We're doing a sale on all of our stuff for a few more days:
http://steamproxy.com/steamstore/search/?developer=BlueLine%20Games

If you like Khet, now is a good time to get a copy for your friends so you can make them play against you online!

...or you can treat yourself to a new game if you haven't tried our other titles yet!

This update has:

• French translation thanks to user Milouze! The translator has requested feedback if you find any room for improvement. Thanks!
  
• Fixed a bug where clicking "Rejoin" very quickly after entering the Online Game Menu Screen could cause it to crash.
  
• Fixed the "Ready" button in the Online Multiplayer some more... potentially fixed other button clickability issues. Basically, MouseUp was refreshing the Input events even if the events weren't being handled. So if it refreshed and the button was already up... maybe that was the issue? Regardless, this fixes our test case for the Ready button but might not affect the other button issues.
  
• Quieted the Log File a little bit by removing the "Loading item" lines since we haven't had a problem with asset-loading in a LONG time.

Get some updaaaaates:

• Fixed the case where you Leave a game during LoadingFromServer, then started another game (eg: local, or just a NEW online game) and the game thought it was still loading from server... forever.
  
• Fixed game-reconnections (if it says "Loading from game server..." at any point during a game, now it should succeed again. That was broken for a while... we just didn't notice because that only happens in weird cases anyway).
  
• Fixed the use-case where a host starts a game asynchronously with the opponent moving first, then a guest joins and makes a play, then the host would previously freeze in "Loading game from server...". Creating async games and having the opponent move should be fine now.
  
• Game warned "this game is rated" when forfeiting, even if it was not rated.
  
• Mac: fixed crashing that would happen in various versions of OS X on various machines. It was due to several versions of Mono crashing in different ways on different versions. We found an old version that works consistently.
  
• Old "Steam Notifications" have been deleted and any games that end will now get their notification deleted once both players have seen the end of the game.
  
• GamePad support for BlueLineCloudSignupDialog is no longer broken... can fill it out correctly, or skip it and play without an account just like with keyboard/mouse.
  
• Made resizing the window conform to the ratio instead of using leterboxing.
  
• The Online Game Menu Screen doesn't flicker when the list reloads now.
  
• Made Alert dialogs center in the screen correctly (they were slightly off-center before).
  
• Added Polish translation (thanks Ti_Ichigo from our LiveCoding.tv channel[www.livecoding.tv]!) and tweaked the layout of the rules to be better for all languages.
  
• Made it so that asynchronously created games also have the opponent's name added to the serverName when the 2nd player joins.

If you like the digital board games that BlueLine makes, you should consider getting more of them since they're all on sale right now! (for Othello, only the two-pack is on sale... for reasons).

Check them out to make sure you have at least 3 and you can get Simply Chess Premium for free (see below):
http://steamproxy.com/steamstore/search/?developer=BlueLine%20Games

Do you own some of our other games already? If you buy 3 or more of our games and you don't have "Simply Chess: Premium" yet, when you play Simply Chess, you will be presented with a Steam Code for Simply Chess Premium as a way for us to say Thank You for being our loyal customer!

NOTE: The Steam Key appears when the game would otherwise show you a Cross Promotion, so it's not immedaite. Basically: finish 4 matches, then from the Main Menu, go to start another game and it should show up.

So check out which games you already own, and maybe grab a couple more at STEEP discounts and maybe even get Premium for free!
http://steamproxy.com/steamstore/search/?developer=BlueLine%20Games

Thanks to user AladinCZ (Filip Konvičný), there is now a Czech translation of Khet! He also sent me enough pouty-face-emoticons to convince me to make the Loading screen translatable also ;) before the text was just right in the background image (no bueno!).

Since it's been a while since the last release , there have a been a handful of other fixes that just got released as well:

• Fixed layout in Russian Rules Dialog (thanks N0v0leg!)
  
• Added Czech translation (thanks AladinCZ!).
  
• Fixed the occasional crash on Mac/Linux that occurred especially when entering the Online Game Menu screen very quickly after starting the program. This was a really gnarly one that we'd worked on a lot in the past, so it was a huge relief to have this one finally taken care of!
  
• Fixed a recently-developed crash when opening the Steam Overlay (eg: for Leaderboard or Achievements) in OSX.

