Encouraging desirable player behaviour

bey bey · 2013-06-18 08:31:23

About protecting the family: Suggestion: If there is more than one way for the family to reach the exit, they will take the one further from the robber. This would allow for some protective setups where two dogs and clever layout might protect the family just fine. I think. Saying that the robber has to enter in a way (at least if he doesn't use tools) that triggers the flight of the family and at the same time positions a dog one step away from him. He'll have to deal with the dog instead of hurting the family. Manage that with three dogs (consecutively, and you have a protective setup that would be a bit more interesting at least than 20 dogs.

(I tried something like this with windows etc. once but it didn't work in practice...)

jearr · 2013-06-18 11:57:26

I really liked FunnyMan's original suggestions about encouraging robbery-fun houses rather than unbreakable houses. I'm interested in the game design taking some steps in this direction, mostly just to move focus away from designing unbreakable houses. Mr. Rohrer has already done a lot of work trying to deal with unbreakables, but not like that. The abandonment of blueprints has made it a lot easier to go back to experimenting with simpler house designs rather than only trying to come up with the most complex/convoluted designs.

I have previously suggested letting dogs walk over corpses (pile-o-dogs!), but Mr. Rohrer doesn't want to encourage rooms of dogs (I still use them). I think that standing on corpses to protect yourself from pitbulls is a silly mechanic, and it is so widely used. I've also complained before about the significant monetary damage that you can do when you slaughter someone's dogs, but Mr. Rohrer's recent economy changes have made that much less of an issue (for the moment!).

I'm interested in Bey Bey's suggestion of using alternate paths and dog-distractions to better protect your family, but frankly I have no idea how to test such a thing. Does your family react to you during self-test as if you were a robber (ie, start fleeing?). I'm not sure how you could test your family pathing.

Last edited by jearr (2013-06-18 13:26:16)

ukuko · 2013-06-18 13:04:03

jearr wrote:

Does your family react to you during self-test as if you were a robber (ie, start fleeing?). I'm not sure how you could test your family pathing.

Yep! They do. You're dressed in your robber garb, screaming THIS IS NOT A DRILL!

jearr · 2013-06-18 13:29:36

ukuko wrote:

jearr wrote:
Does your family react to you during self-test as if you were a robber (ie, start fleeing?). I'm not sure how you could test your family pathing.
Yep! They do. You're dressed in your robber garb, screaming THIS IS NOT A DRILL!

Lol! Hopefully you're smart enough to use a bunch of chihuahuas during self-test though, which makes the whole scene a little surreal, with a masked father fleeing from a bunch of tiny dogs. In other news I still have problems spelling chihuahua.

largestherb · 2013-06-18 14:02:23

jearr wrote:

In other news I still have problems spelling chihuahua.

i've been using a bit of spell-check lately, but i still think just saying chuiauia is fine. i'm sure enough people will try to read it and go 'oh those little dogs, who invented that spelling pft.'

jasonrohrer · 2013-06-18 22:01:05

I've changed it (in v10, not released yet) so that animals only step when you step. Electricity still reacts instantly, though. So, for example, if a dog is on an electric floor and about to step off, and you throw a brick on a switch that turns the floor on, the dog remains still during this tool use and fries.

But yeah, I guess you do become a ninja with drugged meat! You could drug a whole room full of dogs by just standing there on an empty tile. This is, admittedly, a strange side-effect.

Dogs don't cross corpses or sleeping dogs because there is only one mobile object per tile. In a game where the sprites are so tiny, this is necessary to make things visually understandable. Dogs don't disappear when they die (like enemies do in DROD, as I recall), because they are there for the owner to see, and the trail of carnage that you leave (visible to yourself) is an important aesthetic in the game.

Having a free, easy route around the house to a window that looks in on the family (so they can start running and be way ahead of the robber before the robber reaches them) is a viable plan, I think.

Family picks their exit path based on the current house layout, regardless of where the robber moves. They don't route around him.

Regarding encouraging "fun" houses.... well, that's simply a different game, and this game was always and will always be about designing houses to keep people out. Of course, it's also a game about vulnerability and violation, so if you can keep people out permanently, the game is broken.

There are other games where the point is to make fun levels for your friends to enjoy (where players can rate levels, and the "best" levels rise to the top of the list, etc.) I set out to do something different with The Castle Doctrine.

bey bey · 2013-06-19 02:30:50

I tried the windows thing a few weeks back - didn't work. (but might have been my incompetence.)

