The Castle Doctrine Forums

Thanks for the help everyone. Shame we didn't get more response (I also learned the "recent reviews" can go away if not enough activity in one month... I'm thinking less than 10 reviews).

^Good idea. I know there is a One Hour One Life discord (though I never played).

It would be cool to have one massive server for all of Jason's games and individual channels for each one. Then even with low player populations people can still chat about whatever and cross pollinate.

Just wanted to say, if you wanted to maintain the original puzzles then you could in theory totally reset the house. Not all puzzles would be back to normal though (because of panic buttons) unless you also replaced the family members (e.g. a godfather steps into take care of the children now that dad is on the lam). I don't think this fits into the game, but it's possible.

If you mean the same player robbing the same house repeatedly, that's very easily solved by preventing players from repeatedly getting to the same safe at least until a house is updated. If you mean the metagame of climbing the ladder by starting on low value houses, I thought that was just part of the game.

This already appears to be the state of things. The top houses are practically impenetrable (I'm especially confounded by the popular clock-walkway that makes any sort of exploration basically impossible), but if people could climb their way up they might have a shot at dethroning the top players.

Ah! Didn't know that. Figured most of the burn rate was from people dying. 4000 houses is a huge amount of content and you don't even need to worry about keeping around houses from dead players.

Perhaps many won't be great puzzles. I think this could be automatically solved by having a very small starting salary that only grows when houses resist being solved for days. The no brainer houses would only be worth a few bucks, but the really good puzzles would start accumulating money fast.

I feel like $0 houses with no salary is a nonstarter. You'd have to be pretty bored to go in there.

The stray dog thing is also interesting though and frankly quite terrifying!

I'm thinking that any issues with too much money in the economy could be scaled automatically by having the salary respond accordingly. Though it's hard to say ahead of time what "too much" money even looks like.

Wow, awesome! After two newer games, I didn't expect you to touch TCD again at all. The change seems like strictly an improvement. Not seeing any downsides here.

It's really bummed me out that, while I had so much fun with this game, it's really difficult for me to recommend. Basically because of the reasons you're saying. A tiny playerbase combined with nothing to do ruins the whole thing. And you see that pretty clearly pointed out in Steam reviews as the primary reason people didn't enjoy it (with high difficulty being a close second). That sucks! With no exaggeration, The Castle Doctrine is like nothing else out there and has made me feel so many intense emotions again and again.

With the playerbase issues, it becomes one of those games like Dwarf Fortress which everyone enjoys talking/writing/reading about but is way too inaccessible for most people to actually engage with.

I'm sure the chill update is going to improve things. I logged in and saw a solid two pages of houses. But I wish the game could return to something closer to its former glory.

This has been weighing on my mind for a couple years now....

You could think about TCD like a puzzle game with user generated puzzles. I bet you've basically received something like 10,000 user submitted houses. This is an amazing situation to be in because that content provides pretty much limitless challenge and entertainment. And to top it off, those "puzzles" are already of varying complexities (i.e. difficulties), which is pretty great to support varying levels of skills. And then what happens next is all those puzzles are just thrown into the trash.

So I figure this has been thought about before. I actually just saw it being discussed in another thread. I basically agree with the idea of bringing back salaries (with a few tweaks) and keeping old houses around. Both of those together totally solve the problem of the game being a content wood chipper.

Sure, but there's a simple fix! Wipe out the loot in the house. Isn't that the first thing police do when an infamous criminal dies? Now you may be asking what good is a $0 house? The thing is houses aren't valuable to the game because they have money, but because they are good puzzles. Adding a salary (or a social security check or whatever you want to call it) eventually fills up the house with money again. Yes, the original owner knows how to solve the house, but they can only abuse that if a) they don't create a new house (which I assume would remove the old one) b) they wait around for the house to accumulate money and c) no one else gets to it first. You could also consider preventing someone from repeatedly robbing a house provided it sees no update and has no living family members. With that change, you could keep the house around forever. Why should the community lose out on content because one player stopped logging in?

Keeping old houses around not only gives players more to do, but provides a shallower learning curve. Back at the peak of the game, it was a totally reasonable thing to farm low value houses and slowly improve your finances/knowledge of the game. For the past couple years, a new player logs into one page of houses and most of those are practically impossible for them. And they're not able to gather enough money to make any interesting house (and learn about nontrivial electronics). I think the game should be brutally difficult of course, but having that vertical cliff of difficulty is a nonstarter for most people.

Remember that amazing Rooster Teeth video? That video was so satisfying because, even though they failed repeatedly, it felt like they actually had a chance at that early stage of the game and they eventually succeeded.

I'm sure there would be some design decisions to make about how many old houses to keep around and how fast to grow the salary (maybe it should accumulate faster the longer the house remains unbeaten), but nothing especially complex.

In any case, this chill thing is good stuff.

What a fun party!

imgur. see?

http://i.imgur.com/c5afVHj.png

Now that the owner is fixing the house, I'll elaborate.

The front was pretty weak. I was able to get into the magic dance corridor for one explosive, one saw, and two bricks. That let me map a good bit of the magic dance. From there, I must have guessed correctly on one or two magic dance sections. Then I think I guessed right out on a 1 out of 2 hallway. Finally, I guessed wrong on a 1 out of 3 hallway. That was in the top right corner. I'm still curious if how far that was, but I understand not wanting to disclose that.

Ah. You're probably also the reason I was able to get Mitchell because your theory was correct:

Have only played once or twice in the past few months. Decided to do a little chain robbing for fun. Took out Jeffreys for like $19k, then Mitchell with that.

Left a $70k gift to Cutler because I don't have time to build a house.