This build somehow took me 6 long days of work just to get the release to build on OSX and Linux (it was a rough week - also: big thanks to Flibitijibibo of FNA for the help solving some Mono issues), but we should be able to push releases of our other games with some of these fixes above, as well... and while Khet is the only game with translations at the moment, all of our games are getting closer to being translatable.

I hope you all have a great weekend... or for those with vacation, a great long-weekend!
- @SeanColombo

Operation Supply Drop is a charity that we've been working with for years, to bring games to active-duty service members and veterans.

This weekend, they're doing a tournament for Khet 2.0 on Steam! Head over to their Twitch channel for more info:
http://www.twitch.tv/operationsupplydrop/

And sign up for the tournament (it's free) here:
http://challonge.com/Khet

There are rumors of prizes for the winners... best of luck! Support a good cause, slay thine enemies in the tournament, and make me proud! :D

This update includes a couple of bugfixes & two new translations.

• SPANISH TRANSLATION! Thanks to dani_as0 for the hard work (and patience) on this!
  
• TURKISH TRANSLATION! Thanks to Neschume888 (Melikşah Canoğlu) for the Turkish translation! It looks phenomenal.
  
• Bugfix: the buttons for the second-player to join a lobby had become un-mouse-clickable. You had to use the keyboard in the prior release. Fixed that regression.
  
• Bugfix: Fixed some log-spam that we added in the previous release. Log files will be shorter/easier to read again.

The translations were done entirely by volunteers, so mad props to them for making Khet better!

This update was pushed to Windows, Mac, and Linux. All three versions are expected to be essentially the same right now.

On Saturday, we pushed an update to Windows, Mac, and Linux which grabbed a bunch of changes.

Here are some bugfixes:

• There was a bug that let people re-open the same ended-game from a Steam Notification and that would apply the game-outcome to their Elo Rating again (did not appear to affect their opponent). This is fixed now.
  
• Updated credits to include n0v0leg who translated the Russian version.
  
• If a game ever gets out of sync (which would obviously be a bad edge-case that we'd have to fix) instead of crashing on out-of-sync rotations, it will give an error message. This just applies to rotations and not movements for now, but hopefully nobody will ever run into this anyway!
  
• Fixed a bug if only 1 of the players of a game had the Beamsplitter unlocked and the GameSettings were configured to use Random Layout. There was a good chance that in that case, they could each end up thinking that the game had a different layout.
  
• Fixed some really bad edge-cases that were caused by playing an online async game, then leaving it, then finishing a local game in the same run of the program. This should solve a lot of the more mysterious bugs that were being seen.

In addition to the bugfixes, since the last release of Khet, we rewrote our entire font rendering system to use a more scalable system. On users with huge high-resolution monitors, they should now be able to see the fonts as clearly as someone with a standard monitor. The new system is "Signed Distance Fields". For the curious, here is a youtube video that shows the general way in which they work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGZRHJvJYIg This change also allowed us to completely re-write how string-measurement works. After a ton of obsessing over the details, you'll notice that now, text is centered better in several spots in the app, and the Chat box looks less wonky. This is all due to being able to measure text very accurately.

Happy Holiday Gaming!

We just pushed the latest version, which has an additional fix for Intel HD Graphics cards.

This release also includes:

• Smaller log-file
  
• Better displaying of names with apostrophes in them, in the Online Game Menu String.
  
• Fixed a rare potential crash from leaving the Online Game Menu Screen running.
  
• Added a visible menu button to the game. This improves mouse-only accessibility.

To make it so that a game can be played by as many people as possible, it's important to make games accept a wide variety of input. You can currently play Khet with Keyboard, Mouse, or GamePad... and any mixture of those.

Prior to this release, we had a shortcoming that there was no way to pull up the in-game menu using just the mouse. This meant that mouse-only users (such as those that you Speech Recognition) would have to close the entire app each time they finished a game. That's got to be really annoying, so we fixed it.

Since accessibility is a fairly easy thing, that BlueLine is trying to get more game developers to put some time into... we Streamed the processes of adding this menu button (and talked about accessibility while doing it). The stream was on http://twitch.tv/bluelinegames and now that it's over, the video is up on youtube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjYFJkvg9-s&t=28s

The game is actually on sale for 80% off right now, so if you or someone you know doesn't have a copy yet, you should probably snag one because it'll be a couple of months until the next sale.
http://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/312720/

Cheers!

