Discuss the massively-multiplayer home defense game.
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So... do you guys think that 10 minutes is too short and that it legitimately harms tactics in the game? Obviously, that value can be tweaked to my heart's content. Should it go up to 15? What would the ideal be?
Also TF2!
Sorry, I've taken this thread way off the rails now.
Thank you, Deth, that means a lot!
Though I must say, League of Legends is pretty friggin' amazing. Sometimes the mainstream really knows their stuff! Though, as much as I've played the holy-smokes out of LOL, I haven't ever paid anything for it, so go figure.
I don't know that COD-type games (on-rails story shooters?) were ever very good. I think the enormous attraction is for multiplayer, which I've actually never tried in those games, so I can't say.
To me, an FPS deathmatch is an FPS dealthmatch. I saw that in Quake 1, and it blew my mind. For people who haven't seen it before, COD multiplayer blows their mind.
But for me, as jaded as I am, I need something beyond just an FPS deathmatch. Like K&L2: Dog Days multiplayer. Or Uncharted multiplayer, or The Last of Us multiplayer. Those games all innovate in the deathmatch space. Or, OH MY GOD... Left 4 Dead!
You must be talking about Harry Potter.... which originally launched in expensive hardcover editions only, and people lined up around the block for them.
Yes, it is truly the mass-market appeal of the work that matters, not the price.
BUT... The Castle Doctrine is not a game that has enormous, bland, mass-market appeal. Even if I gave it away for free, I could not get 100 million people to play it. Passage was free, received widespread critical acclaim, and was one of the first games to make it into the MOMA permanent collection. But far fewer than 1 million people played it.
That doesn't mean it's a bad game. There are much "better" novels than Harry Potter that sold way worse. Heck, there are probably much better FREE novels than Harry Potter that far fewer people have read.
There are some people who argue that sales are the only objective measure of quality. That sales are where the rubber really hits the road: if loads of people are willing to pay money for it, then it provides the most value to the world, therefore it is very good.
It may be the only objective measure of quality, but when I say something is "really good," I am NOT speaking objectively. I'm speaking subjectively according to my own taste. That is what taste is all about, after all: the subjective.
So, when trying to figure out how to make a living from my work, I need to take these factors into account. I have not made a game that will sell 100 million units, or even 1 million units. Therefore, if I charge $0.01 for it, I'm not going to be able to support my family.
But it is an amazing game to some people, and those people are willing to pay $8 or $12 or even $16 to have that amazing experience. I can sell far fewer units, to a specific target audience, and still make a living.
I mean, I'm the guy who raised $90K on Kickstarter for a Nintendo DS game.... with only 1300 people supporting it!
Keep in mind that this is my 9th year of doing this, and this will be my 6th game that I've tried to sell. I've experimented with a bunch of different models, and "selling for dirt cheap to attract a huge audience" doesn't work for me.
Yes, the "scary turtle" house isn't entirely dead...
Yes, she can't bear to step on the dead body of one of her own children! I suppose it's possible to arrange the children so that they never walk over the shotgun (you'd want to do that anyway, right? I mean, a trigger lock gives you a certain peace of mind, but you still don't want to store the shotgun in the nursery...)
But she has a strong-enough stomach to walk over the bodies of dead dogs (which will never die on the trigger lock anyway, because they hate the smell of gunpowder and oil).
Well, in the case of a hard disconnect like this, the server times you out after 5 minutes (so the owner only has to wait for 5 minutes after the point where you disconnect). Of course, the owner could disconnect at the 9 minute mark.... essentially, with a disconnect, the maximum owner lock-out time is 15 minutes.
If you are actively robbing a house, your client pings every 4 minutes. If the server goes 5 minutes without a ping from you, then it axes you.
Oh! And if you quit the game and them reconnect before the 5 minutes pass, the server axes you when you attempt to do something else (like load your own house or view the house list). Essentially, any other server action on your part will purge a stale robbery that wasn't ended properly, killing you. In that case, the owner doesn't have to wait the full five minutes for the robbery to expire.
Yes, I just made that version yesterday using my antique Roland SH-101 analog synth. It's already uploaded to Steam, and I'll be replacing the old trailer on the homepage soon.
I felt like the music-free trailer lacked impact and was a little too dry. I'm still not totally thrilled with the trailer, but I think the "beats" at the end with the game title and web address are really strong and leave you with a solid feeling (especially with the last line in the trailer, "what you do with it is up to you," which I think is strong).
Yeah, yeah, my depressing voice acting and all.... but the jubilant-Jason version was turning a few too many stomachs.
Well, it could have also been someone who stood on the welcome mat AND had server trouble when checking in the house.
Please continue to report this if it keeps happening to you, though!
Yes, I think the family is a liability if you're really trying to build an impenetrable death fortress.
This is okay, though.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts here!
In the current game climate, the only way to "bootstrap" yourself as a new homeowner is to NOT spend 100% of your money on your house to leave a little bit of money left as bait for others. Of course, you also have to devise some sort of trick in your house that someone will likely fall for.
