Suggestions Page

Sconna · 2014-01-29 17:00:22

In this thread are suggestions gathered by people from around the web.

Well thought suggestions
-

Suggestions
- Improved search filter (link)
- Leaderboards(link)
- Save house mid-Edit(link)
- Life Stats(link)
- Scrolling(link)
- Inventory confirm box(link)
- In game settings(link)
- Memo function(link)
- Practice room(link)
- Invisible Wired Walls(link)
- Cooldown on being robbed(link)
- Painting searcher(link)

Not going to happen
- Alternate genders
- 2k Templates

Last edited by Sconna (2014-01-31 21:39:33)

largestherb · 2014-01-30 02:05:00

we're lazy like that!

i was thinking about maybe being able to enter a number into the house filter to act as a kind of 'find houses worth $x or less,' or at least some change to scrolling through the neighbourhood list.

clicking that arrow fifty times to get down to the $100 houses is tiring!

iceman · 2014-01-30 09:35:40

Definitely a way to search for a range of value for houses!

As for ones I've seen around the forums-
Leaderboards - Who's done the biggest robbery, most expensive house, etc. in a month
Life Stats - Similar to leaderboards, but just for your player - both overall and per-life would be pretty nice to have
Alternate Genders - Although Jason has said he's not going to do it, it would be good to have it in a "Not going to happen" section, along with a "Here's why" link to an explanation (and maybe a link to the mod?)
Save House Mid-Edit - This would let you save a house in the middle of an edit, so that you could edit a house during a 5 minute break, leave, and come back later to finish (Please, Jason, make it happen! =P)
2k Templates - This would let you build a starting house at the click of a button. Again, Jason's said it's not going to happen, but it would be nice for people who think of it to see it here and be able to ready why Jason doesn't like it.

iceman · 2014-01-30 16:48:03

Here's the sources for the "Not going to happen" section (is there a better way to word that? hmmm)

Gender: http://thecastledoctrine.net/forums/vie … php?id=402
Mod: http://thecastledoctrine.net/forums/vie … php?id=687

Saving House: (quote from steam)
http://steamcommunity.com/app/249570/di … 566785958/

So, this is a really important (and eternally unpopular for new players) part of the game. You are working with dangerous stuff that can potentially permadeath someone else. It can do the same to you.
Okay, so that's for your own house, but why does death have such a high cost in this game?
When you die in this game, or are about to die and are trapped, the feeling of dread is incomparable. You start mentally scrambling like a trapped animal, looking for any possible way out, any way to escape the inevitable demise that you have brought upon yourself.
Because, that's right, isn't it? No one can kill you in this game except for you. This isn't like DayZ where another player can shoot you in the back of the head. The front door is there. You can always run out! If you push ahead, well... you do so at your own risk.

We've been trained by years of game playing that "nothing you do really matters" and "you can always just reload" if you make a mistake, so we're not used to having to think about what we do in games so carefully. We're used to charging ahead and not really caring, trying this or that on a whim.
BUT, that kind of playstyle is antithetical to how someone would really behave in such a situation. If you're robbing a house in real life and the owner comes out with a shotgun, you are going to run for the door. You're not going to charge ahead just to "see what happens this time".

On the other hand, I promise that you will become acclimated to it over time. It does take time, but you will learn to play more carefully, and you will generally stop dying in the game. Remember, nothing is random, and you can always walk back out the front door. If something doesn't look right to you, get out of there (even when testing your own house). When in doubt, bug out!
FINALLY, in terms of testing your own house safely, indicator lights are your friend. Also, realize that you can change your house over and over, without cost, up until when you finally reach your own vault on the proving screen. If you back out the front door from proving, you can go back to editing and change things to your heart's content.
This is a new play pattern too: edit, test, back-out, edit, test, edit, test. Then finally, one last test run in the final house to reach the vault. You can remove the indicator lights and replace them with deadly stuff for that final test.
It is possible to design a VERY complicated house this way, totally safely. Don't put anything deadly in your house until you're sure that you've got it all working.

