Discuss the massively-multiplayer home defense game.
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Michalk, I appreciate hearing that from you.
This game was inspired by one of the worst experiences of my life: when my pregnant wife and children were subjected to a violent attack. I've written many articles about the thematic underpinnings of this game. One of the articles is linked above. The rest are on the "news" page of the main website, if you scroll to the bottom.
It is a dark, disturbing game inspired by dark, disturbing things. There are no two ways about it.
It may be the first video game where you can kill children. It doesn't sugar coat or elevate violence. It doesn't even animate the violence, which in my view makes it all that more disturbing (you imagine the violence instead).
As for why people keep playing, I think it has something to do with human nature, which is part of what this game is exploring. We have such a desire for security that we become obsessed with it. Our fears become inflated way beyond reality. Entire human industries thrive on this part of human nature. There are many people who wake up in the middle of the night to check their house in the game. There are many people who wake up in the middle of the night to check that their doors are locked in real life.
ON THE OTHER HAND
Though I'm proud of the thematic impact that this game has---the artistic payload---I also have a VERY dark sense of humor. I'm not sure why... maybe it's my way of dealing with the absurdity of death and all the other things we cannot control. Maybe I'm just laughing at the absurdity of human dignity as it succumbs to these things. Human dignity while sitting on the porcelain throne.
As horrible as my family's attack was, there are some things about it that are hilarious, particularly some of the things I said and did during the aftermath of the attack. I did some really foolish things! I sprayed myself in the face with pepper spray!
So, this game is not all piercing violins... it's like a twisted, absurdist reflection of security run amok.
While I'm having my balls frisked at the airport, and while not a single child plays in the street, and while people are being mauled to death by their own guard dogs, and while others are being shot by their own guns, we're actually having one of the safest years on record here in the US! The crime rate is less than half of what it was back in 1991.
So, I'm guessing that some people keep playing it because of how funny it is. Watching the security tapes is nothing if not funny.
Booby traps are funny. Getting killed in your own booby traps is even funnier.
And that is part of the artistic payload too.
Great thread here! Thanks for starting it.
Also, according to my clock, we have more than 3 hours left...
You're tearing me apart, Jason!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plz-bhcHryc
More seriously, I was worried about what this contest would do to people... sorry about that!
But SO many people have discovered the game because of it.
I found myself doing that too....
Okay, everyone should have their steam key now.
If you didn't get the email, you can find your Steam Key link on your main download page. As a reminder, that's:
http://thecastledoctrine.net/ts/server. … XXXX-XXXXX
Where the X's are your download code.
Yeah, it sounds like you do really have an interesting perspective!
I've just been watching what has been happening mostly from the outside. Of course, some of my close friends are now millionaires because of Steam sales, so I have seen that first hand.
You're right about the value-add. Something like 2000 people bought the game because of the contest, and the game is much better for all those additional players right now (so they're adding value to each other, too, through network effects).
I'll be thinking about more stuff like this in the future.
Cool stuff! I do worry about extra server load if everyone was doing this, though...
Currently, when you're active in the game (like robbing or editing), the game only talks to the server once every 4 minutes.
I imagine that any humans "checking" their tape list while doing something else tend to do it less frequently than every 45 seconds. They probably forget, and many minutes end up passing in between checks.
At at least one point today, we had 25 simultaneous MySQL queries in parallel, which swamped the server and cut a bunch of people off. I've upped the limit to 100... but 25 is a lot!
Yeah, there are other ways to handle this for sure.... ways that would require far less work on my part!
Having a step number display would be a good place to start... then at least you could know where to try and stop as you fast forward from the start again.
Thank you! That means a lot.
It's Saturday, and I've been doing email and forums literally ALL DAY. My family misses me!
Tell your friend to email me and name the robber AND how much was stolen: jasonrohrer@fastmail.fm
I can take a look at the tape on my end.
I'm going to hold off on adding more people one-by-one for now.
Before the launch, I hope to add EVERYONE so you guys can hammer on the steam-side before the launch.
I have thought about this, but decided against having a "tool store" outside the home. People have also suggested a "van" that you can load up (but people would just use that to hid wealth). Anyway, with your suggestion, there'd be the danger of someone "spending it all" if they thought they were for-sure robbed.
In the current game, if you're locked out and need tools, it's a good time for tool-free scouting
This is something that I may add someday, but it will require quite a bit of work.
The reason is that a robbery tape playback is a fullblown "simulation" of that robbery. The "tape" is actually a move list (up, left, up, up, down, right, saw_used, left, up, brick_used) plus the starting state of the house map. From that, we can simulate the robbery step-by-step.
The problem with rewinding is that time only goes in one direction in this game. From state T, you cannot infer state T-1, even if you know what move the robber made to get to T from T-1. The best example is a dead cat at step T. You don't know whether it was alive in step T-1! So, you can't just step backwards.
The only way to do it is to save a FULL snapshot of the map in RAM for each step that has played so far (so when you hit the StepBack button, it can just jump back to that map state).
