Oh jeez I'm sorry folks. Apparently there's a rather annoying glitch in the compilation thread (totally my fault and nothing to do with the entry that was submitted). In one of the entries that involves custom weapons and weapon switching tokens (you'll know it when you see it), if you grab a custom weapon and then leave via the exit stairs, you'll be disarmed when you get go on to another level. This is totally my fault in that I forgot to clear the scripting when returning to the level map. Please don't hold this against the entry in any way. If this should happen to you, don't panic. Just go back to the custom weapons level, take a custom weapon,
then take your sword back before taking the exit stairs. I'll post a fixed version of the compilation to this thread later tonight, but you are more than welcome to keep using the version you are playing as long as you know the workaround.
I'm posting some comments on the entries under unhide tags. If you want to post comments that don't show up until after voting You can post your own using unhide tags as follows:
[unhidetime=16 April 2017 11:00pm] Type your comments here. [/unhidetime]
I didn't vote obviously, but figured I'd provide some feedback to the architects to add to what others may have posted. First of all, it's important to recognize that there are different types of difficulty and some folks who might be pretty good at logical linchpin type difficulty may not be as solid with horde management or manipulation or whatnot. So I'll come out and say that I'm probably not as strong with execution difficulty (manipulation and so on) which will probably lead me to judge execution heavy rooms as more difficult than others may. I'll try to mention what I thought about the different types of difficulty for each of the entries in addition to talking about the difficulty curve overall.
On the flip side, I tended to feel like the entries that were based more on linchpin difficulty were closer to five brains. That may in part be just from familiarity with the kinds of tricks involved in those rooms. In particular, there were a few snake manipulation and time clone rooms that use tricks that, while maybe not commonplace, have been used before. If you know the tricks, the rooms are pretty straightforward. If you don't it makes the room a bit more difficult since you essentially have to discover the trick (which, while not super difficult, is probably more than 5 brains). I can see some of these entries having a high standard distribution of difficulties in part because of that.
Another interesting thing that came up for me but probably not anyone else is that knowing who the architect was for each of the entries actually probably made them a bit easier. I've played enough bomber50, Chaco, disoriented, and Xindaris holds at this point to have a good feel for the kinds of rooms they each go for. That gave me an idea of what type of approach to take. For example, Chaco tends to make rooms for which the best approach is to take careful stock of all the room details up front. Just about everything in his rooms will have a purpose. That's definitely not to say any of those architects are predictable or only capable of one kind of style, just that they each have fairly consistent architectural philosophies that can help you know what kind of approach to take with a room. At any rate, the result of that is I think I found the entries by architects I'm familiar with slightly easier than I would have otherwise.
"Gimme Five"
This one felt pretty much right on the nose at five brains for me. There were a couple of rooms that were slightly tricky, but no rooms were serious stonewalls and most rooms yielded to a bit of thought. I think the difficulty here was mostly in logical reasoning and not so much in execution (with a few exceptions) which made it feel pretty approachable. Difficulty was pretty consistent throughout too. interestingly, I think some of the harder rooms (or at least the ones that took me longer) were front-loaded in this one.
2W and
1S2W were rooms for which I had to resort to "
guess and check"
. There may be a better way to do them, but I couldn't find it and had to blindly experiment. That always ends up making me perceive the room as more difficult (even if a correct solution is fairly easy to stumble upon.) Most of the rooms after that were pretty straightforward though, and had nice tricks to them. Somehow
2S1W got mentioned a lot in chat even though it relies on what I thought was a fairly standard trick. I guess it just goes to show how subjective difficulty can be. I think
4S1W was possibly my favorite on this level. It's a perfect example of the kind of room for which a bit of logical deduction works wonders. I also appreciate that the horde room at the end was fairly forgiving. It's a very different style of difficulty from the rest of the rooms, so it was good that it didn't go for anything too intense. If I had to pick my favorites for this contest it might just be this one. It's also probably second place in my book in terms of getting as close as possible to five brains.
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"Minimalism"
This one also felt very close to 5 brains on the whole. I like that it had a mix of different difficulty types, some manipulation, some linchpin, and some horde management while still mostly maintaining a consistent difficulty level. I really liked
1N1W for this contest because of the flexibility in difficulty that it provides. A seasoned DRODer will immediately see that this can be done without the mirror and the temptation to rise to the self imposed challenge will be to great to resist. Letting a player chose their own difficulty level like this is really clever, and a couple of the rooms in this entry did just that by providing more resources than were necessary to solve the room.