And all of these "ways of playing" are cool and interesting and very different than how you play other games.
And they all stem out of the fact that you cannot save your house maps.
If you could just hit "reload" whenever you died, you wouldn't need to be careful at all! You'd just save your map before testing it, die, then reload it, and repeat. It wouldn't feel right. Or at least, it would feel extremely different from the way that it feels now.
(And by "the way it feels now," I don't mean "frustrating." I mean the way it feels for players who have acclimated to it---it "feels like being very careful").
I spend a ton of time thinking about how my games feel. I want this game to make you be careful!

SomeGuyNamedDavid · 2014-01-30 19:43:38

To expand on changing the scrolling: buttons for scrolling more than one house page at a time. Since yeah, getting out of the rich range every time you clear a filter takes a while now that there's so many houses. Possibly also page numbers plus a box that lets you enter a page number.

A confirmation box for exiting the backpack after things have been either bought or sold, so it's not quite so easy to accidentally hit done instead of undo when checking your true house value and lose all your tools forever.

A setting to make enter-confirm default to on, for those people who want that extra careful. Also, a setting that will only accept one key press per second, or some other unit of time, to prevent accidental double-taps.

Just in-game settings in general, since manual setting files are even more awkward to use now that they're inside the Steam folder system.

A way to reset attempts/deaths without redoing the self-test, since as of now all you have to do is pick up the vault and put it back down (and redo self-test)?

Options for moving every piece in the house one space in the same direction, for when your plans are slightly wrong and you just need that one more row.

iceman · 2014-01-30 21:40:40

SomeGuyNamedDavid wrote:

Options for moving every piece in the house one space in the same direction, for when your plans are slightly wrong and you just need that one more row.

Oh, so many yes's for this one....

An idea for scrolling around the house list - what if it starts out at the value of your house (or at least gives you a button to go to that page)? It would be a lot faster to get to the houses that are profitable for you to rob, and it might also help with all the players saying houses are impossible because they try the top ones first.

Cool_Roxas · 2014-01-31 00:41:21

I would love to see a memo function added to the game, where we can leave a note inside a house we rob that can be read later by the house owner during tape playback. It will be some sort of stress venting for the burglar before his final moment and for the house owner it will be extremely hilarious to read the memo. Also, this way there is more communication in the game (which this game lacks of) other than simply robbing and building defenses.

After a long day at work, I very much anticipated the prospect of watching people's brutal death in my house and the dying messages can only add more to the thrill.

largestherb · 2014-01-31 02:29:28

Cool_Roxas wrote:

I would love to see a memo function added to the game, where we can leave a note inside a house we rob that can be read later by the house owner during tape playback. It will be some sort of stress venting for the burglar before his final moment and for the house owner it will be extremely hilarious to read the memo. Also, this way there is more communication in the game (which this game lacks of) other than simply robbing and building defenses.
After a long day at work, I very much anticipated the prospect of watching people's brutal death in my house and the dying messages can only add more to the thrill.

based on some stuff i have already seen on the steam forums.. i think too many of these memos would just be swearing.

unless it follows the dark souls soapstone example (i haven't seen this anywhere else so slap me if this originated elsewhere) where you can choose from a list of phrases.

jasonrohrer · 2014-01-31 11:06:38

iceman wrote:

An idea for scrolling around the house list - what if it starts out at the value of your house (or at least gives you a button to go to that page)? It would be a lot faster to get to the houses that are profitable for you to rob, and it might also help with all the players saying houses are impossible because they try the top ones first.

HOLY CRAP! That is an amazingly elegant way to handle it. Jeez... why didn't I think of that?

So, it shows you your neighborhood by default, and you can scroll up and down from there.

I was thinking about stuff for paging in steps of 10 pages (extra, ugly buttons), or searching by numeric value (pain to explain to people that the Name Search field has more than one purpose).

But this is it. I wonder if I can make it work server-side without changing the client...

jasonrohrer · 2014-01-31 11:20:53

Actually, this is harder to make work correctly in all cases than it seems.... once the page position is set by the user, you want to leave it set (you don't want to scroll it for them if they positioned it on purpose) BUT, if their house value changes, you'd want to automatically change what default page they see.... but how do you know that it's okay with the user for you to do that for them?

