Celebrating 13 years and 2,069,877 robberies

The Castle Doctrine first launched off-Steam back in March of 2013. And what do you know? I just tested it on Steam Deck, and it works great on there. Even the wonky Windows-pop-up for server-side account creation works.

Looking back on it from the twilight of my career, with 19 games behind me, it might just be my best game, not in terms of popularity, but in terms of tightness of design and how compelling it is to play.

It's also pretty amazing to recall the world of 2013---even just the game world---and what things were like back then. When The Castle Doctrine was accepted by Steam, it was the ONLY game to launch on Steam on its chosen day.

These days, the average day on Steam has 60 new games launching.

The Castle Doctrine was my second game on Steam. The first game that I tried to submit, Sleep is Death back in 2010, was considered by Steam for a few months, but eventually rejected. My first game accepted on Steam was Inside a Star-filled Sky, and Steam was still holding on so tight that they actually changed the store artwork that I submitted. Yes, I made artwork and uploaded it, and then some artist working at Valve re-did the artwork for the store page before my game launched.

I was recently thinking about how strange this was, and I was tempted to put the original artwork back up on the store page. Then again, Valve probably made the right call, because my original store artwork was pretty weird. Here's what I submitted:

And here's what Valve changed it to:

By the time The Castle Doctrine made it onto Steam, Valve was more hands-off.... or maybe I was just better at designing store artwork by then.

What font is that, you might wonder? I actually hand-pixel-painted that whole title. Every square in its right place.

Yes, a lot has changed: my oldest child just turned 23, my youngest is already 15, and even my doggy is about to turn 5. Not wearing glasses yet (though I'm starting to make the fonts bigger), but my hair is getting pretty thin up top, and I'm now wearing slippers deep into April. But I'm still typing this from an old laptop running Linux (this laptop is older than The Castle Doctrine), still using Emacs, still coding on a split keyboard, and still mousing left-handed to spread the repetitive-stress load. There have been a lot of ups and down over the years, but I look forward to sitting down in my home office each weekday morning and setting to work, and I've managed to support my family while doing it, which makes me one of the luckiest 48-year-olds around.

I'm not quite done yet---hopefully there are a few more games left in me before I hang up Emacs and go out to pasture.

Thanks for sharing this ride with me. Jason Rohrer

April 2026

Dover, New Hampshire