Note that all that "suicidal robber" activity on your part was giving each of those houses a dose of cash. So, you need to figure out how to attract suicidal robbers to your house.
The problem with salaries is that they encourage players to sit and wait for more money to come in. If you can do that, the best strategy becomes to build a house that LOOKS scary from the outside that no one will bother trying. (For example, a commit gate right by the door with nothing else visible.)
When this is a viable strategy (the "scary turtle" strategy), and the game world is filled with such houses, it becomes uninteresting pretty quickly. The problem there is that the "scariest" looking house might be a single point in the house-design space, so once players find that, they all copy each other. There is no need for innovation in house designs. There's no challenge.
The same is true if I limited salaries to starting players: then there would be a bunch of boring, scary-looking houses at the bottom of the list.
So, now there's a real challenge for starting players, and it's an interesting one: spend LESS than $2k and build a house that somehow tricks someone into getting cocky and dying. People can't just copy each other to pull that off, because the same trick doesn't work for very long...
So... you know you were robbed because you were blocked out of your house for a while? And you're SURE there's no new tape there?
Looking at the server code, the only way a "currently being robbed" state can be cleared is through code that also creates a tape... UNLESS the robber is carrying no tools and just steps on the welcome mat and leaves. Nothing interesting happened there, so it's not logged. Maybe it should be? I just thought those "house check" robberies would be annoying to watch on the tape list.
In your case, this person could have been very slow to do their "house check," thus blocking you out of your house for a while and still not leaving a tape.
Once your client sends a "start_rob_house" request to the server, and you haven't gotten a response back yet, you can't safely quit, because the server might think your robbery has already started, so the client doesn't let you quit. Eventually, after the robbery is over and the client has confirmation from the server that robbery is over, the client will let you quit again.
And YES, if a robbery quits mid-robbery, no move list is sent to the server. In that case, the server "makes up" a tape showing a doormat suicide (so you can see the tools the robber left you).
There's currently no way to differentiate between a REALY doormat suicide and one of these server-created ones. But I think that real doormat suicides are pretty rare!
Unless your house looks SO scary that the robber loses their love for life at the mere sight of what you built.
Thanks for pitching in with the Wiki, anable!
Yes, you have that correct. The "amount stolen" as it shows up in your security tapes is the total cash stolen PLUS he resale value of any tools stolen (currently 50% of their purchase price). On that tape, you can't see what tools were stolen, but you can see the tools carried by previous robbers on previous tapes, and note which ones died (if they left the house with unused tools remaining, you don't get those).
Hmm... but protecting the family IS encouraged by the current mechanics of the game, even if players want to "do well" by climbing the wealth ladder. I mean, it's not impossible to keep playing after they die, but a single robbery after that point will fully wipe you out.
So, you're saying that "to play longer, players should maximize wealth." But for the same reason, they should keep the family alive to play longer with a given house (so they get a second chance after being hit once).
Perhaps you're saying that the whole thing has a dissonance as a game that players want to play, and want to do well at, even though there is no win condition and your hopes of finally becoming invulnerable are futile in the end.
I'll point out that life itself has that very same dissonance, though.
Here's an example:
http://castledraft.com/editor/xPAW6
On the top half, bright monitors can see the dead ends because of the way that connected walls get drawn under the shroud.
The bottom half shows various ways to deal with this (leaving a gap, or using a non-connected wall as the dead end).
Okay... as admin, I can watch old tapes.
The problem here is that your "dead end walls" are right behind the doors, where the "right" passage has no wall behind the door.
On a darker monitor, you can't tell the difference, but try amping your gamma and take a look (you can re-build two test passages like this to see what I mean).
The vis algorithm, for the sake of continuity, draws connected walls back behind things, even if they should not logically be visible (so that walls don't look "cut off" as they pass back through the soft edge of the shroud).
The solution here is to leave a 1-block "gap" behind each dead-end door (between the door and the dead end). OR, if you don't have room for that, you can put a single concrete or metal block back there as the dead end. Since it's not connected to the wooden walls, it won't be drawn behind the door. They open the door, and BAM, concrete wall. Kind of dramatic.
No, looping states globally, actually, for the whole map.
The game engine actually takes a hash of states all across the map and watches for the map to return to a place where a hash reoccurs.
With the walls, there's supposed to be a trade-off. Wood walls are the easiest to cut through (and can be cut with all three wall-bypass tools), but they're also the only ones that pass power.
I didn't want a "tile rotation" thing in the UI because it is fiddly. I eventually added horizontal and vertical wires simply because it makes houses look cleaner, and it was just two tiles to add. The ideal thing would be one "wiring" tile that auto-reacts to everything around it, only sending out "plugs" if there's something nearby that can take the power. But that would be really hard to code correctly, and I think it would end up being fiddly (with it connecting stuff that you don't want connected all the time).
Corner wires would look very nice and get rid of the ugly plugs hanging out as wires go around corners, but they'd also require a heap of new power-passing properties to be added to the game engine for all four cases. And... I'm pretty sure it would require FOUR new tiles (I don't think I could automate it so that it knows which direction the corner should be).
