Discuss the massively-multiplayer home defense game.
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What does "effective" mean to you, though?
I think it means, "So that no one can get through no matter what, unless they spend a ton of money." Obviously, that makes for a pretty uninteresting game. Like I said before, the solution to these effective houses is obvious (N ladders), but you just can't afford it.
What if building an "effective" house really was impossible? What would you do then? You'd have to build the best, most misleading, most foreboding, most confusing house that you could.
A house that screams "THIS WAY TO THE VAULT" would no longer be viable.
The very best experiences that I've had with The Castle Doctrine have come from sneaking through houses that look nothing like the top 8 houses do right now. I was pushing my luck, and my heart was in my throat the whole time.
The current tool prices are balanced around the current build possibilities. If those build possibilities change, the tool prices might have to change too.
Anyway, I'm still not sure that it's possible to force this change. As we have seen, players are smart, and they will find a way, if there is a way.
Blip: I figured out a way to make your "line of six trapdoors" more compact:
http://castledraft.com/editor/boT38a
So, this line of new-world house design worries me! Let's keep pushing it to see where it can go.
Suggestions for limiting power propagation are good. I'm worried about how that will be easy for players to understand... even if I try to make it visible somehow, it will complicate the display.
Blip, you show how access to the electronics can be blocked by a "breaker" button along the wired path to those electronics. I get that.
But still, the electronics can be inspected after that for next time.
People seem worried by my suggestion, because it will ruin their current, fool-proof security. But this game isn't supposed to have fool-proof security. Security where simply poking around gives you NOTHING is not what this game is about. This game is ABOUT poking around. Nervously sneaking through someone's house, hoping you're prepared for what is around the next corner.
What I'm hoping for is to make "combo locks" of various kinds so much less effective that psychological houses become just as, if not more, effective.
The "solution" to the current magic dance house is crystal clear: bring 8 ladders so that you can get to where the animal is walking. The solution to a combo lock house is also clear: bring enough ladders to bypass the lock. Everyone knows the solution, but very few can afford the solution. There's nothing to figure out, except for how to get enough money to break it.
The psychological houses have something to figure out. Maybe it's just the right place to throw one brick. But at least there's something to think about!
Yes, with such changes, tool prices might have to go up.
Of course, if unscoutable combo locks are still possible with the "new world" that I outlined above, there's no point in going to the new world.
So, I'm still looking for people to "build their worst" to try to break this new world by constructing a combo lock.
Also, maybe the animal movement doesn't have to change.
What if animals can still follow you from behind walls after seeing you, but power can't propagate through walls or through traps? Then you could still have:
http://castledraft.com/editor/HaPPzl
Which can obviously be bypassed by 2 ladders. Still a magic dance, if you want to try it without tools. But you could scout it for half the price of simply breaking it.
Largestherb, if the requirement is wire separators between traps, that simply reduces the "longest trapdoor run" from 30 down to 15. And, by going around corners, you could make it longer.
A major weakness in the current setup is that house builders can "force" you to cross X trapdoors (or doors, or electric floors) to bypass, or else solve some unsolvable thing.
Way back in v5, as soon as I saw that line of trapdoors appear, I was like, "Oh no! That's not what I was hoping for. Now everyone will be doing that."
10 releases later, we still have that pesky line of trapdoors.
As an experiment, I've just counted 13 active houses. 27 people have played in the past 24 hours.
I'm setting the starting funds up to $4000. Does this change things?
I'll check back at 9:43am PST tomorrow and see what has changed.
Hmm... letting you pick from two different salary levels is interesting. Or maybe set your own level? Maybe you could decide how much you want to earn per hour, from a range.
Still, it seems like a kind of distraction away from the core mechanics of the game.
Separate servers has been considered.
One idea was that the number of deaths you have would dictate which houses you would be able to see, and who could see you. So maybe the 1-20 death folks would be grouped together, and then they'd eventually graduate into the 20+ death group. Or maybe something simpler, based on number of hours played.... something.
After all, the new players aren't all that interesting for the experts to play with... they're just easy prey, maybe.
Sill, I worry about splitting the community at this point.
Yep, eye in the sky over here.
Though I'm not keeping this data on purpose.... it's just all in the database as part of keeping the game running. With the proper SQL query, you can pretty much answer whatever question you want to answer.
Yep, makes sense! Will do it.
Yeah! Especially if the timer started when you started editing the new house. So, it really only affects people who "build nothing." Also nicely deals with the throw-away houses created by people who respawn and rob right away.
Great thinking. I'll add this behavior soon.
Yes! Exactly the kind of outside thinking I really needed here.
You're right about the trapdoor/electric-floor combo to make unpassable wiring---nice work, Blip and Jere.
