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Castle Doctrine - Protect what's yours
Mighty
Omeganaut '15 '16 '17NebraskaRegistered User regular
Omeganaut '15 '16 '17NebraskaRegistered User regular
When you start this game, you are given no introduction, no instructions. It places you in a stark grey room with your family and your vault.
You know that there will be intruders attempting to get at what you own. You must plan to keep your family secure, and defend your home from those who would desecrate it.
But be careful, these traps are not deadly to just the trespassers, if you should fall awry of your own schemes, everything you have worked for will be gone.
Building these defenses costs money... and you only have so much. You begin to wonder where everyone else is getting all the income to construct such elaborate setups.
So you venture out, into the night... and knock on a nearby houses front door. It slowly swings open on the first rap... unlocked..
This is "Castle Doctrine!"
The base premise of the game is that you are given a home and a family to defend. There are tools such as pits, electric floors, and pit-bulls to do it for you.
Once you are satisfied with your house, YOU must test it. I found the best thing to do is replace all pit-bulls with chihuahuas so that you wont kill yourself if mistakes were made.
It is a massively single player game. There are a few hundred houses out there now, all built by someone else in the world. The same people are queuing up to enter your home to make off with your goods.
Currently the game is in alpha, so the developer is passing out the full game for 8$
This gentleman by the name of Aavak has some pretty good videos about it, his first one shows how all the different tiles interact. His second shows his impressive, maze like layout.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgQPztel0u8Protect what's yours!
Twitch: twitch.tv\dreadmighty
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What an intriguing concept.
Reminds me of DRoD, a bit.
What's DRoD?
Anyone interested in the game should check out RPS' impressions: part one | part two
Anyone interested in the developer of this game should check out the interview he did with RPS: part one | part two
He sounds like... well, a lot of nerds I've met, basically.
Using mainly chihuahua's I have set up a running path, that if you do ANYTHING but run for my safe, you will be terminated.
Break the walls? Pitbull.
Short circuit the electricity? Pitbull
Muck about to kill my family? Pitbull\electrified
Its not perfect mind you, however, i was able to set up 90% of it with the initial 2000$
I would probably just see if I could make a tower of hanoi puzzle, and then everyone would just leave instead of going through the boring tedious motions of solving it.
Getting them to leave because of boredom would count as winning I would figure.
there's a 50/50 chance that instead of getting bored, they will return with tools to break in and destroy walls and crap.
*my house update*
after 2 people tried to get in, and got mauled, someone jumped into my house, and clubbed my wife and drilled into a few walls.
I'd be okay with this, BUT i cant rest my house now because there's a chihuahua on the entrance mat.
This is preventing me from replacing the chihuahua, and from resetting my house.
Kind of annoyed with that.
In one of the interviews, Rohrer said it's possible to make a map that can only be beaten once or something, so that might be what you're seeing.
I'll be keeping an eye on this.
You don't understand what I'm saying. The position of the pit bulls is not supposed to change after a robbery attempt. There are houses with pit bulls literally right next to the entrance.
The state of the map is saved after a thief exits if they successfully stole from you (including killing your wife). If those players with dogs at the door re-enter their house for any reason (including successfully stealing from another player), they must rebuild it and make it possible again. While they may accrue some tiny moneys, it's not really worth the effort to deliberately set up that sort of thing.
Steam
So, this game is super addictive and frustrating and difficult.
I usually spend my whole $2000 getting something set up, then I venture out to get some more money so people actually try to break into my house, allowing me to test my layout.....but I always die before I can get anything. And on the off chance that I don't and someone breaks in....none of my traps ever work, and nobody ever walks into the pitbull rooms, they just go straight for the vault. HOW DO THEY KNOW? You'd think if there were four identical doors, all of which house pitbulls save for one, the statistically likely thing would happen and somebody would pick the wrong door occasionally . BUT THEY NEVER DO. They walk right past the dangerous rooms and go right for the money. How do they know? I don't understand.
Also, protip: steel walls conduct electricity just like wired wooden walls and they cost the same amount. Had a huge "duh doy" moment when I realized that.
Put a pit trap/grid or some other means of making them commit (or use tools) to each of the path, then have a dogdoor further up or something.
Steam
my house layout looked like this to a thief: a hallway going straight or a path that has a dog in it. if they go gor the dog, they cant get my vault, as the chihuahua timers will set off the electric floor tiles when they step on them.
next, i rigged up voltage switches, so that if someone brought water, and shorted the floor tiles, the door at the end of the hall would remain open, and a pitbull would come out.
to make sure this pitbull caught his prey, there was a cat timer that would only start when you stood at the edge of the pit traps for 3 turns.
it was about this time that my house got broken, and everything i had done got deleted.
or if my current setup isnt working at deterring thief, i want to be able to pick up components that i bought and move them without having to re-buy them.
Also the moment you have any wealth you end up avoiding any risky houses.
So it kind of gets boring fast in terms of "gameplay", although it's still fun to just build amusing houses.
There should somehow be a more gentle curve between being broke-ass and rich, so that there's a direct balance between risk/reward and a constant pressure to keep trying harder and harder houses.
then, once you get robbed by someone, you can filter to their name, and go steal your money back, or mess up their house.
a vicious cycle indeed
Except that doesn't work so long as it's possible to make impenetrable houses.
Here's an example - what the user sees when they enter the house. Everything is more than 9 levels deep making them impossible to tool through.
tinypic.com/r/23hxdoj/6
And here's what's going on behind the walls:
http://tinypic.com/r/xdtlbr/6
tinypic.com/r/2ir3i47/6
In a nutshell, you walk more than 1 square to the right, it becomes unsolvable (but the burglar doesn't know this). Walk even one square up, same thing.
You have to walk a pretty specific pattern (e.g. 9 down, right, let, 2 up, right, left, 2 down, right left, 7 down, 3 up, right left right left) to get the electric field off.
It will forgive the user a bit but almost any deviation from the pattern makes it unsolvable.
And you could make it even more complex/picky, but even this would take, I dunno, probably many many thousands of attempts to crack.
that system is very interesting to see, the problem being that is anyone does express the tenacity to actually crack it, the next robbers will have it solved for them. which i dislike.
it would be much better if when you placed dogs, they came with a food bowl that marked where they came from, and they would return there after robberies. (unless killed)
That's kind of what I meant by "impossible to crack".
It was really easy to set up a scenario where if you didn't know the exact movements to get through a house it was impossible from your first mistake on.
The two connections both run straight to sticky pressure plates, which I assumed do not give power unless first stepped on.
I've tried breaking the wiring path from both the top and bottom input, but either way it remains powered.
edit: Figured it out. Wired walls are 4 way, and not the up/down they appear to be.
edit #2: It seems really weird that when you test your vault run, you don't also have to make it out. Just walked into a guys house where a dog follows you down the corridor and blocks you at the safe. An impossible level without tools.
Looks like you have a bypass on your linkage.