Voltage-controlled switches cannot be rotated on purpose: they capture an important aesthetic of engineering, where you end up having to tear the whole car apart because of the contrary orientation of one piece. They give the exercise of house building more flavor and character.
The other cool thing about running your own server is you can tweak all the parameters, like prices and chill timers and bounties. Oh, and starting money! You could make a "pauper's server" where everyone starts with $100. Or you could make a server where everyone starts with $100,000 and goes nuts.
You can also mod stuff if you're running your own server. It's pretty easy to re-define how the objects and tools work without coding (see the gameElements folder). You'll need to rebuild the signatures for all of that stuff after you change it (which requires switching something in the code and recompiling).
Also, please don't share your download link with friends, because that chews my bandwidth (and if you did that, they'd have your DL code and be able to log in as you on the main server). I'm tracking how many downloads happen for each account, and I turn off any that seem to have "escaped" in to the wild.
You can pass them the binaries or source bundle directly, though, or post/host it yourself somewhere.
Heck, you can even make your own PAID server (the ticketServer code is included, which would let you set up your own FastSpring to sell accounts). Or bill monthly or whatever. If you get a really cool server going with an interesting mod, I might buy an account myself to check it out! :-)
Sleep is Death was courted by Steam way back when and then dropped/rejected. Yes, lobby server is an issue there, but so is the sheer difficulty of playing.... it's really exhausting and asks a lot of most people (perhaps too much) to play Controller. That game has been Name Your Price forever, so the notion that putting a game on sale will prevent the community from shriveling goes out the window. Really, it's a game that always seems worth the effort to play after you've played.... but so daunting to play again next time.
Regarding the potential to have fewer players if TCD never goes on sale, that is undoubtedly a side-effect of my plan. Yes, many people who buy it on sale would stick it on their "shame list" and never end up playing it, but some would play it and love it, and some would "discover" the game that way. HOWEVER, for me it is a question of trying to do less harm, and not line my pocket by doing harm to a large group of people. For me, the people who would buy it and never play it (and thus waste money and be tricked by the sale) swamp the rest. I just don't want to make half of my living by doing that to people.
As for knowing that the cross-over point is not a 0% discount: proof please? The reality is that we have evidence from games that went on sale (almost every game) and games that never went on sale (Minecraft, Democracy3). But we have no controlled study where the same game both went on sale and remained off sale at the same time. Furthermore, it's a question of the industry as a whole. In the middle of a "culture of sales," the one person who avoids putting a game on sale might make less money (because people avoided buying that game at full price). But if we switched to a "possible world" where there were no sales, would the industry as a whole make more or less money? We also can't answer that question. A "rush" mentality distorts markets away from optimality.
On the other hand, if that "one person" makes it clear to everyone that the game will never be on sale, and that people can't just wait for a sale.... well, the culture of sales becomes irrelevant for that one game (as long as the audience believes the developer).
Finally, some people claim that I'm being "classist" by not putting my game on sale so that less wealthy players can afford it. In my view, $8 is a pretty amazing price for a game with the kind of limitless depth and play value of The Castle Doctrine. It's cheaper than a paperback, a movie, or taking a friend out for coffee. On the other hand, I realize that there are people who cannot afford paperbacks, movies, or going out for coffee. In fact, my family lives on an extremely tight budget, and we never buy books, see movies in the theater, or go out for coffee.
To those people, I wish I could say, "The game is in the public domain, so just get a copy from a friend." Yes, you can do that, but that won't let you play on the main server, which requires a paid account. The $8 in this case is for the LIFETIME ACCOUNT, and not really for the game itself.
The other option is to get it from a friend and then start your own server. You could run a free server for everyone. Though I know that will cost more than $8 to set up (web hosting isn't free... well, maybe you can find free hosting).
So... if none of those options work for you, and you REALLY REALLY love the idea of this game and are dying to play it, and you're really facing the trade-off between buying food and buying my game, PLEASE email me.
A few minor changes and fixes.
A brick can now be thrown to open a wooden door.
The full list of changes can be found here:
Okay, v30 is live now.
Now that we have a swell of people leading up to launch, I'll try to announce downtimes here.
I'm taking the server offline now to build, test, and post v30.
Yeah, the whole name system was put in place to prevent exactly that kind of (potentially unfair) collaboration between friends.
Of course, if you describe your house to a friend, and the friend pokes through a bunch of houses, the friend might be able to figure out which one is yours. Paintings can also be used for this purpose.
But it is slower and more labor-intensive than it would be if you could just name yourself to your friend.
Also... it's funny, but you can see people talking about Mr. Taylor (or whatever) in the forums, and then slowly realize that it's YOU (because you see no Mr. Taylor on the list.... hmm...). That's a cool realization when you have it.
By "lowest state," we mean the state number in the gameElements/houseObjects folder for that object.
Colorfusion is correct that for all objects, their unpowered state happens to be state 0, which is the lowest state. Thus, somewhere in the loop, if the object hits state 0, it will be set to 0 once the loop is detected and dealt with.