And, the suggestion about power not flowing through non-switches is a good one, I think. I was never happy with the "whole line of doors" or "whole line of trapdoors" as an inevitable construction. Even with no wires through walls (assuming that the trapdoor/floor combo wasn't possible), the outside, visible logic would still lead to a "line of trapdoors," most likely, which isn't very interesting. But if the first trapdoor couldn't transmit power status to the next... then house designers would have to think a lot more.
Blip's example house looks much more like the kind of stuff I'd want to see.
I agree with colorfusion that this will probably lead to a return of the blueprint-style houses to some extent. Still, that's better than logic hidden behind walls, right? I mean, in principle, there's nothing stopping someone from making blueprint-still puzzle logic behind the walls now. They just don't need to, because it doesn't matter. And those blueprint-style houses were only a problem when limited backpacks forced people to actually solve the puzzles.
So, revising the proposal. Imagine a world where:
1. Power can't pass through walls
2. Power is not transmitted from one powered object to another (Powered object eats the power).
3. Animals only chase/flee when they can see you.
What sort of exploits to build combo locks can you imagine then?
Right... my investigation centered around the fact that the final, successful robbery was by a different, unrelated account. Sadly, the tapes have been flushed at this point, so I can't go back and look to see how "Aaron Jesse Waters" got 61 ladders---I recall looking at that at the time, but I don't recall what the explanation was. Next time it comes up, please email me right away, and I'll investigate more deeply.
Hmm... but then cooperating players would just wait 5 minutes (or whatever) before transferring the money. Yes, the longer you make it, the more it slows them down. But also, the more in shrinks the house pool!
Thoughts on this? Should the game ship in Windowed mode by default? How many people play in fullscreen all the time?
The problem, of course, is what window size? Maybe it should auto-pick a size based on the current screen size.... one size less than the current screen size. So, it would be 640x480 on an 800x600 screen, and 800x600 on a 1024x768 screen, and so on.
Well, maybe it should be a percentage or a cap, whichever is smaller. So, the max you could earn would be $1680/hr (the same as now), but low-end houses would earn much less than that per hour.
Yes, tutorials are needed. These will come in the form of videos outside the game, I think.
I'm wondering if the rate at which money flows into the game is a problem.
Maybe the flow should increase slowly over time, as the value of your house increases.... like "interest" on the money in your house. That way, if you're a new player with a low level house, your house won't rise in value so quickly, so it won't become worth robbing so quickly.
Right now, EVERYONE earns $1680/hour. Obviously, that has a major impact on low-end players (almost doubling their money in the first hour), and almost no impact on high-end players.
Could be capped at 10% of your house's value, per hour? So, if you have $500 left in your house, you earn $50 that hour. If you have $5000, you earn $500. Maybe 10% is too low.
Also, just a note about the history: the salaries really were added to attract burglars to a house over time, not to help the home owner build better stuff with more money. Before salaries, house owners would build with most of the money, and then the house would have $200 left, and it would just sit there, because it wasn't worth robbing, ever. Plus, no one had money to buy tools to rob it. There was a major money shortage!
First observation: so-called "magic dance" houses are not interesting to rob. They essentially require expensive, brute-force cut-through with tools. They are also perplexing for new players.
Obviously, animal movement could be changed in simple ways to eliminate magic dances (dogs only move toward you when they can see you, and cats only flee when they can see you).
Second observation: if magic dances are eliminated, then combo locks will return. They are just as uninteresting as magic dances, if not more so. (Actually, they never went away, and still exist---they're just not quite as perplexing for new players).
I'm now seriously considering eliminating wires through walls (and making metal walls not conductive) to bring hidden logic out in the open.
However, I'm then guessing that logic would just be protected by pit bulls instead of walls (wires that run back into a corner, where that corner is full of dogs, so you can't get back there to look).
So, first of all, I need feedback on these ideas. What if there are no wires through walls? What if animals can't follow you behind walls? What kind of maps would you devise? What are the new exploits in such a world? Examples, please!
I've been thinking a lot about "interesting" houses. I think the best ones are kind of maze-like, with various little devices along the way that need to be triggered in this way and that to get through. Lots of little things to think about. The PROBLEM with these houses is that a smart robber can bypass everything. But that problem is actually what makes these houses interesting. The game is good and rewarding if you can outsmart a house.
The ideal arms race should be more and more clever house design vs. more and more clever robbers. I've been outsmarted by a brick about a dozen times, and it's always amazing when it happens. Those are great tapes to watch! Or the tapes where the robber cuts through in just the perfect spot.
So, I want to figure out ways to force home owners to play this "cleverness" game. To force them to resort to psychological tricks and such instead of combo locks and thick walls.
I do worry that there's no way to do this. That no matter what, combo locks (in various forms) will find a way.
