What’s new in Castle, Oct 9 2019
Greetings from the Castle team! We’ve made some cool updates to Castle in the past few months. Here are a few of them:
Share posts from within games
While playing any Castle game, you can click a button to share a screenshot of what’s going on.
Posts from a particular game appear on its game page, and posts you’ve authored appear on your Castle profile. Posts also get a permanent link you can share on other platforms.
Posts can be more interesting than just a screenshot. For game developers, Castle also includes a castle.post API which lets you dynamically create posts. You can attach arbitrary data to a post, such that when somebody opens the post later, your game is launched with that data. This enables powerful game interactions, such as sharing in-game artifacts, levels, replays, or sharing a specific world state.
Check out the Post API reference.
Build custom tools for your games
We’ve added an API called castle.ui which lets you display user interface elements such as buttons, text inputs, color pickers, dropdowns, and many others, in order to enable advanced tools for your game.
Here are a few ways Castle creators have already taken advantage of this library:
- Apples exposes a few simple settings for the game, like the ability to disable shaders.
- Crazy Crazy Golf uses
castle.uito expose a level editor so you can build custom golf holes. - Edit World has a code editor, among other things, so you can script the game world.
Check out the full documentation.
Chat with others playing the same game, or just with your friends
All Castle games now have their own chat space which is reserved for whoever is playing that game on Castle. Also, you can open a private message thread with anybody you know on Castle.
You can globally hide chat in Castle if you don’t want to talk to anybody.
Host your games with Castle, if you want
When you open a Castle game, we load its code over the air. As a creator, when you add a game to Castle, we allow you to specify where we should fetch the code for your game.
Previously, we recommended using a third party code host like GitHub to host your Castle games. However, we got some community feedback that not everyone prefers to use some other code host. People don’t necessarily want to sign up for GitHub or figure out how to use it. Therefore, we also now allow you to upload your game’s code and assets directly to Castle if you want to.
You can still host Castle games anywhere (like GitHub or on some other host) if you prefer that. Castle code hosting is just a new option that coexists with the old option.
Some smaller, but still cool, stuff
- Mark your projects as a work in progress using the
draft: trueconfiguration. - Castle games show a CPU monitor so you can check how a game is performing on your machine.
- Easily invite others to join your multiplayer session on Castle.
That’s it for now
Thanks for reading! If you don’t have the Castle client yet, you can grab it here for Windows and macOS. If you already have it, it will update itself, so you don’t need to do anything to get the latest. Please let us know on twitter or in Castle chat if you have any feedback.
Past updates
Check out some of the older updates to Castle:
- May 2019: Custom game dimensions and scaling, cloud storage API, automatic multiplayer servers
- April 2019: A new game creation flow, automatic updates, an API to get the current player name
- February 2019: Community chat, adding games to your profile, background apis
