The Castle Doctrine Forums

I really like what this is getting at.  What I think we've all noticed in this game, is that there are two modes you eventually have to play as, but currently the game treats it as one. 

There's "A have a house I worked on hard and I'm scared to lose" mode.

and there's "I'm out for blood and revenge and I'm going to break into this other house if its the last thing I do" mode.

Figuring out how to do justice to both modes will be the challenge in my mind.

A note on being able to see the whole map:  I feel like this will spoil the game. I mean I haven't played it this way, so I don't know, but I feel like a lot of the fun is figuring things out, not just how they work, but inferring things about what you CAN'T SEE.

If you can see the whole map and it's still hard, to me that just means people of have obfuscated what the real map is.  Like when people do cryptic stuff to javascript code to make it unreadable by humans, but it does the same thing.  If everyone can see the whole map, we'll be trying to over-complicate everything we do to make it as obscure as possible. Not sure that's going to be that fun!

However, I do think the game needs more tools that allow us to infer things from what we can't see.  Tools that are like the voltage sensor (but more useful).  Like a tool that allows you to "hear" through walls (like safecrackers use), so you can determine, that 20 squares away, something just stepped on a switch.  An obscured "wire view" which maybe allows you to see some flow through the house, or maybe indicates when a large electrical change has occurred. Maybe a little camera snake, that can burrow through walls and allow you to see what's going on, without going there?  Or a device that allows you to splice wires together (say, to avoid a pressure switch) and then manually toggle them on and off.  Brute forcing a combination lock just became easier.   (OOoh OOh! and if you want to go off and a completely nonsensical direction, how bout letting us download and share bruteforcing software into the program which can crack the code for us. Okay forget that.)

Also, maybe instead of making a pack of 32, these tools are simply reusable.

Awesomee - I dig how you got those two pressure switches next to each other, somehow I was thinkin it couldn't be done. 

Definitely there can be some trial and error to solve the problem, but when the solution is around 15, people have a hard time brute forcing it.  Especially because there is zero visual feedback telling you how you are doing.

Nice catch!

Thinking of adding it as an option via the text grid component, but trying to keep the interface of the builder simple so will probably keep that to the daughter, given that they are functionally the same as the son - plus women are under represented in gaming, so why not.

Glad you dig it!  It popped into my head when Jason noted that even if you can see a whole map, it's still hard to figure out.

I think one of my goals going forward is to add features that allow you to clear away the noise and see the solutions as clearly as possible.

Major update to Castle Fortify!

New features:

• Home Valuation - See how much your home is worth. (Idea credit: Thanks Nystical!)
• Wire View - See where the power is flowing by removing all walls
• Custom Code Mode - Best for last! Now you can make your map from a text grid, or export a text grid to take with you. (Idea credit: Thank you bgorven)  Screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/yGcIFLboh8

Note: This is extremely alpha! If something is broken let me know!

Edit: By the way, if you have a template you like to create your text grids with, post it here - if it's really cool, I'll make it the default.

Edit2: I may be getting ahead of myself here, but I found an interesting side effect to the text grid concept.  You can now "copy/paste" portions of a map to other portions of a map.  I have assigned "x" as the "no-change" tile, meaning anything at the location with an "x" will stay the same (provided there is something there to begin with).  Not sure how useful this is yet, but I really like the idea of seeing a trap you like, and just copy pasting it into your own layout.  Tricky before - now with the text grid, it's easier.  Ight, now I'm headin to bed.

Nice catch, it should be one up?

Edit: FIXED!  I moved it one up. Thanks for the heads up.

lol. Please tell me you did that by writing "error" over and over in the code panel.

That would be awesome! Would love to get that code - and I'm totally down for collaborating.  Let's do it.

lol - yeah psych warfare is much cooler than combination locks, lookin forward to seein it!

Ed, just saw your work at http://castlr.fonkle.com/.  Glad I didn't see it till now or else it totally would of discouraged me from building castlefortify!  Really like how you got the isometric view, transparent tiles, and cost structure in there.  Nice stuff man.

This is something I kinda like about the current state of the game.  Even if you can make a system robust against a single attack, and even if you can make a few areas robust against 3 attacks, it seems like it would be possible to make the entire map robust against 3 attacks.  At some point there's gotta be a vulnerability somewhere in there..

That said, the downside of the current version is once someone comes in and kills one of the family members, the map gains in strength, until all of them are dead, in which case the map may become unbreakable..