Discuss the massively-multiplayer home defense game.
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Oh... yeah, if you have two clients open, they may be interfering with each other on the server!
I see some evidence of that in the server logs for your account.
Try only having the game open in one place at a time from now on, and see if that helps. If you EVER see a house check-in failed henceforth, please stop playing and send me the latest recordedGame file (jasonrohrer@fastmail.fm). I can watch it on my end and see what happened.
Yes, someone should claim it! I think an admin is needed to have delete power (or grant delete power to others, hopefully!)
Thanks for the feedback!
First of all, if you'd like a refund, just email me. jasonrohrer@fastmail.fm That goes for everyone: I don't want to keep anyone's money who is not happy with the game.
Some of the things that you talk about, like dying in your own house, are deeply connected to the themes of this game. The game is about violence as a means of self defense. Many people are killed each year by guns, but most of those people are the OWNERS of those guns. A few people are killed each year by guard dogs, but most of those people are the OWNERS of those dogs. Security has a cost. That is one of the main points of this game.
So, when you put something dangerous in your house, it can kill you too.
I know it is frustrating and NOT what you're used to from building games... but that's the point! This game is different, because it actually has a point.
As for this game being intentionally addicting, it is actually LESS addicting that some other "roguelike" games (Spelunky, FTL) for these reasons:
1) There are no random elements. You will not get a "better roll" next time.
2) Death is ALWAYS your fault. You can always back out and save your own neck at any time (use the front door). Therefore, when you die, you feel terrible/stupid and want to quit out of rage. Not rage at the game, but rage at YOURSELF, which feels even worse, and makes you want to keep playing even less.
Other games have a "just one more try" hook after you die... but this game has more of a "I QUIT AND AM NEVER PLAYING THIS AGAIN" feeling when you die.
Checking your house IS addicting, though, but that's because of natural human nature---which is part of what the game is about thematically. The game makes you paranoid, and it's a game ABOUT paranoia.
Also, be careful about logging in simultaneously from two different computers. Your clients will "fight" each other on the server, stepping on each other's toes (like if you're trying to rob a house with one client while editing your own house with the other) and death will likely result...
But as long as you're only using one machine at a time, you should be okay.
No, there's currently no timer on the self test. Do you think there could be a back-and-forth house that really took more than 20 minutes to solve with complete knowledge? :-)
Well, camping all night in a house is the worst case, and I haven't heard about that actually happening yet. I DID get some complaints about being locked out of a house for an hour, though... and that seemed a little excessive to me. Right now, the timer is 20 minutes.... 20 minutes is pretty long, I think.
You shouldn't have to edit sharedClientSecret if you are connecting your own mod to your own server. The default secret, bundled with both the server and the client source code in the source bundle, should "just work". Let me know if I screwed something up there.
Oh... but if you want to run your own server for unmodified clients to connect to, you'd obviously have to update the sharedClientSecret on the server.... maybe that's what you're talking about.
Yes, for sure these games aren't for everyone! I want everyone to think about it before buying, and do their research, and watch the videos, and read the reviews. Don't buy on impulse because the price is low!
Sad that sidtube is offline now...
That was the main motivation for it.
But also, thematically, there's this:
http://thecastledoctrine.net/forums/vie … php?id=408
The "otherness" aspect is amplified when you don't know how you yourself are being perceived by players in the game. You don't even know your own name, but they do, and vice versa.
Okay... I've upped the chill timer to 24 hours for the contest.
I've also upped the "force ignore" timer. If you robbed someone, and then they die, you can't see their new houses for 24 hours now. That prevents you from farming a second account for bounties by robbing them over and over again.
The timers were 1 hour before when the population was small, but now with 90 houses to rob, it's not an issue.
Good to hear!
I've always worried that it wouldn't be straight-forward enough for people to set up their own servers, but several people have succeeded now, so I guess my instructions are okay.
(Still, it's not something that works "out of the box" for someone with no PHP/MySQL experience.)
And in this contest, obviously, you can win a real painting by having one (if you're in the top 8 at the end)
In the case where a house was listed at $2000, but you only found $300 in the vault, there are several possibilities:
1. There were also some tools in the vault.
2. The wife was holding some of the money.
3. The vault had been hit in the past, but some robbers died in the house since then, leaving bounties (and the wife had the other $2700).
Yeah, I didn't want the contest to disrupt the existing game too much (there were already a bunch of new players before the contest started), so I decided against a full reset.
I also figured that there would be enough "churn" throughout the contest to negate the advantages of pre-contest money.
I am a bit worried about people camping in their houses at the end. I'll think about how to deal with that. I have to be careful not to penalize people for legitimate long-editing sessions!
Yeah, instead of jumping off the cliff of trying to do this the "right way" (everything server-side, really the only way), I instead opted for an honor system approach, with stuff in place to prevent accidental modding. Someone would have to be well aware of my wishes to mod the client to cheat.
Yeah... some people who play this game are insanely smart!
If you hit ESC in the game and bring up the pause screen, the game goes into low-fps mode, which make the CPU usage drop down to almost nothing. Pretty easy to leave running in the background.
Ahem.... not that I'm encouraging anyone to play this game all day and check their house obsessively! :-)
Yeah, it's really important that it's always a real person's house. That's what this game is about!
