Discuss the massively-multiplayer home defense game.
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There were some funny threads about this... a pit being so traumatized by a ladder that it simply can't go on.
But the point of "lingering" damage like this, even for things that aren't logically "broken," is so that robbers can chip away at a harder house over time. I decided to put almost all robber tool effects into this category.
You may have noticed that I've been a bit quiet.
I've had my head down, busily doing the Steam coding necessary to make server accounts work on Steam. It's always surprising how much suffering Steam integration involves, but I'm gritting my teeth and pushing through it.
I'm getting pretty close to having the code side done now, but after that, I need to get all the graphical assets (Steam banners and buttons) done, and then do the final packaging and testing of the game.
The goal right now is to have a release toward the end of January of 2014, but I don't have a confirmed release date with Valve yet---I'm waiting until I get everything totally done and ready to launch before I set that date.
Well, it wasn't just to make the family easier to protect.
It was to increase the tactical, moment to moment gameplay around dog movement. I want you to walk into a room and need to survey the position of dogs carefully, and look for a weakness in that position that you can exploit in some way (maybe by cutting a wall---who knows?)
If you could drug-and-club dogs, then you would just march in and do that mechanically---there's nothing tactical about it. You see five dogs, you know you need five pieces of meat and five clubs, no matter how those dogs are positioned.
Yes, wow... that's a taught piece of emergent narrative.
Whoa! Fixed this with a redirect. Thanks!
Twisted emergence in action.
Yeah, once you get a few more paintings, you can hide the undesirable ones in the archive stack under other stuff.
There's no way to get rid of paintings (like sell them off) because I didn't want the game to turn into an art trade simulator!
Yes, all values are rounded so that at most two significant figures are shown, and the rest are replaced with 0's.
48 => 48
538 => 530
25,343 => 25,000
This is done so that the more players we have, the harder it will be to find your friend's house in a very long list... even if your friend says "I have $1905," you'll have to search through a long list of $1900 houses.
Yes, anything that is not actually "broken" by the robber (or killed, in the case of animals) in some way resets, including sticking pressure switches.
"Someone else just hung themselves in front of our vault, Larry. Time to get the locks changed again."
This is a general problem with the oblique projection used in the game. The problem with that pit is not that there's no visual representation of the animal in the bottom of it, but that the visual representation is blocked by the south-adjacent wall. If there was no wall there, you'd see the crippled pet.
Though I have tried to iron other suicide-motivating mechanical dissonances out of the game.... this is one lingering one. You really don't care about your life/family if you're doing this, which is weird.
The game used to give chills for ANY house that you set foot inside. However, this was really brutal on new players, who would quickly find themselves locked out of most houses after some innocent poking around.
I haven't found a way to make "each life non-disposable" yet that doesn't drastically screw up the game (like, people could get a forced "time out" after each death, but that really sucks).
Ideally, I'd really like you to feel, "This is my life, and it's valuable, better be careful with it," all the time! (I could charge $1 per life...)
Maybe chills could only settle on houses that you took more than one step into? Or houses that you interacted with in some way, even without tools? So at least you could poke your head in the door to find the house you're looking for without getting chills.
Or... maybe with more houses around now, chills for every house entry aren't such a bad thing?
Yes, if you go into a house and touch nothing, you won't leave a ghost there when you die.
Oh, you can put the shotgun wherever you want, so it's totally possible for the robber to reach it first. And you can put more than one down... so... various misdirections and tricks are possible.
To deal with the problem of visibility several tiles deep behind walls (if you amp the gamma), there are now TWO overlapping visibility shrouds.
During visibility toggle in tape playback, I forgot to turn the second shroud off. This results in some strange behavior as you pan around the house with the arrow keys.
Will be fixed in v26.
This is an interesting one...
In the build mode, I really like how pets and family always face you. It makes the house feel move alive... like they care about you, and want to watch what you're up to (and as a parent of little kids, this resonates---while I'm fixing something in the house, my toddler is following me around, watching me and asking questions).
