big one! The game now supports multiplayer natively, which means you can play with your friends without using Remote Play Together. It should be more reliable and faster, and have a much smoother experience all round.
Multiplayer might have a few bugs at first, so please bear with it and report any problems you have on the Discord so I can get them fixed. Thank you!
I know how frustrating it is to not being able to join your friends, so I tried to design multiplayer to be as flexible as possible.
- The game supports connections over Discord and over Steam, so if one isn't working for you, you can swap to the other. Different players can simultaneously play over different services. For me, Discord has been quite patchy, so I'd recommend using Steam for the moment (although let me know if Discord works for you!).
- The game also supports hot-joining, so you can hop into your friends' games at any time, without them having to restart. You can also leave and join again if you have to go away for a bit.
- Up to four players can be active at once, but you should also be able to join your friends and spectate if it's already full.
- You can also join locally while playing online, as before. You can also have a friend join you locally while you're connected to someone else. In fact, you could even join a friend's server and then remote play with someone else so they can play, if you really wanted to.
I hope you enjoy playing multiplayer, let me know in Discord if you have any problems! There are a couple of caveats for the moment:
- Demo players can't join full game players. Sorry! This is unfortunately a limitation of using Steam; the two games (the demo and the play test) have different App ID numbers in Steam, so Steam doesn't let you play together.
- Starting the game from an invitation should work on Steam, but it's a bit patchy, so I'd recommend starting the game first and then accepting the invitation
- You can't (yet) kick people from your game, so play nice!
Bug fixes
Thank you to everyone who's playing the game, and thanks to everyone who reported bugs. I've tried to fix as many as possible, and there's a few big ones that should be gone now.
- The middle of the restaurant should now allow things to be placed there again; this also means you can't pick up the floor anymore
- Dish washers can no longer be loaded while they're on, because that's not hygienic
- UI elements shouldn't fall off the screen if you resize during the game anymore
- Customers are no longer fussy about where food is placed on big tables (and instead can get back to focus on throwing the food all over your restaurant)
Discord and Steam Rich Presence
I've also added support for Discord and Steam's rich presence, so you'll show up as ingame on both platforms. People can also see what phase you're in and if you have any free slots to join! There's lots of potential things to add there, so let me know what you'd like to see!
Stir Fry
All this netcoding has taken a lot of time, but I still wanted to squeeze in some more content to the playtest, so there's now a new dish: stir fry!
Stir fry is all about preparing in advance and cooking quickly. To make a stir fry, you have to add each ingredient into a wok and cook it briefly -- too little and you can't add the next ingredient, too much and you'll be in the sink, scrubbing!
Stir fry is unlocked after fish. If you've already played past that level, you should be given it immediately after you finish any restaurant.
Stir fry is also available to demo players, so if you've been craving some more plating-action, you can steak your way to stir fry and enjoy the new dish too!
Patch Notes v0.8
- Adds Steam and Discord multiplayer support (use the menu -> Multiplayer to allow people to join)
- Adds Stir Fry dish
- Adds Rich Presence support
- Adds current players panel (so you can see who is playing)
- Fix bug with background objects occupying spaces, mostly the ground occupying the middle tile (thanks Kroc, Anaxileah, SummerBorne, awesometanker and everyone else who reported this one!)
- Fix bug with conveyors stacking objects placed at the same time (thanks Kroc)
- Fix bug with placing dirty dishes into dish washers while they were running
- Fix bug with UI elements on screen resize
- Fix bug with trees blocking orders (thanks Anaxileah)
- Fix bug with large tables only accepting items in one place
- Improve card readability (larger, darker text)
Patch Notes v0.8.1 hotfix
- Improve networking stability in almost all cases
- Fix bug that randomly caused players with reasonable connections to be kicked for having bad connections
- Fix bug that caused day to start when no players were connected
- Fixed a bug with local player's name when running without Steam