There are loads of games where people design levels, and the best (or hardest, or whatever) levels rise to the top. That's already been done, and that's not what I'm doing here, so I'm avoiding adding anything that feels like that.
I also REALLY like the "once it's gone, it's gone forever" aspect of this game. Like... one keystroke and POOF, a house that has been at the top of the list all week vanishes. People come to the forums to talk about their memories of that house.
Arakira, what do you think now with the 20 minute limit. Is it too long?
Rumors have been floating around for months... I've finally launched this thing.
When you die, all your stuff is reclaimed by the state, and your paintings are put back up for auction. If you die WHILE someone else is in your house, robbing it, they get to finish their robbery before your house is reclaimed (and they keep whatever they steal in that last robbery).
The game currently has a "one house per player" rule at all times. This is important, because when you're robbing a house, you ALWAYS know that you are potentially hurting another, real person. You know that someone will be watching you on tape later and seeing what you did.
If the list was filled with "ghost houses" from deceased players, this wouldn't be the case.
I agree that it's tempting---it would certainly keep more "unbeaten" content in the game. But keeping it real, in terms of the game's real-world meaning, is really important to me.
I've experimented with different things here over the past 10 months.
What we're up against are two conflicting requirements:
1. That the game look really good.
2. That visibility functions match what the player can see, logically.
I've tried various hard-edge shrouds, including blacking out invisible tiles in various ways. It always looks really terrible. The soft-edge shroud, with the mysterious look that it gives, is the visual hallmark of this game. The screenshots always end up looking "retouched" because they have this lovely, organic black haze at their borders. But the game actually looks that way.
The current system actually hides most things that are logically hard-unseeable. You can't see a dog behind a wall, for example. The dog will fade into view as you come around the corner.
However, walls are the one exception to this, because having a connected wall get "cut off" as it goes into the soft edge of the shroud looks pretty jarring. You can see the other, connected part of the wall, so you KNOW that there is more wall back there.
Example:
.
AXA
BCBIf X is a door, and A, B, and C are all walls of the same type, what does the player know? Well, they can clearly see A, and see that A is not a "stand-alone" wall, because A has a "connecting" edge on its back side. That means they know that B is back there, so we must draw B for them. But if we're already drawing B, and they can see it, then they can see that B connects to something else. They can see that the B tiles are not "end points" in this connected wall. So, the player can already deduce that C is there, just from being able to see A and B. And though they can't logically see B, they know that it's there, because A must connect to something. So, not drawing B would be strange.
We could draw a FALSE version of B back there... but how would the game engine chose what lie to tell? We'd have to be able to know what trick the owner was intending to play. So, we just draw B as it is, which means that we've given away information about C, so we might as well draw C as it is too.
In most cases, this doesn't tell you very much that you don't already know, and house builders can work around the rest of this system's shortcomings (like leaving a one-tile gap behind a dead-end door). I figured that the real secrets are usually not structures, but what those structures contain.
If the VAULT was at C, you could not see it. That's important.
Yeah, you're probably going to need a linux machine to host a server.... unless php/mysql can run under Windows these days---I don't know.
So, anyway, the server stuff isn't included in the Windows bundle.
I just added a note to the Download list about hosting your own server with the UnixSource bundle.
Mouse over the pit...
Dogs hate the smell of other, non-human animal corpses.
You could imagine a "light backpack" that only had 4 slots but gave you more time (because you could move quicker).
I don't think I want to bifurcate the experience like that, though.
The timers were added mostly as a way of preventing owners from being locked out of their houses.... forever. A forever lock-out was totally possible in v28.
Also, I don't want the game to degenerated into super-slow robberies where you check and double-check and all that. That doesn't FEEL like a robbery in real life would feel (they are almost always time-pressure affairs, unless something really creepy is going on).
So, I need to find something in between. We went from infinite down to 10 minutes. I'll try doubling it to 20 minutes and see how that feels.
I guess you want to come bursting through an unlocked door, knocking it off its hinges, just for dramatic effect?
It may seem weird that brick can be thrown at a door to open it gently, without breaking the latch. But this is 1991---Bricks have changed a lot in 20+ years.
Consumers aren't putting the games on sale at a deep discount. Rampant sales and bundles (which grew out of the indie space, actually) are a VERY new thing. Valve, as an example, has only been experimenting with this for 4 years.
From what I can see, it is simply a way of getting MORE money out of MORE people with very little extra cost. It is the pinnacle of the greedy, toxic "mainstream" system you are complaining about.
Not only do they trick you into buying a game for day-1 DLC, they also trick a bunch of other people into buying the same, crappy game when it goes on sale later. They probably at least double their money by doing this. Heck, just ask any developer or read any blog post: everyone is doubling their money by putting their game on sale.
Rampant sales have been lead and pushed by developers, not by consumers.
Josh: I can't throw my game up on GOG for cheap, because I'm selling lifetime accounts here, and the cost of maintaining those accounts does not decrease over time. In fact, the cost goes UP for me over time, because I'll be busy working on the next game, and it will become very burdensome to still be doing TCD maintenance... essentially forever.
(Note: the system that I designed is as maintenance-free as possible, but stuff happens.... people need to change their email addresses or lose their download emails... the server needs to be rebooted..... some obscure bug causes someone to lose their house..... AND, of course, there's community maintenance, like responding to people in the forums)