KeeperRL Alpha 36 will feature full Steam Deck support
A few months ago I've received a Steam Deck and quickly fell in love with the device. KeeperRL has received a "Playable" status from Valve already some time ago, but in practice it meant using the emulated mouse for everything, and it wasn't a great experience. I've decided to go all-in and make KeeperRL run super smooth on the Deck, including full controller support in all the menus.
I got to work and it quickly turned out to be a massive undertaking due to most of the UI in KeeperRL being mouse focused. It was a lot of work both to design the new UI interactions as well as to implement the changes, as the code responsible for UI is not great and quite inflexible. I'm proud to say that most of the work is done, and it's currently super fun to play KeeperRL on Steam Deck. I've just resubmitted a new build for review by Valve and hope to finish up the whole undertaking before the end of the year.
Now you might ask, why would you care if you don't own a Deck? The answer is that while making these changes I've made other improvements as well. I've revisited and overhauled a lot of old menus, including adding keyboard navigation and improving visuals. Because of using the Steam Input library, KeeperRL will also support all controllers used by Steam. Finally, with controller support out of the way, there is now big potential for console ports, which I will be looking at next year.
I got to work and it quickly turned out to be a massive undertaking due to most of the UI in KeeperRL being mouse focused. It was a lot of work both to design the new UI interactions as well as to implement the changes, as the code responsible for UI is not great and quite inflexible. I'm proud to say that most of the work is done, and it's currently super fun to play KeeperRL on Steam Deck. I've just resubmitted a new build for review by Valve and hope to finish up the whole undertaking before the end of the year.
Now you might ask, why would you care if you don't own a Deck? The answer is that while making these changes I've made other improvements as well. I've revisited and overhauled a lot of old menus, including adding keyboard navigation and improving visuals. Because of using the Steam Input library, KeeperRL will also support all controllers used by Steam. Finally, with controller support out of the way, there is now big potential for console ports, which I will be looking at next year.