nijuu: Not much info on the website. The RPS articles makes things a bit clearer.
Quite a unique game. But its really a online game though isnt it?.
Yeah but it's asynchronous. You set up your house then you leave it alone for a while while you rob other houses. If someone is robbing your house or your house is being robbed, you can't access it. You will never see another player's avatar.
I think the server is literally hosted on a webserver somewhere, as it's made entirely of PHP, MySQL and a bit of Perl.
EDIT: And since the source code comes with it, it's possible to modify the game, host your own server, etc.
EDIT2: Posted the same thing as above on RPS (I cross-post a lot when no one else posts about it) and got a reply from Jason Rohrer himself.
Hey, thought I'd clear some of this up with a few pointers.
#1 is the way it is because each wall has a trade-off. They're not all the same. Wood walls are cheapest to cut (and can be cut by three different tools, saw, torch, and explosives). However, they are the only ones that can have wires through them. This also means that you can *detect* when a wood wall has been cut and have your house react to it (a circuit that does something when a wire is cut.... like release the hounds). Metal walls can only be cut by the expensive torch, but their tradeoff is that they're conductive (behave just like wires), so they cause short circuits. Concrete can only be destroyed by explosives, cannot be wired, and is not conductive, but is the most expensive.
#2 is just a misunderstanding. You can always always always back out the front door if things get too hot in any house (including while testing your own). On the Prove screen, backing out the front door takes you right back to where you left off editing. See one tile out of place? Back out of the test, fix it, and hit Done again. This can be done as many times as you want before you finally reach your own vault on the Prove screen and submit your house to the server. If you forge ahead into danger and die in your own house, well, that's your fault. This is a game about being very careful around dangerous stuff. The game is never unfair! Even if there are 100 pitbulls right in front of the door, you have 1 turn to look at them before backing out the front door. You are never forced to die... you always do it to yourself.
#3 is also a misunderstanding, somewhat. Yes, the family is timid and won't step over any of your security nonsense. However, dogs do not block their path (they can walk into the same spot as a dog). This means that dogs are key to protecting the family (which kinda makes sense). I mean, even if you could have them trigger switches, they'd still eventually reach the front door if the robber waited long enough. Put some dogs in front of them that reach the front door before the family, though, and the pressure is on....
I'm not expecting you to know this, because it hasn't been explained anywhere. I don't really know how to explain it to people, though. I don't want the game to be cluttered with tutorial text. I've thought about posting an FAQ, but I worry that no one would read that anyway.
Obviously, the game suffers quite a bit (is much more frustrating) when people don't realize this stuff....
