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Indie home invasion game offers prizes and cash for top players

The Castle Doctrine is an Indie MMO developed by one man, and he’s offering players real cash if they end up in the list of the top eight players when the contest closes at 5pm Pacific Standard Time on Monday the 27th of January.

He’s not offering a lot of money – his budget is just $3,000 – but the contest is open to pre-purchasers of the game with PayPal accounts that can receive payments, and there is no limit from the developer’s side on who can enter so South Africans with qualifying PayPal accounts can also join the fun. It’s a clever and inexpensive way to generate a bit of buzz about the game before it launches officially, which happens on the 29th of January.

Developer Jason Rohrer posted the contest rules on the game’s blog, and while nothing in this life is guaranteed, the offer certainly appears legitimate.

The Castle Doctrine is a massively-multiplayer online game with a fascinating premise: you own a house in a neighbourhood populated by other real-world players, and you must defend it from being broken in to and your money vault being raided by laying all manner of traps for the intruders that will inevitably come. It’s apparently based on an actual US law of the same name that essentially allows home owners the right to kill intruders. In the game, those intruders are other players looking to bolster their own in-game bank accounts, and, just like them, you’re expected to try the same thing with your neighbours.

But there are many obstacles to victory, including your own traps, that will end your in-game life and force you to restart with an empty house and a $2,000 in-game budget with which to rebuild your home. It’s a brutal, unforgiving world, but that just serves to give the game’s mechanics emotional weight that make doing well feel more rewarding than it does in other games. You could be riding high one minute, and then trip and fall into your own trapdoor the next and be forced to start over.

The graphics aren’t anything to write home about as Rohrer has employed an 8-bit art style, but as we’ve learned over the past few years from games like Minecraft, Hotline Miami and many others, players can get over low-fi visuals if the actual gameplay engages them. Check out the trailer below for a better glimpse of what The Castle Doctrine has to offer:

The eight players who’ve accumulated the most in-game currency by the time the alpha closes (5pm, US Pacific Standard Time on 27/01) will be rewarded with real cash paid into their PayPal accounts according to a special exchange rate. At the moment, $222 of in-game currency is worth a single dollar, but Rohrer says the exchange rate will fluctuate according to how the community plays, which means it could go either way. As he says in his blog, “It’s kind of like a game. How much will I pay, in the end?”

He’s also offering physical prizes along with the cash. The top eight players will also get a real-world copy of any in-game paintings they have in their possession at the close of the contest, plus Rohrer is handing out security-related items like several door-reinforcement kits that stops robbers from kicking in doors, a self-defense baton and $50 gift certificates from a gun shop in his home town of Cruces, New Mexico, USA. None of these will likely be of much interest to local gamers, but it’s a pretty cool way to promote the game nonetheless.

If you’re interested, you can grab the alpha now for half-price ($8, or around R88) which grants you DRM-free access to the game’s alpha right now and a free Steam key when it hits Valve’s online platform on the 29th.

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