What’s new in Castle, Jan 22 2019

Hello! The Castle team just released a new version of the Castle desktop client for Windows and macOS. You can download the new version from playcastle.io.

Behind the scenes, we’re cooking up some major changes which aren’t ready yet. This release mostly contains stability fixes which we wanted to release in the meantime, although there are a couple nice improvements as well.

Describe your game projects by adding a .castle file

Castle projects can now include a file ending with the .castle file extension to indicate some metadata about the game. For example, you can specify a name, description, and where to load the lua code to run the game.

An example `circloid.castle` file, and the result when opening this file inside Castle.

When you create a new project in Castle, we’ll include a minimal project.castle file by default. Castle files are written in YAML, which mostly means that if you mimic what’s already inside the file, you’ll be doing the right thing. Here’s an example:

---
main: main.lua
name: My New Game

Older projects which omit this file will still work fine — just open up main.lua directly.

See the current player’s status in your game code

You can now use castle.isLoggedIn from your game’s lua code to see whether the current player has authenticated with Castle. This is the first step toward a more general API for customizing your game to suit the current player.

We fixed some more things

• The mute button continues working even if you load a different game.
• If you’re working on some hosted server code with share.lua, remote errors now display correctly in the logs view.
• Fixed an issue where the game boundary would occasionally float away from the Castle window on macOS when switching between Castle and another program.
• When you create a new project, we changed the default text to animate back and forth, since the previous program looked confusingly like a text input.
• We provide better error messages when using share.lua and trying to load assets in a non-network coroutine.

Thanks for reading! You can get the newest version of Castle from playcastle.io, and don’t forget to join our Discord and let us know what you think.

For more updates, check out our changelog from December 15.