Discuss the massively-multiplayer home defense game.
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Hmm... I think I found the tapes that you're talking about.
This was several lives ago for you now, but the tapes are still in my admin view.
I see Nathan Peter Penn hit your vault for $289
Your house at the time looked like this:
IMAGE REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Your vault became empty.
Then Alvin Devin Howard came in and left. Then he returned with a two crowbars and meat. He used one crowbar on a window, then died to a pitbull. Both of his tapes show the vault empty.
At that point, his remaining tools ($60 worth) go into your vault.
Finally, Richard Darren Hahn comes in and hits your vault for $60 worth of tools.
On ALL of these tapes, I'm seeing Robyn carrying $568.
Are you sure it wasn't just confusion over why the vault became non-empty again? It actually had no money in it... just the tools from the dead robber.
I also could be looking at the wrong tapes, but I scanned the whole databases of logs, and these are the only tapes that come close to matching what you're describing here (vault hit again after a robber dies).
Oh, wow! Yeah, that's a bug. Can't believe nobody noticed it until now. Will fix it in the next release.
However, note that the server is NOT billing you for the removed item that got replaced by the vault. For example, the green balance number might say "-$10" still if you replace a new wooden wall with the vault, but after you return to your house later, you'll find that you still have that $10 and it was not spent after all!
(But then obviously you'd need to be able to bypass them with water, or else wired wooden walls that are powered would not be bypassable with tools---really, you'd need to make the cutting action itself deadly. Maybe someday.)
You need to save your TGA files without compression and without colormaps (they need to be full RGB color TGA files). My TGA-reading code is really simple, and doesn't support the full breadth of the TGA format.
I wonder about broken doors conducting power.... I mean, the wires are still there!
And trapdoors still open and close under the ladder (so, obviously, they still conduct).
I like the idea of sawing through a wired wall killing you if the power is on. However, there's currently no support in the engine for a tool use triggering your death. Only tiles can trigger your death upon contact. You could imagine cut wires becoming dangerous to step on if they still have power, though (and the same for cut wired walls). Like, essentially they turn into electric floors after being cut.
Well, I don't mind there being a trade-off between vault protection and family protection.
Oh, wait...
Any of these ideas would bring back the problem of "using a tool to change animal distance from even to odd". Because, you know, you could half-use a tool to get the animal to come one step closer (into clubbing range). Or select a tool (animals step) and then abort the selection by moving.
That was the whole reason the "animals are frozen during tool use" change was made----to prevent this kind of exploit. An animal at a dangerous distance is always at a dangerous distance, and there's nothing simple you can do to change that.
Also, it looks like we've had about 24 active players in the past 24 hour period.
Yeah, I considered multiple vaults back in the on-paper design days.
I decided against it because it complicates house self testing (you have to reach multiple vaults before success?)
I agree that there is a house scarcity problem. But I don't want to just reset all houses in the way that has been suggested. Coming back to a damaged house is a really important aesthetic part of the game. So is sneaking into a house and finding it already damaged.
As it stands, each house on the list can potentially be robbed 3 times before disappearing. The vault must be hit twice before it starts losing money, and then the wife can be reached.
Yeah, it's not supposed to work that way. Sounds like a bug. Thanks for reporting it!
Yeah, I really liked the wake-up-with-water mechanic. Sad to see it go.
Oh, do you?!
I can imagine no one agreeing about the right numbering order.
Obviously, this is not hard to do on my end.
However, I've been avoiding it because I'm concerned about the UI for it. I wouldn't want to add more numerical overlays to those backpack slot (cluttered). On the other hand, it's bad UI for it to be invisible. Of course, since there's no dangerous consequence to picking a tool, I could just let players press random numbers to learn the slot mappings. Or maybe just show the hotkey mappings in the tool tips?
For the time being, I'm not going to change the way tool use is working. Maybe someday, after some other stuff is ironed out. As someone pointed out, cutting through walls with a dog on your tail is kindof a last-ditch effort, and is way more expensive than clubbing the dog anyway, so it's not exactly a strategy (maybe a heat-of-the-moment tactic). Other times, since you can only reach 4 squares with most tools before moving, tool use during the "frozen time" between moves is pretty limited.
I realized that changing this would require changing the way recordings work (to potentially handle aborted tool use, where a tool is picked but not applied).
The metal walls being the same price as wired wooden walls is a mistake! I'll change that now.
Drugged meat is weak because the affected dog becomes impassable (in a corridor, as bey suggested).
I have thought about reducing backpack slots to fewer than 8. However, I think there's a cross-over point where houses become unbreakable again, and I haven't reasoned about what that crossover point is.