Agreed, AGO, this game is going nowhere fast if it turns off new players.
I'm working on fixing that, for sure. I was just pointing out that it's more complicated than it seems, and solutions are not readily at hand.
If you look at the game Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, which is based on a similar core idea, you can see that they keep players by making everything "not real". You don't really get robbed and lose everything. Your castle isn't ever really hurt by other players. You can't really die while trying to get through security in another castle. Finally, security in castles isn't real or even up to you to design (you just select from pre-built blocks to string together).
My job would be much easier if I took that route.
But I'm trying too keep the game real and deep while also making it interesting to play over the long run. I want you to be able to build whatever you want, and to have a real, permanent impact on the creations of other players. I want to make a game where what you do actually matters. But games like that, where players have so much real power, are much harder to balance.
We've been through 15 revisions so far, and we're clearly not quite at the end of the tunnel yet.
Oh, so you did this yourself.... but not with a second account?
Did you have Ludi actively cooperate with you?
Your idea for historyless implementation of scents is really great.
However, I worry about this being a completely invisible property. As it stands, you can LOOK at a given map state and compute in your mind what will happen next, and I think that's a good thing.
Yeah, actually, for the eyedropper, the game is already doing it that way. I call SDL_GetModState() to check if the ALT key is held down.
Thus, I'm pretty sure is an SDL bug:
http://forums.libsdl.org/viewtopic.php? … a70cbba1c1
Also, Josh just did the debugging work on his end, and the Alt-Tab crash was found to be in part of Windows. Also, this is a known issue for other games:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s … ?t=1517550
Which means, sadly, that I don't really have power to fix these things...
Oh, no, that's not the death toll for the past 7 days. Those are TOTAL deaths for all players who were active in the past 7 days. Someone has lived 2000+ lives, yes! But that was over several months.
Blip... major changes to mechanics (like animal movement, wires through walls, etc.) might still be coming! If you make a vid explaining magic dances, those might go away soon.... so, you might want to wait, or be ready to revise later.
And I REALLY appreciate you working on tutorial vids. I think it will help new players a lot.
Yeah, the stuck alt key is a strange one.... it's like the key-up event never gets sent. But if that's the case (a simple problem), then hitting ALT again later should clear it up (which would send down and then up events). There may be a bug in SDL here...
largestherb:
Wouldn't the same "disguise" be possible without the doors? You can hide your family down inside a maze already. The "sliding doors" would just keep the dogs in the maze a little bit longer.
The idea of animals following scent or something else is interesting.
I'm still not totally happy with the way that they move behind walls. Yes, they have to see you first, which is a big improvement (because at least its not a total, blind mystery).
I'm not sure that I want to go toward a complete line-of-sight rule, because I don't want them to be that mindless. Like, you duck behind a wall, and suddenly they forget that you were even there?
If they go by scent, that means that they will only go where you have already been, which makes it harder for them to successfully corner you from a distance.
Maybe.... they always run toward you, if they can see you. If they can't see you, they run toward the last place where they saw you. But I'm thinking about the implementation of dog movement, which is historyless (given a current map state, you can always compute the next state without knowing anything about past states), and this change would violate that assumption. Hmm...
Maybe it can be as simple as them only running toward you (or away) when they can see you? Then they stop moving when they can't see you again.
AGO, I'm sorry that you're having trouble as a new player.
It is a tough, harsh game, that's for sure.
Many of your suggestions (limited backpack slots that you don't lose in each robbery, etc.) were in place in previous versions of the game but changed for very good reasons.
The one suggestion that hasn't been tried is giving you starting money that's earmarked for building only. I think this would just make even more houses that are even harder, right? People having more money means that they will be able to build harder stuff.
On the one hand, you're saying, "Help me make my house harder to rob!"
On the other hand, you're saying, "Help me so that the other houses are easier to rob!"
But, we're all in that same boat. It's impossible to simultaneously make houses both easier to protect and easier to rob. We can only make home owners stronger by weakening robbers, and vice versa.
That balance can currently be tweaked by adjusting the ratio between tool prices and house tile prices. More expensive tools make robbery harder and houses more safe. Less expensive tools make robbery easier and houses less safe.
I probably will raise tool prices in the future at some point... to raise the threshold where brute-forcing a low-valued house (by cutting through walls) becomes worth it. But I haven't dug too deeply into that yet, because I'm busy fixing other issues.
Unfortunately, it really depends on who is playing the game at the moment and what kind of houses they are building.
Right now (a few days later), I see 15 houses on the list, some of which look pretty interesting to poke around in.
Part of the problem is that "easier" houses get robbed very quickly and taken off the list, so over time, there's a tendency for only hard houses to remain.
bitbutter: wow, amazing job making those videos. That, my friend, is a major accomplishment. One of those vids has 136K views!