Interested about those dog movement changes. I was just thinking about a family protection scheme, based on the idea that once you see the family, you'll have to use a tool for each turn because dogs keep swarming you so that the family can walk past you unscathed. Obviously, v10 would allow you to just throw meat at dogs until the family arrives (once they see you) and then club the family as they walk past while the doggies are watching in morbid curiosity.

Last edited by bey bey (2013-06-19 02:31:12)

zed · 2013-06-19 14:08:09

jasonrohrer wrote:

I've changed it (in v10, not released yet) so that animals
only step when you step.

I was sceptical at first, but now I think this might work.

It doesn't make much sense though that the robber would refrain from clubbing
a sleeping dog, when they're happy to batter defenseless women and children.
How about making it that a sleeping dog wakes up if the robber walks next to
it, and it immediately gets a move? That would nerf drugged meat even further,
which I think might be a good thing, and would make more sense.

Dogs don't cross corpses or sleeping dogs because there is only one mobile
object per tile. In a game where the sprites are so tiny, this is necessary
to make things visually understandable. Dogs don't disappear when they die
(like enemies do in DROD, as I recall), because they are there for the owner
to see, and the trail of carnage that you leave (visible to yourself) is an
important aesthetic in the game.

(I feel compelled to reiterate that having mobiles swap positions with corpses
would preserve all that - but I hope that v10's changes will make magically
safe corpses less of a problem anyway)

Having a free, easy route around the house to a window that looks in on the
family (so they can start running and be way ahead of the robber before the
robber reaches them) is a viable plan, I think.

Kind of. This would be much easier if the way scrolling worked were tweaked
slightly, so you can predict for sure from what positions the family will be
visible. Currently it's too easy for the robber to be able to break any
windows between him and the family before actually getting the family in
sight. It seems only the corners of the map are really safe in this respect.

Regarding encouraging "fun" houses.... well, that's simply a different game,
and this game was always and will always be about designing houses to keep
people out. Of course, it's also a game about vulnerability and violation, so
if you can keep people out permanently, the game is broken.

Agreed. The builder shouldn't be trying to please robbers, he should be scared
of them.

It's true that death-traps are more interesting than thick walls, though, so
perhaps it's worth considering promoting them without changing the fundamental
theme of the game.

Currently there are a few reasons for wanting to robbers to die in your house
rather than just leave:

(i) Assuming your house is only vulnerable to the rich, a good way to stop
them cracking in is to kill them on their scouting trips.
(ii) Having a high death rate might put the rich off risking your house.
(iii) You just have a (probably hypocritical) murderous hatred for robbers.

These aren't all that strong, though.

In v9, we lost
(iv) Having the robber die was the only way to get their tools.

Meanwhile there's actually a very good reason to *avoid* killing robbers -
they tend to get annoyed and come back for vengeance in their next lives.
I do often find myself deliberately trying not to kill or piss off my
intruders for that reason (as long as they keep away from the family), which
probably isn't how the game is intended to be played.

I think the change I'd like to see (not an original suggestion) is to make it
that you can't rob a house you've died in. That would give death-traps a real
motivation, deal with vengeful reincarnations, and make permadeath more
important.

largestherb · 2013-06-19 16:01:28

zed wrote:

How about making it that a sleeping dog wakes up if the robber walks next to
it, and it immediately gets a move? That would nerf drugged meat even further,
which I think might be a good thing, and would make more sense.

nine squares being blocked off unless i have a gun is kind of terrifying. i'd like to see that

jasonrohrer · 2013-06-19 17:39:36

Hmm... not getting too close to sleeping dogs is interesting, though it's messy to pull off in the engine as I have it working right now, so I'll think on it for a while.

You can't rob a house you've ever died in is REALLY interesting. But, is that... ever ever? Or until the owner changes it?

I also worry that it will be too hard on new players. I mean, first of all, hard to explain... just that one house disappears? But also hard, because as you're figuring out how to play the game, you die a lot. If you stumble into a top house and die, and can never try that house again later after you figure out how to play...

I've also thought about "planes of existence", where every house visible to you is from someone who has died as many times as you. So, in this life, you see a bunch of houses, but if you ever die, that's it, you never see those again, and wake up in a new world with different houses. Of course, that would fragment the player population too much at this point.

zed · 2013-06-19 18:00:10

jasonrohrer wrote:

Hmm... not getting too close to sleeping dogs is interesting, though it's messy to pull off in the engine as I have it working right now, so I'll think on it for a while.