Clearly, you could build a house where, if the robber cannot solve the puzzle, they MUST use:
--Explosives (only way through concrete)
--Torches (only way through metal walls)
--Ladders (only way to cross pits)
--Water (only way to cross electric floors that are on)
--Crowbar (only way to open closed doors)
--Gun (only way past certain dogs, assuming that I get this part of the game fixed)
--Wirecutters (only way to pass electric floors that will come on remotely when you step on them)
So, right there we're up to SEVEN. A home owner can potentially force you to use all seven tools to bypass a single house. If I set a limit of SIX slots, then unbreakable houses will be possible.
And, I'm not sure that, in practice, reducing the slots from EIGHT to SEVEN really accomplishes what we'd want to accomplish by reducing slots (you'd really need to get down to 4 slots or something to make the choices feel tougher for the robber).
I'm not sure that "always carrying a brick" or water is such a bad thing. Bricks are limited to basically clever uses (I've seen people use them to trip switches from afar in ways that always surprise me as a home owner). Water only works on "on" electric floors, and its cheapness forces home owners to hide their power supplies, which is good.
All un-dead and un-damaged objects spring back into their starting state for the next robber.
They remain "down" or in whatever state the last robber left them in just for you to see them in your first post-robbery edit (as you're inspecting the damage). As soon as you go back to self-test, you'll see them pop back up. And they will remain popped back up if you leave the self test and return to editing.
Sleeping pit bulls are another example of this. When you first return home, you will find them asleep (so you can see how the robber got through), but as soon as you toggle to self-test and back (by pressing Done), they will wake up.
The idea with animal-triggered switches (where the animal moves and gets stuck somewhere) is that the animal WON'T be able to hit that same switch again next time (because it won't be in the same position. But the switch won't stay down forever.
This is interesting!
I would be tempted to tie it to the 2-step action that is needed to use a tool. In other words, pick a tool (animals move one step) then use the tool (animals move a second step). So, the first step is getting it out of your backpack. You know, an infinite backpack can take quite a bit of digging around to find what you need! And if you change your mind, and decide not to use the chosen tool after all, then move lost.
Otherwise, if both animal moves simply happened after tool use (as you're suggesting), the auto-two-move timing would feel weird. You know, there would have to be a forced 0.5-second pause between the two animal steps, during which the player would have no control. Right now, the game has a very deliberate feel, where the speed is completely under your control at all times (every key press makes the clock tick, and there are no automated clock ticks).
Still, I do like the 2-click system for confirming tool use, where nothing happens if you click away. Gives the game a very deliberate feel. Not sure if I want to sacrifice that safety and deliberateness.
Also, the system I suggest (one animal move per tool-action click) would change the "dangerous distance" for animals. An animal 2-steps away would become safely clubbable, while an animal 1 step away would no longer be (maybe that's more realistic anyway---if the animal is right next to you, it's tool late to pull out a crowbar and club it).
In general, I agree that having animals frozen during tool use doesn't feel as good as having them move. Hmm...
Yeah, you folks are correct here.
The problem is that you can lead a dog from one side of the house to another. Dogs are good enough at following you that they route around stuff without getting caught anywhere. Thus, even if dogs are spaced out initially in a tricky way, you can kill one with a gun and lead the others back to that spot, over and over to stand on the shot-dog body safely, until all are crowbar-dead (as pointed out above).
It seems like changing animal behavior so that animals avoid standing next to dead animals (like, they smell the death from one square away), but that pit bulls still attack you if you're standing next to a dead animal (their desire to attack overrides their aversion to the death-smell) would change this.
Thus, you could stand behind a dead pit bull and still move around safely. But the square just beyond the dead pit bull (the one just between you and the next living pit bull) would be a deadly square for you.
So, you could no longer use a dead dog to easily change a 2-square-away pit bull (unclubbable) into a 1-square-away pit bull (clubbable).
This release changes the robbery end condition so that an empty vault that has already been robbed by someone else cannot be reached. This means that reaching an empty vault over and over can no longer be used to cumulatively add damage to a house (damage is saved when the vault is reached or family members are killed).
A "safe movement mode" toggle has been added (to help out in tense moments---this mode enables Enter-confirmation for each move that is made).
Yeah, I screwed up and failed to put up that "Please Wait" message this time.
v13 is up there now!
So, they were protectable in v8 simply because of the tool limit? I don't think anything else has changed to make them less protectable now.
Obviously, any imbalance like this can be addressed through a change in tool prices. There doesn't need to be a separate budget to accomplish this (giving the robber half as much money for tools is the same as making all tools cost twice as much).
You're not really supposed to be able to do much with the starting budget as a home owner. Build the best thing you can to stall robbers until you get more money. That includes stalling them from reaching the family.