It's been more than a month since the last announcement about Khet 2.0 releases, so here's what's new:

• The "who-goes-first" option was written backwards between August 5th and our release on August 26th. Thanks to user AshKanenald for pointing this out!
  
• Fixed the Online Game Menu Screen crash that was happening on Mac OSX.
  
• Redid our release-process to remove a bunch of un-needed assets that were left around but weren't being cleaned up. This leads to less hard-drive space being used for the game, and significantly less bandwidth used for the initial install. This was a pretty big change. If you were to install Khet 2.0 game 3 times (once on Windows, Mac, and Linux) the total download required would have been 1.1 gigs (wow!) and now it is 752mb... for installing on all three OSes, the total hard-drive space required would have been 334.1mb, now it's 265.8mb. :)
  
• The logFile now has a .txt extension instead of .log. This makes it easier for users to open it, and makes it easier for us to open on our mobile-phones so we can provide support to people even when we're afk.
  
• Reduced some of the log-spam so logFile.txt will be smaller.
  
• Added "Join Steam Group" button.
  
• We added Spanish translations in the package (thanks to user dani_as0!!)... it isn't enabled in Steam yet though. We just need to test this, then flick a switch for Steam to allow it.

BlueLine Games has released our next game, "Simply Chess"! It's a straightforward Chess game made to be widely-accessible and is geared towards casual and intermediate players.

Also unique: this one is Free-to-Play! To encourage the widest use (we felt that Steam needed a flourishing Chess community) we made ALL FEATURES FREE. After a couple of matches, you'll see a 7-second cross-promo for one of our other games. If you upgrade to Premium (~$4.99) then you won't see the cross-promos (soon, if you own all 3 of our games, we're going to remove that promo automatically, so you won't have to have Premium). Since 7-second cross-promos aren't such a big deal to most people, you can think of the $4.99 is kind of a donation to say thanks... and we do appreciate it! :)

This style (free-to-play) is likely just a one-off for us and our next planned game will likely be sold the same way as Hive, Khet, and Reversi. People love Chess but very few people want to pay for it since there are so many free Chess features scattered across different platforms... even if you bundle a ton into one game, people don't feel like it. I've always wanted to be able to play Chess on our engine, and now we can! :D Also, we're hoping this increases the number of people exposed to our game engine, so people might consider taking a look at our other games... which should grow the Hive, Khet 2.0, and Reversi communities! :)

http://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/312280/

We've had a bunch of bugfixes and performance improvements in this update... and unfortunately we have a Mac bug that we haven't killed yet (will explain more at the bottom).

This release was for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Here's what improved in this version:

• Russian translation! - huge thanks to Steam user n0v0leg for the translation! He did a great job of not just translating to Russian but also helping us test out the translation in general (to make sure we got every part of the game to use the translation system). This is our first translation but likely not our last!
  
• 2D performance improvements (especially in the Online Game Menu Screen). Windows had these improvements last week, but Mac/Linux didn't until today.
  
• Fixed the occasional 1-second stutter that would happen approximately every 35 seconds.
  
• Upgraded to the latest Steam SDK. You probably won't notice anything different.
  
• Better logging (we log the BuildId so we don't have to ask you if you have updated correctly)
  
• LogFile.log is no longer part of the distribution so if you "Verify Game Cache Integrity" it won't download a file every time now.
  
• Bugfix to GameSettings which had Player 1 listed twice (for about a week).

The Mac bug: I don't think I've knowingly released a crashing bug in a game before... but it's been taking too long to solve & we really think it's more important to have these other bug fixes out there (the OGMS was running so slowly on Mac when there were a lot of games that it was almost useless).

So here's the bug:
If you're on Mac and start the game and really quickly click the Online Multiplayer menu item, you sometimes will get a "Reference not set to an instance of an object" crash. This appears to be due to a bug in .NET on OSX that we're trying to figure out a way around. For now, if you just wait a couple of seconds before clicking the link, it should work. I'm really sorry about this bug & we're going to keep hammering at it... hopefully a fix will follow up shortly.


More to come, as always :)