So, it seems like this change would only be able to affect the first house page that is shown when a new game is launched (that currently defaults to the top page). After that, the position would have to stick to where the user left it last (even if their house value changed).

colorfusion · 2014-01-31 11:22:27

The filter button also resets to default page, which it seems people do quite a lot to get back once they've seen the top/bottom houses or something.

Last edited by colorfusion (2014-01-31 11:23:02)

jere · 2014-01-31 11:22:48

You can't do it when they hit "filter" on empty string also? That always defaults me to the top and I imagine that's quite annoying for new players.

Fatalis · 2014-01-31 11:53:01

What do you guys think of something like a practice room?

There are a lot of thing I want to try creating, but I obviously don't have the money/knowledge to actually do it.

I think having a room where you can practice wiring, and mess with how traps work could be beneficial.

It obviously wouldn't carryover to your real room, but I think it would be nice to practice.

colorfusion · 2014-01-31 11:57:15

Fatalis wrote:

What do you guys think of something like a practice room?
There are a lot of thing I want to try creating, but I obviously don't have the money/knowledge to actually do it.
I think having a room where you can practice wiring, and mess with how traps work could be beneficial.
It obviously wouldn't carryover to your real room, but I think it would be nice to practice.

I like this idea, I suggested a similar sandbox a long time ago. Jason said he wants to keep everything in the game feeling real, I personally think that it would be a great opportunity to reuse the blueprint graphics. Might be easier having somebody set up a custom server with everything costing $0 though.

Last edited by colorfusion (2014-01-31 12:00:17)

cbenny · 2014-01-31 12:11:52

Would it be possible to have the graphic for "Wired Wooden Wall" be the same as "Wooden Wall" when robbing? I found a house recently that had an amazingly complicated locking mechanism, but I was able to get through it simply by looking at the wiring inside the walls near to me.

This would also help give some credibility to several "Electric Floor"s I've found in wooden hallways which are obviously not hooked up to anything.

I think it would make sense for robber not to be able to see into walls.

lyrikles · 2014-01-31 14:45:29

cbenny wrote:

Would it be possible to have the graphic for "Wired Wooden Wall" be the same as "Wooden Wall" when robbing? I found a house recently that had an amazingly complicated locking mechanism, but I was able to get through it simply by looking at the wiring inside the walls near to me.
This would also help give some credibility to several "Electric Floor"s I've found in wooden hallways which are obviously not hooked up to anything.
I think it would make sense for robber not to be able to see into walls.

Or perhaps it could be a two step process. Every wooden wall would appear the same to a robber, until destroyed. If the wall is in fact a wired wooden wall, a wire would be revealed, which could then be destroyed.

arieltonglet · 2014-01-31 19:12:54

lyrikles wrote:

cbenny wrote:
Would it be possible to have the graphic for "Wired Wooden Wall" be the same as "Wooden Wall" when robbing? I found a house recently that had an amazingly complicated locking mechanism, but I was able to get through it simply by looking at the wiring inside the walls near to me.
This would also help give some credibility to several "Electric Floor"s I've found in wooden hallways which are obviously not hooked up to anything.
I think it would make sense for robber not to be able to see into walls.
Or perhaps it could be a two step process. Every wooden wall would appear the same to a robber, until destroyed. If the wall is in fact a wired wooden wall, a wire would be revealed, which could then be destroyed.