One gun plus crowbars only works if your dogs are all in the same area. If they are spaced out more, then I believe it's possible for each group to require a gun. I'll play around with this and see if I can come up with an example.
Okay, part of this is changed on the server (your vault stops earning money after it is reached by robbers twice, thus limiting vault-reach vandalism).
Working on the rest of it (empty vault sprite) now. Will require a new client release.
Well, the problem here is not vandalism... I like vandalism!
The problem here is limitless vandalism with no cost. Everything in the game should have a cost. You should be trading the opportunity to vandalize for some other opportunity. Giving up X to achieve Y.
Of course, the root here is "free money on each new life with no strings attached and more waiting for you post-suicide, with no limit". Thus, there is no interesting choice to make about how you spend that money, as long as you avoid dying in someone else's house (to avoid chills), your decisions in the current life have no effect on your next life. Throwing that $2000 away is fine.
All that said, fixing this root problem is really hard, because it's connected to so many other aspects of the game.... in general, immediately after death, you WANT players to have a fresh start with money to build or rob with. You also want them to have freedom at that point (don't want to shackle them into designing a house first before robbing, or whatever). So, "making that starting money mean something" is a tough one that I'm going to dodge for now. Maybe it will never be solved. Essentially, it's a "nothing invested, nothing to lose" problem that plagues every game where you can restart in some way. In a 1-player twitch game, you might insta-restart if you make a simple mistake in the first level, and opposed to playing out the rest of the game with one less heart, because you've got so little invested. But if you lost a heart on level 10, you probably wouldn't restart... you'd keep going, because you had something invested.
So, for now, I'm going to focus on the symptoms.
In general, against a house with working security, these fresh-life robbers with $2000 worth of tools are not a threat. If they're just plowing in without really playing, they're not going to make progress, and whatever damage they do will auto-revert. They can do it until they're blue in the face, but since their activity has no effect, they'll stop doing it.
But a house with a reachable vault is currently forever-vulnerable to a respawning player with $2000 each time. Yeah, if that vault is hit twice in a row, it goes off the list forever. But if there's a living wife still, then it won't (she still has money). Which means a respawning player can easily chip away to the wife by reaching the vault over and over to save damage. That's also not interesting.
Still, I want to keep money flowing into one-time robbable houses, because they are still interesting challenges.
So, here's the solution I've come up with:
--A house with $0 total money goes off the list (same as right now).
--A house only keeps earning vault money (while owner is away) if it hasn't been vault-reached twice (not twice in a row, just twice total) since the owner's last repair job.
--A vault with $0 in it changes to a different sprite (empty vault sprite) and is NOT reachable to end a robbery (cannot even be stepped on). Thus, leaving is the only way to end a robbery if the vault is empty (though wife might still have money to be taken). So, reaching an empty vault with NOT save house damage.
This still gives fresh-start players an opportunity to free-money vandalize by reaching a vault that is still earning money, but only once per house, and only if they get there before someone else does.
REALLY trashing a house will still be possible, but only if you've saved up money to do it---in other words, only if it has an extreme cost.
Dalleck: can you send me that failed playback? That shouldn't happen, but still does sometimes (sometimes the events in the file fall out-of-sync with what's going on in the playback).
As far as more features for recordedGame playback... well, I know it's a cool feature, but it's really just for debugging, so that no bug goes uncaught or unreproducible. There are some speed control keys in it (look for enableSpeedControlKeys in the settings folder), and then ^ for slow (2 fps), & for normal, and *, (, and ) for faster and faster. Those speed control keys work during the regular game too, though, so be careful.
Also, the recording stuff is part of my game framework, so it is built into every game that I ship (was in Inside a Star-filled Sky too). Thus, it's very generic. Not really meant for prime-time, so I don't want to sink a bunch of time into polishing it. If there's a bug to catch, it works well enough.
Some kind of "video tape" effect on the security tapes.... I go back and forth about whether that would be good in practice. It sounds really cool, but it might be annoying after the wow-factor fades, because it would make stuff harder to see. Regardless, it's certainly a someday feature!
I wonder if a time limit would really help. Sometimes, it's more like a brain mistake causes this to happen, and probably more than 0.3 seconds passes in that case.
During really tense moments in the game, I usually slow down a bit and make very deliberate keystrokes.
I wonder if there's some other, optional UI device to make "dangerous moves" less prone to this kind of error. Like a little pop-up thing that would let you click directions with the mouse, but have a confirmation checkbox for each press.... where you'd have to press twice per move.
Or maybe a "safety" mode you could turn on when you need it, where you have to press each movement key twice to initiate a move.
Oh... wait, duh! What about mouse-based movement? Where you can mouse over where you want to go, and see a highlight there, and then click it? Maybe miss-clicks would be less likely compared to miss-typing....
I'll figure something out for v13.