The Castle Doctrine Forums

Some experimentation during the self test (with chihuahuas to be safe!) will help answer some of these questions (like the diagonal question).

It has to do with various decisions made in the code about what is processed first.

The house grid is processed from a South-first (bottom rows first), West-first (left tile in each row first) order.  So, if two dogs are competing for the same spot, the South one or the West one will get their first.

If dogs are following each other and moving West, they will continue to follow each other with no gap.  If they are moving East, the West-most dog will try to move first but be blocked by the dog that it's following.  The East-most dog will then move, leaving a gap between the two for the rest of the trip.  This happens to the family, too, as they follow their exit path.

When dogs chase you, they look at the unblocked squares around them (N, S, E, and W), and pick the one that's closest to you.  If the square that they're on is closest to you out of their unblocked options, they stay where they are.

Note that whatever you steal is held in "limbo" until you actually manage to return to your house.

So, let's say your house has $100 in it, and you go out and steal $1000.

After the robbery, you see the message that "Someone is in your house, you can't return to it now."

If that robber is successful, they will only take the $100.  When you finally return to your house (even after robbing multiple houses, looking at blueprints, or watching tapes), you'll find that your $1000 is safe and sound (including all loot and paintings that you've stolen).

This is a tiny bit like what you are talking about, though not as extreme.

It is possible to build "only rob me once" features into your house to prevent people from trashing it over and over and over (damage is only saved if they reach your vault or family and survive).  I once had someone trash me over and over even though I had $0 and no wife left, just for revenge!

Hmm.... interesting!

This wouldn't be too hard to do (record number of ms per move into the move list).

I'm guessing this would be best if it only affected the "normal speed" playback.  As soon as you hit the FASTER button, it should revert to being robotic again.  (Could just half the ms per move every time someone hits FASTER, but that would still leave some longer pauses in places.... when you're hitting FASTER, you often want to get on with it).

Fixed in v6

Interesting idea about not saving cut walls, animal moves, etc. when a family member is killed but the vault isn't reached.

However, what if the robber cuts through walls to get to the family?  (May be necessary in v6, because family doesn't move until they see the robber).  You'd come home to find a dead family member, but no obvious way that it happened (no hole in the wall).

That's the main reason that damage to a house is permanent sometimes.... because the first thing you do in the game is come back to your house and see the damage... that's a really strong moment in the game.  Then you watch the tapes to see how it happened.

Also, if you just reach the vault without touching the family, then half the money survives (wife holds half).  So, if the house is one-time robbable with $100K in it, it will become an impossible house with $50K after the first successful vault run.

Maybe the idea of de-listing houses will work.... not just after a week of no owner visit, but after a week of no successful robbery, after it has been robbed at least once.  And then paintings (but not house or money) could be reclaimed a week after that.

We'll see how things go in v6.

Very very soon for the v6 release....

Yeah, I'm aware of the house shortage problem.  Certainly hoping to bring some players back into the fold.

NPC houses flies fully in the face of what this game is about, at its core.

Do you really think people are idling for 5 minutes in order to get out of editing their houses?  Obviously, a modded client could bypass the editing screen entirely.

There's also the problem of someone making a top house and then abandoning it.

I've found at least one player who must be skipping the forced-re-edit in one way or another.  Will think about how to fix it.

Abandoned houses are harder to deal with. 

The ability to make a one-time robbable house seems pretty interesting.  Though I guess it's so easy to do that most people will include such a feature.  After that, these houses linger forever...

Keeping houses around at all, after they are successfully robbed, was added to give people more robbery targets (otherwise, there are simply not enough houses to rob).

However, in the new world of super-hard houses, maybe this isn't a problem.

Yeah, I am conservative with my designs.  A lot of designers throw every possible thing they can think of into a game (beds!  cakes!  mice!  bats!  jump-boots!).  That's a valid and rich style of design, but it's not my style.

Coming back to the family as liability, I believe that's been fixed in the forthcoming v6 in a pretty simple way:  the family stays put and doesn't start running to the exit until they see the robber.  Thus, it becomes possible to protect them, because the robber has to find them.  Of course, they have to still have a clear path to the exit.

Though now I've realized that it might be possible to overprotect the family....  put them down a long, snaking hallway with 9 pitbulls in it.  More thought needed here.

This kind of stuff will be considered later, after the core mechanics are ironed out.  The core game should never feel grindy.  It currently does feel grindy!  Fixing that, at the core level, is a high priority.

I've avoided any kind of written communication in-game, from signs, to chatting, etc., because I know where that will quickly lead.  Even if it doesn't lead into profanity land, it's very easy for players to write things that break the aesthetic coherence of the game, even if they don't intend to.

Instead, all player expression is channeled through the game mechanics, and there's a wide range of possible expression.  So far, none of that expression, that I've seen, has broken the aesthetic coherence (even 100 pitbulls in one room matches the dark humor that I want to communicate about home security).

Demon's Souls is a weird example here.  They allow you to post text messages, but they don't allow you to type them yourself (you have to pick from a list of messages provided by the developer).

I've thought about adding wire cutters as a way of "snipping" electric floors when they are off.

Obviously, in v5 they are a major source of impossible-to-cut-through puzzles.

However, I'm also curious about what will happen once maps are added.  Obviously, the 9-deep thing isn't so great.  It's nice to have something that doesn't have to be 9-deep to be effective (though as soon as it's on, it becomes the cheapest trap to overcome---just a $2 bottle of water).

So, the current plan is to leave it as-is and see how the maps change things.