Today I was thinking that a more "realistic" scenario would be if you could see the green outlets on the wall, but not the wires inside [which is a kind of x-ray vision]
That way you know that that is a wired wall, but you don't know exactly where the wires are going

arieltonglet · 2014-01-31 19:16:52

Sconna, maybe a better way to relate the suggestions at your first post is to link to the reply, instead of the "description below", like this
As the thread grows it will be difficult to find the exact reply

cbenny · 2014-01-31 20:23:58

Maybe add the option to delete some of your old security camera footage? There's a few good ones I might want to keep, but my list always gets filled with people who take less than 10 steps before leaving.

jasonrohrer · 2014-01-31 20:32:40

So... regarding wires inside walls... there are certain wall orientations where seeing the green "plug" part of the wall is impossible, especially if other walls are around. So, obviously, the robber would be able to see if a given wall had wires coming OUT of it, but you're not seeing things from down there where the robber is... you have a god's eye view, and the best way to represent the robber's knowledge is to draw the wires in the walls like that.

Jere: Great idea about the empty "filter" button returning you to your neighborhood. I'll do that. I'm also thinking it should do that after you die (put you back on the $2000 block again).

jere · 2014-01-31 20:40:20

Thanks! Credit to colorfusion too. We were posting the same thing simultaneously.

arieltonglet · 2014-01-31 21:20:09

jasonrohrer wrote:

there are certain wall orientations where seeing the green "plug" part of the wall is impossible, especially if other walls are around

That's right, I had not thought of that.. thanks!

nathan · 2014-02-01 07:22:44

I'd like to see a way to filter by wealth, not by name. Maybe this could be done with minimal effort on Jason's part by having the user type the range, for example "$2000-$500" into the Filter box.

Someguy · 2014-02-01 07:45:20

I would like to see the total build value of a house and ideally filter for that value in the house list.
Globally I would like to see a bit more detailled info on the houses. The wealth is not enough...

Also, I think there is too much hidden information and robbing for poor players is too much based on lucked, ie. too hard.
Big part of this is the screen "scrolling" exploitation with electric grids f.ex. that is very cheap and getting out of hand.

On the other side for rich player it is way too easy. I am not sure how to balance this though.

Last edited by Someguy (2014-02-01 07:45:47)

heihojin · 2014-02-01 13:23:26

Hello, all!

I just started playing The Castle Doctrine a few days ago, and I am absolutely hooked. I love this game, and I think it has fabulous potential to grow. Thank you, Jason!

Here are my suggestions for improving the game:

1. Make robbery riskier.

My impression is that the majority of players who rob do so with reckless abandon, likely making only token efforts (if any) to build their own houses before setting out to destroy the work of others. Dying means nothing to these players, as they have invested nothing in their character - they'll happily start over with a fresh $2k in order to "get back" at the last person whose home did them in. From what I've been able to determine, the vast majority of the robberies successfully committed against me to date have been "revenge robberies" by someone who fell prey to my design. But aside from the entertainment provided by the security tapes, my only other reward is to have their reincarnated avatar kill my family and destroy my work.

Robbery could be made riskier in a number of ways, but I think the best solution would be to impose a 12-hour cooldown on being able to rob the same house twice with the same account. Hence if the robber fails in his first attempt, neither the robber nor any of his subsequent incarnations can invade the same home again within the cooldown period. If you wanted to allow "casing" a house, simply limit the number of invasions to two in a 12-hour period. But the revenge robberies are problematic because they entail no cost to the robber and they punish the home's designer for succeeding.

2. Disincentivize killing the family.

The family is incredibly difficult to protect on a $2k budget. They are prime targets in revenge robberies. And not only does the wife carry half the money, but killing any family member makes all damage done permanent - making subsequent robbery attempts all the easier. For a new player, even just losing the wife generally entails committing suicide and starting afresh.

The disincentivization could be implemented in a number of ways, individually or concurrently. You could set a lower cap on the amount of money carried by the wife. You could simply award the robber with a bounty for killing the wife instead of taking it out of the owner's pocket. You could allow purchase of replacement family members at a cost that scales in accordance with the owner's remaining assets. You could make the house unavailable to rob after a family member is killed until the homeowner can return and make it available again.

Alternatively, you could make the family easier to protect by allowing them to traverse household objects - but I understand that there may be technical limitations to this.

All my current concerns with the game can be traced to those two issues. I think the game has incredible potential, and I want to see it grow and flourish. I love this game. Thanks for reading!

Last edited by heihojin (2014-02-01 13:28:01)

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