Hmm, triggering the transition would be tricky you mean? I guess you could
make it that they only wake up if they can move directly on to the player -
then you just need a player-triggered transition from sleeping to eating.

You can't rob a house you've ever died in is REALLY interesting. But, is that... ever ever? Or until the owner changes it?
I also worry that it will be too hard on new players. I mean, first of all, hard to explain... just that one house disappears? But also hard, because as you're figuring out how to play the game, you die a lot. If you stumble into a top house and die, and can never try that house again later after you figure out how to play...

Well... if you make it just for the current version of the house then as long
as there's enough churn (which there seems to be at the moment), it shouldn't
be much of a problem and doesn't even need explaining. i.e. yes, it just
disappears from the list.

But if you wanted to make it an explicit mechanic, you could just have a
rejection message if you try to rob the house - "Something about that house
gives you the chills... you can't bring yourself to go there" or something,
and the player can hit the 'ignore' button.

Bonus I forgot to mention: this would foil death-dumping nicely.

jasonrohrer · 2013-06-20 09:57:54

zed wrote:

[mm, triggering the transition would be tricky you mean?

If you look at the way the engine works now, it's all VERY generalized, and it slurps the transition rules in from a text file with a simple syntax at startup time.

Essentially, all transitions work like: if this object lands on that object (potentially limited by the state of the target object), it causes that object to switch into this state.

All transitions are based on the objects being together on the same tile. Tool-triggered transitions are defined in the same file, but the engine handles them a bit differently (tools have reach, and the player gets to pick the target object for the tool).

So, the player's presence waking up a dog currently depends on the player object stepping on the dog. I'm REALLY trying to avoid special cases.... so far, the game doesn't have any (unless you count current flow).

zed wrote:

But if you wanted to make it an explicit mechanic, you could just have a
rejection message if you try to rob the house - "Something about that house
gives you the chills... you can't bring yourself to go there" or something,
and the player can hit the 'ignore' button.

Whoa! I'm really liking the sound of that.... it's like you're being haunted by your own ghost! It also reminds me of Spelunky, in the moments before the ghost comes out to get you.... hmmm.... imagine if you could still go into the house, but there was an indestructable ghost standing where you died last time who would hunt you down and insta-kill you! Each death adds a new ghost to grapple with... oh man, I'm going way out in the weeds here, better stop.

But anyway, this does sound rather sensible, and you're right that there is quite a bit of churn these days. The server could still list the house to you and send back a simple failure message if you picked it, and the client could display a simple "Chills" type message. I think players would figure out what caused that message (and I like letting them figure it out). Then you could still watch the house rise in the list, etc, and be kicking yourself even more for dying (because now it's a top house).

The one confusing part would be the trigger for the house being clear for you again. Yeah, you could ignore it, and it would pop up later automatically after something changed (just like it does now). But if you don't ignore it, it silently becomes available to you. Almost seems like it should be a different color in the list (like, purple, or some scary color), and you could still pick it and get the message, and then it would change color back later when it was available to you again.

Probably best to keep the trigger the same as for ignored houses (as soon as ANYTHING changes in the house, through robber or owner, the "chill" wears off.

So, this just prevents you from death-grinding or death-dumping in the house in its current state, giving robbers slightly more to lose.

zed · 2013-06-20 10:51:34

jasonrohrer wrote:

zed wrote:
[mm, triggering the transition would be tricky you mean?
If you look at the way the engine works now, it's all VERY generalized, and it slurps the transition rules in from a text file with a simple syntax at startup time.
So, the player's presence waking up a dog currently depends on the player object stepping on the dog. I'm REALLY trying to avoid special cases.... so far, the game doesn't have any (unless you count current flow).

Right, that's why I was suggesting having the sleeping dog "wake up" only if
it can move directly on to the player. So the only change would be in the AI
code, making sleeping dogs move iff they can move onto the player. Then the
(already existing) dog transition would be triggered by the dog being on the
same square as the player, transitioning from the sleeping state directly to
the jugular-munching state.

Odd consequence: you could walk next to a drugged pitbull without waking it up
- but only if you approach it from the south or east and have a chihuahua at
your heels.

