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[Funky Functionality]

Developer: Jason Rohrer (Diamond Trust of London, Passage, among many others)
Release Date: January 29, 2014
Cost: $12 for the week after release, $15 thereafter

Buy It
thecastledoctrine.net (Windows/Mac + source code + Steam key + dev keeps 100% of the profit)
Steam (Windows only for now, Mac/Linux coming at some point)

What is The Castle Doctrine?
A massively multiplayer game about defending your own house and robbing from those of others, based loosely on home security advertisements from the 1990's. Death is frequent, permanent, and punishing.

How it Works
- You start with $2000, a wife, two kids, and a vault.
- You can spend money on home security or burglary tools.

- You can get money by robbing other players' houses or by having another player die in your house.
- The more money you have, the more people will try to rob you.
- When other players try to rob you, you get to watch a replay of their attempt.
- If you die in another player's house or while testing your own house's traps, you lose everything.

- If another player reaches your vault, they take about half of your money.
- If another player kills your wife, they take the other half of your money.
- If either of the above two things happens, any other damage the player did to your house will be persistent, although you can repair it.

- If you somehow manage to get crazy wealthy, you can buy unique paintings at auction to hang in your house.

Trailer



Giant Bomb Quick Look



Reviews

Game Informer - 7.00/10

The Castle Doctrine is a curious MMO with roguelike elements. To some, it may seem brutally unfair and punishing. To others, it may be exactly the kind of competitive experience they have always wanted... it feels like a darker player-vs-player version of 2013’s Monaco while making some grim observations about the nature of society.

Polygon - 5/10

Ultimately The Castle Doctrine is a video game that seems to value its message above your time. Setting aside the moral implications of its message, it requires from those who might play it the will to subject themselves to incessant frustration and failure in order to squeeze whatever satisfaction might come from its fleeting rewards. And all of its rewards come by extension of simulated mayhem, directed expressly at actual, living players.

Defensive Equipment

Walls block player movement, although they can be cut through.

Doors are doors. Powered doors stay closed while powered.

Windows block player movement, but can be seen through.

Pits and trap doors make players fall to their death. Trap doors stay closed while powered.

Electric floor tiles electrocute players while powered. Indicator lights just light up, so they're great for testing.

Dogs follow players, cats run away from players. Pit bulls are deadly, Chihuahuas are friendly. You can use Chihuahuas for testing.

Your wife can pick up a shotgun and shoot players, including you.

Power sources and wires let you create logic to trigger traps.

Switches do all sorts of useful stuff. They can act as triggers for traps, or even be combined to create a passcode unlocking mechanism.

Burglary Tools

Saws cut through wood walls. Cutting torches cut through steel walls. Explosives blow through concrete walls.

Bricks can activate traps from a distance, smash windows, and kill small pets. Crowbars can kill family members and pets, open doors/windows, and modify switches.

Clubs can kill family members and pets. Guns do the same, but at range. Drugged meat puts dogs to sleep.

Doorstops keep doors open. Ladders let you walk over pits.

Wire cutters cut through electric floor tiles in addition to wires. Water shorts out power sources and electric floor tiles.

[posted on behalf of thisisalan]

 

[thisisalan]

I've really, really been enjoying this game. The learning curve is super steep, so don't be discouraged if it doesn't really click with you for the first few attempts/deaths. Keep going until you've robbed at least one vault and/or had your house kill at least one intruder — it will give you a better grasp for the mechanics and things will start to make more sense.

I forgot to include this in the OT, but here's the official wiki, which has detailed info about item behaviors, along with a great traps guide to get you started.

 

[Erekiddo]

Been playing this game over the weekend, and I'm not really sure I throughly enjoy it.

There's not much room for me to experiment, let alone venture too deep into people's houses for fear of it resetting mine.

I wish there was a template option so I don't need to keep rebuilding my house every time I die. Fascinating concept, just needs some tweaks.

 

[Funky Functionality]

There's not much room for me to experiment, let alone venture too deep into people's houses for fear of it resetting mine.

I wish there was a template option so I don't need to keep rebuilding my house every time I die. Fascinating concept, just needs some tweaks.

I feel there's ample room for experimentation; like any roguelike, the trick is to take it slow, laugh at your deaths, and carry on with new knowledge. I feel it must be said, though--if you're too afraid to rob someone else for fear of losing what you have, welcome to the game!

For certain, it's important not to get too heavily invested in your first few homes. They'll undoubtedly have a major weakness or two that will quickly be made apparent to you through your security tapes. Also keep in mind that the player who inevitably robs you will likely be more experienced than you. Pay careful attention to the way he approaches your home. This will obviously show you where improvements can be made. Remember his name and check out his home if you have the chance--his approach to your home may also tell you something about his defenses, and even if you die in his home, you may come away with a more elegant solution to one of your trap ideas, or a completely new idea for that matter.

