Towerfall Ascension creator Matt Thorson seemed duly impressed when he tweeted last January about a mod that brought eight-player support to the multiplayer platformer-brawler. But going by a recently-tweeted screenshot of the TortoiseHg shell extension and the words, “Let's see if I can do this before GDC,” it now seems that he's decided to make it official.
Thorson said that he's not sure if he'll release the eight-player mode to the public, but it sure sounds like the work is going well. “All the UI is busted and the levels are too small, but it works!” he said in a follow-up tweet. To overcome that, he said he'd convert some of the game's levels to widescreen, and is also making changes to the character selection screen and variants menu.
Towerfall Ascension, the “definitive version of the hit archery combat game,” earned an Editor's Choice award in our review in early 2014, in which we described it as “permitting pixel-precise inputs calculated in the slimmest slivers of a single second.” Lag is death, in other words, and how that will translate into an eight-player experience remains to be seen. But if Thorson is excited for it, then I think the odds are pretty good that it will work out.
Images via Thorson's twitter.
