Just wanted to give a head's up on some significant changes before they go live in a few weeks. One very common request we've had from users is for the option to do "Asynchronous Play" which means the ability to play someone even if they don't stay online. So you can just login when you have time, play one turn, then log-off and the game keeps going. We've always planned to have this, and now we're finally on the way to having it done! This is not something Steam supports, unfortunately, so we have to create our own game-servers and replace a bunch of the built in Steam networking stuff.

== What changes will I see? ==

• You will now be able to play with people even when you are not both online the whole time. This is sort of like "play-by-mail" versions of Chess. This should lead to more online play, as well as some MUCH more challenging matches for those who want them.
• When you go to play an online game for the first time after the change, you will be prompted to set up a BlueLine Cloud account. This is a free account, and all it does is tell our game servers who you are on Steam. This is just a technical limitation. This is very similar to the PlayFab signup when playing Planetary Annihilation.
• If everything works as planned, you'll never have to log into BlueLine Cloud manually.
• Email: When you provide an email address during BlueLine Cloud account, we'll NEVER sell that address to 3rd parties. We WILL use it for sending you notifications such as "It's your turn" or "You have 1 more hour to play a turn or you forfeit!". You'll be able to turn off/on each notification at any time. We'll also put the email addr on our BlueLine announcement list which is super sparse (I think we've sent 2 messages in 4 years) and you can, of course, unsubscribe at any time.
• When you set up an online game, there will now be a Game Setting for Turn Timeout. If a player takes longer than this amount of time, they forfeit the game. We currently plan to allow this to go as high as 30 days per turn and as low as 1 minute per turn. This is not meant to be an implementation of "speed" games or "timed" games (that is likely to come later), this is just a way to prevent people from having games go on literally forever if they're losing.
• The timeout settings will show up in the list of online games. It'll say something like "7D/turn" which means you can take no more than 7 days per turn.
• Some fixes: Steam was always really bad at actually reporting which games were in progress. Now, we're in control of that code so it's likely to be way more accurate.
• Some potential bugs: Please keep in mind, we're running our own game-servers now, and there are likely to be hiccups and potentially even some server down-time. We'll be doing our best to keep them up as much as humanly possible, but our game-servers are about 10 years younger than Valve's so realistically, we'll probably mess up occasionally before everything is perfectly stable. Please be patient with us & report any problems as soon as you see them!

== Future Coolness that this enables ==

Once we have our own game-servers this paves the way for several other really cool features that we've always wanted. These include: game histories that you can review turn-by-turn as well as super-cross-platform play so that you can play games against platforms other than Steam (PC/Mac/Linux) such as iOS/Android. This will make an even larger pool of players online at any given time. All of these features will take a really long time, but having our own game servers is a huge step in that direction.

== Questions? ==

If you have any questions, please let us know. In the meantime, we're going to go back to working on this (we've been cranking on this for 3 weeks so far, and have maybe another 3 weeks until we're done).

[ 2015-01-21 17:51:13 CET ] [ Original post ]