I'll agree that having a number of customizable templates would be nice to save some time, but once you hone a successful design, you'll be able to rebuild it in a matter of seconds--the mandatory testing phase of your home will drill into you the mechanics of it all, and you'll be able to rebuild from scratch without issue. I tend to sketch out ideas on paper also, which helps expedite the rebuilding process.

Once you have a number of trap ideas floating around your head, the trick then becomes finding a way to layer these traps within your home and build upon them iteratively, as you won't be making any complex homes or big scores with the paltry $2k starting cash.

General tips for starting out:
First, buy some tools with your $2k. Don't worry about your life. Go tear into a home out there. Figure out how things work. Die. Die a lot. Keep coming back and keep buying more tools and keep checking out more houses. This is the fastest way to come up with ideas for protecting your vault if you have none to begin with. Don't neglect the $0 homes either, especially the ones that still have kills on record. The robbery-attempt:intruder-death ratio is reset to 0:0 every time a change is made to a home, and money is added to the home for every burglar it kills, so any $0 homes with kills on record are usually homes that have been successfully burgled recently. Their traps will likely be broken, so you can see how others are efficiently breaking common trap designs. When you have a trap or two in mind, you're ready to begin.

1. Plan your home. Have a solid direction in mind before you start building--one that you can work toward in small steps. Since you don't get money back for tearing down tiles you've placed in a previous editing session, you'll want each tile you place to be one step closer to your "final" plan. Any tiles you've placed that won't be reused when making changes/additions are effectively money wasted. Sometimes this is necessary when you want to wall off future renovations to keep robbers from seeing them, but be careful with your placement of the more expensive tiles.

2. Spend as much of your initial $2k as possible building your home in that direction. Your first trap needn't be completed at this point. The more you spend, the lower your home will be ranked, and (in theory) the less likely it is that a robbery attempt will be made on it.

3. Make small money by finding ruined/incomplete homes near the bottom of the list that have cash. Use this money immediately to make additions to your traps if they're incomplete, even if it's just one tile. You can also try to poach new homes belonging to players who've just quit after a death, but those $2k/0:0 homes only stay available for a second or two as everyone else is poaching them for the easy cash.

4. When you've finally completed your trap(s) to your satisfaction, there's little else to do but sit back, try to relax, and watch the flood of robbers come. Your first real test in this game isn't completing a successful burglary--it's having your home survive its first night without you.

5. Don't fret when you get cleaned out for all you're worth. It's bound to happen. Watch your security tapes, study the persistent bastard who violated you, use that to plan a better home, go back to step 2.

When you finally have a killer home, you'll begin racking up tools like crazy. This is the point at which you can begin seriously casing homes and formulating complex robbery plans if you're brave... or you can sell those tools to boost your cash, increase your rank, and draw in more burglars to kill. Decisions, decisions.

 

[fleck0]

How do people block off the entrance like in the screenshot below. Can you only do that if people kill off your entire family?

 

[Funky Functionality]

How do people block off the entrance like in the screenshot below. Can you only do that if people kill off your entire family?

Yes, that's correct. Every time your home frustrates a burglar enough that he kills one of your kids, he's actually doing you a huge favor.

 

[thisisalan]

For anyone still interested in this game, I've found a Twitch streamer who has recently been doing some fascinating raids of high-level houses: http://www.twitch.tv/akuwelkin

I believe he'll be back streaming in about a half-hour from now if you want to tune in for a bit of top-tier Castle Doctrine play.

Aside from that, I've also recently discovered the clock mechanism design. You can put it anywhere on the map (doesn't have to be visible) and it'll alternate power every X moves, which can be super tricky for robbers to figure out. It works by exploiting a "paradox circuit" — basically, a circuit that depends upon itself.

 

[thisisalan]

It's been a long while since I last played this game in earnest, but I picked it up again earlier today. There's still that wonderful thrill of working your way up using whatever you can cobble together with $2000, trying to stay ahead of the increasingly sophisticated robbers. Unfortunately, the going is a bit slow since far fewer people are online these days. I kinda wish Jason Rohrer would go back on his "no Steam sales" declaration so that the game could get a new infusion of players.

Anyone have ideas for how to jump-start this game's player base? I'm thinking about buying a bunch of copies for random GAFers who legitimately want to play the game on the condition that they buy a copy for someone else if they enjoy it. Good idea? Other thoughts?