Discuss the massively-multiplayer home defense game.
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Hmm. Well, I'm no pro, but basically you need an animal, either a cat or a dog. Cats will always want to move away from you, dogs towards. In the current version of the game (unlike in the past), the animal will need to sight the player first. Then the animal can be manipulated from a distance to walk over a combination of switches. For example, you could use a link of on and off toggle switches, needing to go back and forth in the right way so that all of the switches are on. This could then even link to a current breaker, so that the correct dance turns something off like a door.
Yes. I like this.
Going away for a few hours from a house with a few hundred, and coming back to find my house had reached a total of seven thousand before being reduced to zero. My biggest peeve.
How about a sign object that displays a string the player can enter?
I have just been robbed for six thousand, except that my house should have had only a few hundred in it. There was only one previous robber who had a bounty of two hundred with a few hundred worth of tools.
Just a thought after coming back to the game after a few months hiatus.
I am still feeling like the game doesn't really reward me for caring about either my life, or the life of my family. I and my family are disposable. Especially right now with so many houses on the list, I am creating a character, tooling up, attemping a robbery, dying, and doing it again and again until I hit a big enough vault to start building something a little interesting (like four or six thousand or more). Basically I just treat my lives as entirely disposable.
Then, even once I have built my house and would prefer not to die, I don't really have a strong reason to protect my family. This is the biggest issue for me.
Can anybody remind me why income from your wife was taken out? Does that reason remain valid, or could incomes be brought back in? If I could protect my family and be rewarded financially, that would be really nice. Maybe some other kind of reward?
Elsewhere I suggested that your children could even act as little "back up lives" for your main character, such that if you die you "become" one of your children who has grown up. Keeping them alive is hence for the purpose of keeping a "back up" of yourself. This kind of reason to care about my family would make the game more interesting I feel, because at present I just don't.
Good response from Jason there I think.
I am in favor of sales, I bought quite a lot of games during the Christmas sale that I wouldn't have bought otherwise. But I also feel that a race to the bottom is going on at Steam. I have bought quite a few indie games that are still in development, and watching them over the years has been quite a lot of fun. Each month I like to check up on how this little stable of indies are coming along. Getting in early is a bit of a gamble. You are often in many ways more of a "supporter" of an idea than a "purchaser" of a game. It makes sense for this to be rewarded with a discount. That said, after the game goes public on steam, I think it is only natural for the price to decrease eventually for most games. I wonder if even Minecraft will be selling for the same price in five years. The question is when. Perhaps Jason would be better to consider a moratorium of a number of years before reconsidering, rather than promising that the price will -never- go down.
I have noticed a few times though that some high level person has maybe gotten bored, and basically wiped out every house on the list within an hour including my own. They certainly arrived with more than two thousand dollars of tools. I'm not sure how often this happens, but it isn't entirely unknown.
This happened to me a few days ago but I attributed it to more nefarious reasons.
Basically I think they were dumping tools and bounty. My house had a fairly low value at the time and they bought along many tools. So, after figuring out how to defeat my house, they suicide to significantly increasing its value. Had I not noticed I assume they would have come back in an hour to collect the greater value in the vault. They would effectively be able to start with a larger amount of money. The risk here is that somebody else will rob the house or that I will notice and change my design.
The sneaky bastards. Actually that makes a lot of sense.
Maybe its the season, but I have noticed quite a number of times somebody will make it to my safe successfully, only to hang themselves. It feels like they are giving me a helping hand, showing me flaws in my design and declining to take pleasure in taking all my money. Thank you whoever. ;-)
Ahh, so two people. Yeah I didn't think it was anything illegitimate. But it does highlight for me the power of a rich player to dominate the whole area. I guess this is the meta game. Attack before you are attacked.
So I just had two houses in a row nuked by a heavily armed individual of the name above who hadn't even scouted. When I went to the house list for the second time I noticed that two thirds of them had simply disappeared in hardly any time at all. Ouch.
Well now I feel silly!
Anyway, I have played some more, and my impression remains very favorable. Except for that drop in active people the last few days.
I just had a play for the first time in a few weeks, and I have to say I really enjoyed the variety of houses. I like that I can hide away a starting investment of tools in my safe and give the appearance of being too poor to bother robbing, meanwhile poking my head in a few other places and seeing what tools I might need to bring to take a shot.
The strength of the panic button over a cat run is that family members can walk a complicated path while cats/dogs can only run towards/away.
What about glass windows btw? Can you one-shot a wife through a window? If so, I say keep it simple and just make it so that you first have to shoot out the window, and make that take one "move". Bingo.
Losing several hours of fine design work to a slight misstep when you are finished and doing a run through is also really, really brutal. As I have just experienced... ><
Very cool.
Some things I notice that are potentially very important.
1. You can have multiple buttons.
2. The children can also operate them.
3. They can only be pressed once each.
4. The player cannot press them.
The last one in particular is interesting. This could mean that with certain designs if the family members are killed, the vault is rendered inaccessible without using copious amounts of tools.
How about this idea...
What if your children were like back-up lives?
OK, so your wife has value in that she holds half your money, but now also can shoot and push panic buttons.
What about the kids? Perhaps you want to protect them, because each of them represents a "new life". If you die, you -become- your child (who is represented as having grown up).
What this means is that...
1. You have a serious motivation to protect your children.
2. A failed robbery does not automatically mean the end of the road. Your kids grow up and inherit your house (and your "blood feuds").
Of course, the grown up child is only say 18 or so, and does not have a family of his or her own, so there is a limit to this cycle. You can die twice and keep going. PROVING you protect your kids.
I've also realized that since houses are the content in this game, and they disappear so easily (through one thorough robbery or simply through the owner dying), making robbery harder than building is necessary to keep the house population from dwindling.
One of the ways that an owner can die however is by a failed robbery. They can also scrap a house if they get bored (from sitting in their fortress while being too afraid to attempt to rob).
I wonder if there are some other solutions here.
I just made 4500 dollars by killing a thief who had attempted to rob me eight times, and was successful twice. Does this mean that the bounty goes up by five hundred simply for walking into a house and walking out again?
Perhaps this should be tweaked so that it only goes up according to what you actually do.
For example, a certain amount for property damage, a certain amount for theft, and a certain amount for murder.
Just wondering. But are tool prices going to be lowered a bit? Now that it is so affordable build it seems a bit hard to break in.
Essentially, for a long time, I've been trying to trim the building part of the game down to thwart "uninteresting" house design, but it turns out that uninteresting house design is possible no matter what. So, now I've changed my line of attack on that problem through the metagame, and I'm going back and reconsidering all the stuff that I trimmed out.
That's really exciting to hear.
Just the ability to make money from killing invaders will encourage people towards venus fly trap like houses at least I think. Certainly something better than the old combo locks.
Will you be holding off from having conducting metal walls? It sure would be nice. Also, I noticed that powered doors don't conduct anymore. ;-(
I have to say I think they are nerfed too much. At current it seems rather too easy to break from their sight and evade them. Surely a real dog would quite easily keep on the trail once it has got the sight or sent of an intruder.
Excellent!
I played mostly around six or seven months ago, before the big drop in numbers, but I was surprised to hear about the removing of wires in walls. Was this partially motivated by a desire to get rid of combination lock houses?