In the ideal, you'd have full blown "scrubbing" with a jog wheel. But there are some messy things that I'd need to do to make it work that nicely (like scrubbing back through tool-target selection would be hard, and scrubbing forward the first time, before playing the whole tape, would be laggy).
It used to work that way.
The main reason it was changed was that damage is saved on a vault reach, and allowing people to reach empty vaults allowed robbers to vandalize a house just to be mean OR dig their way toward the wife across multiple visits.
Yes, yes, damage could NOT be saved when you reach an empty vault as another way to fix it, but I liked the "unreachable empty vault" as a nice inversion of expectations.
It also prevents robbers from blindly heading toward the vault with no possible exit path... there's always a chance that it's empty.
I do get that it doesn't make logical sense that a vault acts like a teleporter, generally. It just feels like the best end point for the robbery "story."
It's really important to me that everything in the game be "real" in terms of outcomes and consequences. When you're in a house, you're the only one in that house, and what you actually do there has real consequences. Some real person out there in the world is waiting for you to get out so they can watch the tape.
The cool thing about this game is that the number of houses on the list scales with the popularity of the game.
There are currently 176 houses on the list... no shortage to chose from. Yes, there may be some contention for the top houses... but I'm not even seeing that. I'm hitting RELOAD over and over, and that top-8 list isn't changing.
I get that if you are "working" on breaking a house, it can be annoying to have it go off list for a while. For all you know, though, it could be the owner fixing it up in reaction to all of your scouting. This is natural and okay.
Email me: jasonrohrer@fastmail.fm
Tell me what you want me to change the second account's email to, and I'll change it (and do let me know which account you want to keep connected to your email so that I don't change the wrong one).
This is intentional, for two reasons:
--It makes the UI less complication and less fiddly.
--It adds a certain "engineering character" to the building process. The tiles are quirky and force your house to have a certain "grain" to it. Sometimes you have to rebuild a whole section because of one component that won't "fit" in your design. That is very much like real-world engineering.
Yes, gamma shows more... but it doesn't show you what's behind a door 3+ tiles back!
If I'm missing something, then screen shot please!
It's possible to build a 15 x 15 x 15 x 15 "guess the door" house with starter money (requires quite a bit more to make the wrong choices deadly) That's 1/50000 chance of guessing correctly.
I've got the "god" view over here where I can watch all robbery tapes. The really big heists all seem to use tons of tools and tons of scouting (for houses that have 1/million chance of guessing). Wouldn't a cheater just waltz through those houses too? Why would a cheater focus on 1/100 houses?
I just checked, and your backpack IS force-returned to vault if you watch a tape OR if you spend 5+ minutes away from home without robbing anyone.
This is so you can't hide all of your wealth in your backpack while you are watching tapes.
She only goes to the dead child immediately after the murder.
In later robberies, she runs for the door again and routes around the dead body.
HOWEVER, if some living family members are blocked from the exit by dead bodies, ALL family members will re-search for the exit path, ignoring dead bodies. In that case, they'll simply walk up to the dead body and stop, if it's on their shortest path.
This has a weird consequence if only ONE family member (A) is blocked in by a dead body:
If a family member B has a clear path, and it's the shortest path, it will use it.
If B's clear path is LONGER than it's body-blocked path, it will end up walking up to the body and stopping.
This is a consequence of the cleanest, fastest way that I could implement the "wife not frozen if her path is blocked" change.
Hey, I'm trying my best here... I have a very full inbox these days! It takes me something like an hour to restore a house, so it's really not possible with all the commotion.
Regarding internet outages, I feel like maybe the client should handle this more gracefully, giving you a RETRY button on the checkin screens. Still, it wouldn't help with a failed ping in the middle of a robbery, because at that point, the client has to pull you out of the robbery to tell you about the problem.
There's also the possibility of temporary outages on the server (like a connection overload that will pass in 30 seconds). That happened today, resulting in unexpected server responses. A retry button would be good there, too.
It could also auto-retry forever even in the case of a serious error like this, but I'd at least want the user to be aware of the problem... because it's a more serious one than a simple lag.
My family (real life one) hears me screaming quite frequently too over mistakes that I make in this game!
Yeah... sorry about this!
There's too much going on this weekend for me to recover individual houses.
Essentially, the server is experiencing way more load than ever before (900 unique players yesterday, for example... the most ever).
What happened was that there were more than 25 simult requests. That limit was set on my database server, but I didn't know it was set, because we never had that happen before. AND it wasn't even being logged (because the log is stored in the db, so if it can't connect, it can't log).
Didn't know about it until I ran into it myself... and then... oh no!
So, I scrambled to remove that limit, and I think we should be good now. There is a server limit of 100 simultaneous MySQL connections still.... we may hit that at some point, but I fixed the logging to email me right away if that happens. 100 simult MySQL queries seems like a heck of a lot to me, though.... yikes!
I also wonder... the client should probably be fixed to show a RETRY button if it gets an unexpected response like this.
Anyway, I'm sorry, but I'm really juggling to much to restore individual houses during this contest.... I really wish I could, but...
They died since then. I looked into this case (more details in the other thread about it).