IronOak Games have posted a couple of updates to the For The King Kickstarter page. The penultimate update announces that online co-op play is coming to the game…at some point:

At some point during development we had to put online play on the shelf until we established more of the game systems. All the programming we’ve done has been designed to accommodate online multiplayer but it hasn’t been tested fully in a long time. Now that we are much further along we have begun to test online coop again and get it back into a good state. Dave has been working tirelessly ensuring that single player, local coop and online coop all work well together. We are looking to do one final Beta push that includes online multiplayer.

Recently we were asked for a bit more transparency on the development side of things and to better explain what has been causing the delays so I would like to talk a bit about that. First off, our initial vision for the game was only single player and online coop exclusively for PC/Mac/Linux. We had many requests for local couch coop during the Kickstarter campaign but we were opposed to it at the time due to the games design not completely supporting it.

In the spring of last year we had a big decision to make on whether or not to port For the King to console and once we decided yes, we suddenly had a lot more work to do. We revisited the idea of local coop and worked out what was holding us back. There were many intangibles which needed to be solved that would ultimately dictate how our UX and UI was designed across the entire game. Every element of the user interaction had to be painstakingly rethought while staying true to what we already had.

Our plan had now changed from doing controller support after PC release to doing it beforehand which, in hindsight, was the right call. We are also now far more prepared for a console release which is a win for our team. It was a big undertaking but it has emerged (in my opinion) as the best way to enjoy For the King and has added so much value to the game! If you have 3 controllers we would love to hear your thoughts on local coop in its current state. Single player is a blast but everything’s better with friends.

More recently, they’ve been getting some good feedback from those of you who’ve been beta testing the game:

We still had over 500 backers sign up and plenty of great feedback early on, which was fundamental in helping tune and shape the game. Thank you to all those who managed to get into the forum and provide us with feedback. And a special thanks to those who posted videos of their playthroughs. You have no idea how helpful these are.

For anyone in the $20 Tier or higher, if you’ve played the game recently, we would love to hear from you. If you have yet to play, or haven’t played since the v0.4 update, give it a go and let us know what you think.

Oh, and if you hadn’t already done so, do check out the Steam storefront page for For The King.