But would it really be so bad to add a new transition trigger, like 'power'
and 'powerNorth', for 'playerAdjacent'? I know it's a special case, but it
seems a fairly natural one...

jasonrohrer wrote:

zed wrote:
"Something about that house gives you the chills... you can't bring yourself to go there"
Whoa! I'm really liking the sound of that.... it's like you're being haunted
by your own ghost! It also reminds me of Spelunky, in the moments before the
ghost comes out to get you.... hmmm.... imagine if you could still go into the
house, but there was an indestructable ghost standing where you died last time
who would hunt you down and insta-kill you! Each death adds a new ghost to
grapple with... oh man, I'm going way out in the weeds here, better stop.

Ha, nice idea! More like nethack's ghosts than spelunky's, actually. But yes,
probably no need to complicate the design that way, in reality.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Almost seems like it should be a different color in the list (like, purple, or some scary color), and you could still pick it and get the message, and then it would change color back later when it was available to you again.
Probably best to keep the trigger the same as for ignored houses (as soon as ANYTHING changes in the house, through robber or owner, the "chill" wears off.
So, this just prevents you from death-grinding or death-dumping in the house in its current state, giving robbers slightly more to lose.

Yep, all sounds good!

It does mean you're slightly penalised for making even the smallest changes to
your house... but probably that's better than locking people out of the house
forever. Probably.

ukuko · 2013-06-20 11:11:00

Am I right in thinking that should you die any houses you had died in previously would become available to you again?

bey bey · 2013-06-20 11:51:26

jasonrohrer wrote:
zed wrote:
"Something about that house gives you the chills... you can't bring yourself to go there"
Whoa! I'm really liking the sound of that.... it's like you're being haunted
by your own ghost! It also reminds me of Spelunky, in the moments before the
ghost comes out to get you.... hmmm.... imagine if you could still go into the
house, but there was an indestructable ghost standing where you died last time
who would hunt you down and insta-kill you! Each death adds a new ghost to
grapple with... oh man, I'm going way out in the weeds here, better stop.
Ha, nice idea! More like nethack's ghosts than spelunky's, actually. But yes,
probably no need to complicate the design that way, in reality.

How about if your ghost comes into view (might just be a slight hue), a message appears ("a chill passes over you") and you lose one or two turns (as in dogs move etc., but you don't). Might be done with a fade-out fade-in for 5 seconds or so. I don't know if it's an ultimately great idea, but the notion somehow intrigues me... And it would at least make death-dumping a LOT more annoying (deal with 30 times that...).

The problem might be that this would be breaking a fourth wall we pretend is there.

colorfusion · 2013-06-20 12:09:20

bey bey wrote:

How about if your ghost comes into view (might just be a slight hue), a message appears ("a chill passes over you") and you lose one or two turns (as in dogs move etc., but you don't). Might be done with a fade-out fade-in for 5 seconds or so. I don't know if it's an ultimately great idea, but the notion somehow intrigues me... And it would at least make death-dumping a LOT more annoying (deal with 30 times that...).
The problem might be that this would be breaking a fourth wall we pretend is there.

Seems a bit unnecessary to me, and people are probably going to find some way to put turn skipping to their advantage. Up to Jason but I think actual ghosts haunting and almost attacking you differs quite a lot from the theme of the game. I think just the original idea of a message to stop you would be better.

Last edited by colorfusion (2013-06-20 12:10:11)

bey bey · 2013-06-20 13:58:23

Well, randomise the skip (say 1-5) and it's unusable tactically.

I'd also say it isn't going to happen, I'm just thinking about how this "stacking up a house to 40000k" can be impaired without draining almost all the cash out of the game that is needed with so few players. Probably also just because it made me think of those charmingly old-school Blackwell games.

One might say that a dire scarcity of money would benefit the game, but I fear that will only enable tricksters who'll find a way...

ukuko · 2013-06-20 16:39:02

ukuko wrote:

Am I right in thinking that should you die any houses you had died in previously would become available to you again?

Well that made no sense at all.

I think I meant: If someone whose house you have died in dies, would their new house be accessible to you?

jasonrohrer · 2013-06-20 22:47:36

Yeah, the idea is that as soon as the owner changes the house, it would come back to being available to you. And yeah, if the owner died and started a new life, their new house would be available to you, too (different character name and all).

Still.... there's something that bugs me about this idea, and zed kinda points it out here:

zed wrote:

It does mean you're slightly penalised for making even the smallest changes to your house...

Even worse, if there aren't that many players, there's the potential for one player to become invulnerable (after EVERYONE who is active in the game has died in their house). And, of course, a player who is invulnerable will not want to change their house one bit, because it's currently giving everyone the chills.

