"This game will never go on sale."

But, hey look, this game is on sale.

Is nothing sacred?

I've lost my moral compass. I've been besmirched. I've changed. I'm not the game developer that I used to be. I'm not the man you married. I'm not the son you fathered. I'm not the baby that you once suckled to your dewy bosom.

And if that last paragraph wasn't clear enough: I've lost my marbles. I'm off my rocker. I'm not playing with a full deck. The lights are on, but nobody's home. I've flown the coop. I've tweaked the weasel. Yes, you read that correctly:

THESE PRICES ARE INSANE!

Somebody stop me before I change my mind!

But why, Jason, after all these years?

The Castle Doctrine is one of my best games, and it stands the test of time. However, it has become price-prohibitive for anyone to play in recent years.

In my early forays into online multiplayer games, I made a big mistake: I designed games that depended on a critical mass of other people to play. This is borderline suicide for an indie game with a small and sporadic audience. (I rolled that lesson into One Hour One Life, which is perfectly playable even if you're the only person playing.)

The Castle Doctrine isn't actually the worst offender in this department, because interaction with other players is asynchronous. You can design a house, and then come back in a few hours to see what other players have been up to. You can rob other players when they're not home, and the content created by whoever has been playing over the past few days is available to you now, even if they're not actually online right now.

The Castle Doctrine doesn't require a huge critical mass of players to work, but it does require a steady trickle of fresh blood. This new, more-appropriate price will make that possible going forward.

And of course, we all remember the glory days when there were 800 active houses online. How can these slim pickings ever live up to that experience?

The game has actually been improved a bit recently to be more low-player-count-friendly, with "state owned" houses fleshing out the list when things get too sparse. There's always something to do, and you can never run out of houses to explore and rob.

But last I checked, a few living players were still hoarding all the paintings. So someone is still playing, and they're in for a big surprise this week, as the teeming masses come beat down their doors.

This is The Castle Doctrine revival.

See you on my security tapes.

Jason Rohrer
March 2020
Davis, California


PS: the Discord server for the game is here: https://discord.gg/HupVMC9

Since the recent update to the house list, there has been the biggest boom in the player population in almost two years, with 50+ unique players per day for the past few days.

The irony is that we now have so many houses online that the original fix, to pad out the house list, isn't currently needed.

However, its important to understand that without such a backup system to provide content in low population situations, a vicious cycle results that shrinks the population over time. By fixing this problem, a virtuous cycle is created instead. Players that try the game again these days tend to stick around for a while, making the game still even better and more interesting for additional new players that show up later.

A Discord channel has sprung up as well, which you can join through this invite link:

https://discord.gg/HupVMC9

In low population situations, the available content of the game dwindles. Remaining players are left with very little to do, especially if the available houses are beyond their reach in terms of tool budget. For example, the top house currently contains $400,000 in value, but it's been robbed unsuccessfully 987 times, killing 594 robbers in the process. The existing player base simple cannot afford to rob it successfully. Other houses may have so little value that they're not worth the tool cost of robbing. When the population is low, there often is no middle ground in the content pool, and a kind of stalemate results.

In the old days of high population, the aspiring player could find middle-tier houses to tackle, and potentially climb the ladder toward being able to take down one of the top houses. There was no stalemate, and more importantly, there was never any shortage of things to do.

But how can I add more content to the game while still keeping everything real? The "realness" was a core design principle from the very beginning. Your success must always come through directly hurting another player in the game. A real person must be impacted by what you did to get ahead. So, no NPC houses, because they aren't real.

It turns out that there's a large pool of abandoned houses in the database. Houses that have been robbed down to zero, but houses that still have living owners who simply haven't returned in a long time. The owners could still return, so they are real.

I'm now seeding some of these houses with a bit of loot from squatters, padding out the house list to a respectable size. The abandoned houses function just like ordinary houses---they still have an owner, still log security tapes, still gather bounties by killing robbers. Many of them are still dangerous, and some of them still have significant puzzles in tact. Furthermore, and owner can return at any time and claim the squatter loot for themselves, so you are still stealing from someone, and further wrecking someone's house. There are lots of interesting philosophical questions about the status of abandoned property, of course.

But the neighborhood is now a bit like Las Vegas, post-housing-crash.

Full details are here:

http://thecastledoctrine.net/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3169


Enjoy!

Jason

As you may have noticed, The Castle Doctrine's player population has dwindled since it's peak of 3600 active players back in January of 2014. Over the past week, for example, there have been an average of 10 players per day, with a min of 6 and max of 14. Not bad for a game that is almost four years old, but not exactly thriving, either.

Fortunately, the game is still playable at these low population densities because of its asynchronous nature. The game simply slows down somewhat. You can design a house and come back in a few hours to see if anyone tried to rob it, whereas back in the day, you'd have had dozens of robbers beating down your door in as little as a few minutes. Still, some aspects of the game were implemented back in the days of larger player populations, and those implementations don't necessarily make sense for today's small, asynchronous player pools.

With all that in mind, I just revamped the way chill timers work, reducing the possibility of you finding that all houses on the list are blocked due to chills. (Chills are placed on houses that you die while robbing, making you wait a while before robbing them in the next life). The summary is that the timeout duration now accounts for the number of available houses, getting shorter as the house list gets shorter. Full details have been posted here:

http://thecastledoctrine.net/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3168

This change should make the game much more interesting for sparsely-distributed player populations.

Enjoy!

Jason