I think I tried turning this off for unseen mobiles in robbery mode (so that they stay in a fixed position, and only face you after they've seen you). As I recall, this looked really weird, because as they became seen, they would suddenly "jump" in orientation to face you, often doing a complete 180 or whatever. Because you can "kindof" see them in the shadows right before you come around the corner and they see you, them jumping orientation like this is jarring. So, they track you always, and then when they become truly visible, there is no sudden jump in their orientation, because they are already facing you.
I realize that this makes it a pain to judge whether an animal is currently tracking you or not.
Thematically, they think they hear something through the walls, but they're not totally sure until they see you at least once.
Amazing feeling when a game that I make far outstrips my own comprehension.
Thematically, the shotgun has a trigger lock that only the wife has a key to (you can see the trigger lock left behind on the floor after she picks up the shotgun, and if you mouse over the shotgun before she picks it up, the trigger locked state is evident in the tool tip).
To find the reach of various tools, look it:
gameElements/tools
Each tool has a reach.txt file. Keep in mind that changing these values on your client WILL change the way that your game behaves, but won't change what the server is expecting from you, which will likely result in a mismatch that will get you killed.
ANYWAY, for a tile to be reachable by some tool, that tile has to be:
1) visible, and
2) within "reach" non-diagonal, unblocked steps from you ("Manhattan distance")
In other words, if you can see it now (mousing over produces a tool tip for it), and you could step there in X key presses, then you can apply a tool with reach X to that spot.
Thanks for keeping up with that FAQ, Josh! It's really turning into a great resource.
Oh... well, the assumption is that lots of people who bought the game before Steam are Steam users themselves and would be upset if they couldn't get the game on Steam after launch.
For Inside a Star-filled Sky, which had the same pattern (launched first off Steam, then later on Steam), I got lots of emails from people who wanted a free "upgrade" to the Steam version.
I don't get it myself (as a non-Steam user), because I'd much rather manage a desktop folder full of games manually. But some people REALLY like Steam.
Oh, yeah, sounds like you ran into an empty vault that had already been hit by someone else. That's always a danger when going into a house (like in the movies.... "The vault is ... empty. Empty? Emtpy!? EMMMPPPTYYYY!").
Also, you can always mouse over something to see what it is (tool tip at the bottom of the screen). If the vault is empty, the tool tip will say that.
No!
Steam is just one way to get the game. People will always be able to buy it (and continue to access updates forever after buying it) from my website.
The reason that it's important to put the game on Steam is that the audience is absolutely huge there, and many Steam people refuse to buy games that are not on Steam.
We cleared this up by email...
Two instances were due to a modded gameElements folder which didn't incorporated the v25 trapdoor changes, and the other time was likely due to running two clients for the same account in parallel.
Anyway, fair warning: DON'T RUN PARALLEL CLIENTS FOR THE SAME ACCOUNT!
Clients sign each request to the server with a sequence number that can't be repeated (to avoid replay attacks by people sniffing net traffic). If you run two clients at the same time for the same account, they will fight over these sequence numbers (one will send message 8956 and then 8957, and the other will still be trying to send 8956, which will be rejected because the server has already seen a request from you with that number), and the likely result will be your death in that account!
Well, be consoled by the fact that Switzer died shortly after robbing you and left someone a 6000 bounty!
Truly "dominating" forever in this game is impossible. Someone is going to get you eventually.
For those of you who were here in the early days of the forums, you may recall the ridiculous battle that I initially had to fight against spammers.
Even putting questions that "only a human could answer" didn't stop them, which meant that we were probably dealing with humans.
Strangely, putting a simple question that required a bit of game-related research (like looking in the Wiki) stopped them completely. They're probably trying to hit as many forums as possible in a short time, and anything that would actually take them a few minutes makes them skip this forum.
HOWEVER, several people have had trouble finding the answer to this question, especially if they are having trouble launching the game. They may be seeking help in the forums, but can't see anything in the game, and they don't know to look in the wiki.
SO... I've changed the question to be ridiculously easy.... like, just look at the main game website to find the answer. I'm not sure what will happen.... will spam start showing up again? We've had something like 6 months with not a single spam post, which is pretty amazing.
Please keep an eye out for spam, and let me know if you see any: jasonrohrer@fastmail.fm