This especially spoils the "it should still be interesting with two active players" goal that I have.

I don't think it will affect the money shortage that much, because people who DON'T die in your house can go home, commit suicide (the best place to do that, right?) and then get a new life/budget to try again.

And tool dumping works now even when you don't die in a house, so that won't be totally eliminated (step in door, dump tools, go home and kill yourself, repeat).

What will change is the general feeling of dread when you're actually trying to explore/rob a house, even if you "have nothing to lose". That part feels right (because you have so much more to lose when self-testing your own house, for example---this makes it more balanced).

However, I'm still concerned about invulnerability of the owner, general decay of a player's experience who has died a bunch, and decay of the experience for a small population of players.

Maybe a house should give you the chills for a few hours instead of forever-until-changed? And a few hours regardless of whether it is changed (unless the owner dies and starts a new character)? Maybe just one hour, to keep it simple and easy to remember/understand?

ukuko · 2013-06-21 00:57:40

I think a predefined timeout would be more flexible. An hour sounds good.

bey bey · 2013-06-21 02:35:18

Temporary timeout sounds like a good solution.

It might be good, however, to include some kind of hint for new players what this is about.

"...chill... . Something dreadful must have happened to you here in a previous life."

Something like that.

bey bey · 2013-06-21 03:18:50

By the way, looks like somebody took down all houses in a stack-and-rob effort. At least did he drop about 15k worth of guns in my house before robbing it with tools (fair and square). The paintings are back in auction, so that was just a "world reset" basically, targeting house after house without contributing content...

And as Jason said, if you don't kill yourself in the houses but in your own home, this wouldn't be hindered by the timeout on entering houses. Maybe, some more direct limit on this starting-cash-exploit is the solution after all, since this kind of one-man-rampage just takes away from the game in the end. And after all, it's a way of ignoring the permadeath idea, so enforcing that more strongly might make sense. Maybe a radical solution would work there.

If you die, you have to wait one hour for reincarnation. That would strengthen the permadeath theme.

Last edited by bey bey (2013-06-21 03:31:56)

dalleck · 2013-06-21 03:31:28

bey bey wrote:

By the way, looks like somebody took down all houses in a stack-and-rob effort. At least did he drop about 15k worth of guns in my house before robbing it with tools (fair and square). The paintings are back in auction, so that was just a "world reset" basically, targeting house after house without contributing content...

Here's what happened:

I found a massive cache of tools. Massive. I can't even remember the player but the house just popped up briefly in the list.

With my huge cache of tools I went on a spree, robbing this, that and the other. Bey Bey, your house was first in line...

Then while I was robbing another house I was being robbed by a player armed with over $20,000 in tools, who made his way into my safe, taking Bey Beys paintings in the process.....

/ / %)

edit: and I didn't drop any guns... I don't even carry guns

Last edited by dalleck (2013-06-21 03:33:31)

bey bey · 2013-06-21 03:36:05

Brilliant! My money was on you Dalleck but your house was destroyed as well, so that was why I wondered.

Funny how somebody stacked up my house before you even made it there. You must have gotten about 15 guns in the process.

Luckily, my backpack full of ladders and explosives hardly took a dent from the repairs.

edit: I have only seen guns used to stack buildings in v9, carrying them for use is just not practical. Might change with v10 dog behaviour. I would have brought over a little something to contribute to your repairs Mr Layman, but it doesn't feel the right time to leave the bulk of my stash in the safe.

Last edited by bey bey (2013-06-21 03:42:03)

dalleck · 2013-06-21 03:50:49

bey bey wrote:

Brilliant! My money was on you Dalleck but your house was destroyed as well, so that was why I wondered.
Funny how somebody stacked up my house before you even made it there. You must have gotten about 15 guns in the process.
Luckily, my backpack full of ladders and explosives hardly took a dent from the repairs.
edit: I have only seen guns used to stack buildings in v9, carrying them for use is just not practical. Might change with v10 dog behaviour. I would have brought over a little something to contribute to your repairs Mr Layman, but it doesn't feel the right time to leave the bulk of my stash in the safe.

Ahem.. it appears accurate 'wealth' doesn't always appear in the rob list, eh bey bey I suppose a quirk of the 'limitless backpack'...

...but is interesting how you have to 'put your wealth on the line' if you want to go out robbing...

Last edited by dalleck (2013-06-21 03:52:55)

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