A couple of rooms did seem to be much easier than the rest though.
2N1W seemed strangely straightforward and I didn't end up using a bunch of the elements in the room (the invisibility potion for one thing). Seems like this one might be broken. Not sure if the pressure plate at (4,14) is supposed to be a toggle and another invisibility potion available. As it is now it's somewhat trivial to get the last door open. I liked the room
1N1E just fine, but the manipulation here seemed a bit too straightforward, definitely well under 5 brains. Most everything else hit 5 brains on the nose for me and was really well done. I found
3N1W to be the hardest one here, probably because the difficulty lies mostly in execution.
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"A Five Brains Hold"
I have a hard time judging this one for difficulty mostly because I felt like I was just randomly guessing for a couple of the rooms and got lucky. In
1W for instance, I just tried something that seemed like it might work and it just so happens that it did. I don't feel like I actually worked it out or solved it though. It was almost more of a demonstration of a neat trick that you can get pretty quickly if you experiment around a bit. A lot of the level had a similar feel. It didn't take me that long to get any of the rooms, but on the other hand, I can see how it could have taken me forever if I had tried to reason out what to do instead of just blindly experimenting.
1S was the exception to the rule here, that one had a nice linchpin that was totally something you could logically deduce.
1N was another one that could be deduced, but it was too straightforward to really feel like 5 brains. Because of that, this one felt like it undershot five brains by a bit, thought it was really hard to judge accurately.
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"Stuck in the Muck"
There were definitely some 5ish brain rooms in the mix here, but there were also a few rooms mixed in that were well over that. The
entrance was good. That was not too tough and not annoying in any way. It was a good intro to the level. But some of the other rooms... General tip: if it relies on gel cutting theory and ensuring that a configuration of gel is going to be cuttable, it probably isn't 5 brains (at least one room was like this). The gel cutting wasn't over the top for the most part though.
1S1W was the one that really went over 5 brains for me. Time clones and brained hordes just don't mix well. The clone is super annoying since the monsters will be attracted to him while recording but ignore him when replaying. It's clear that there are two problem spots that you need to clear before they become uncuttable, so basically I just had the clone clear one of them then disappear. That left me with an incredibly annoying brained horde room. My brained horde chops may just be very weak, but dealing with that horde was probably one of my least favorite things in this whole compilation.
Other rooms were mostly pretty good though,
3S1W and
3S for instance felt like they were exactly 5 brains and were pretty fun too. Some were actually well under 5 brains.
1S for instance seemed super easy both ways, and for
1E it was simple enough to do with only three rock golems, so you were definitely overly generous with resources. I guess you could argue that the too easy rooms and the too hard rooms average out to 5 brains, but I don't think difficulty really works that way. I think I probably tend to rate a hold's difficulty based on the maximum difficulty (or at least the average difficulty of the hardest 50%). So this entry definitely over shot for me.
A couple of notes for the compilation: Challenge scripting in
1S1W is busted and awards the challenge whenever you re-enter the already cleared room. Also, a couple of rooms put challenge scrolls behind room clear conditions. Can we all finally agree to not do that?
EDIT: upon watching you play through your own level I can see that I could have made
1S1W a lot easier by just killing the brain. Somehow all the rooms that enforced leaving the brain alive until the end in this hold drove me to assume the same was necessary in this room. That's my bad for lack of observational skills. I can console myself with the fact that I was observant enough to see a much easier (and probably more fun) way to do
2S than the one in the video (hint: kill the mother before first spawn.)
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"Custom Weapons Redux"
So right off that bat, using custom elements is going to make things feel harder. And that's taking into account that I'm already familiar with these elements from the previous contest. The thing with custom elements is that people haven't had the chance to build up intuition and experience with them yet, so they're going to
feel unfamiliar and
feel harder. This one even included a completely new custom element that hasn't appeared before. I'll be honest, I didn't spend too much time looking at those rooms since it wasn't really clear from the scrolls exactly how the grickle gun was supposed to work (or else it didn't seem to be putting grickles on spots I thought it should have based on the description.) I wasn't really in the mood to play guess the scripting so it's probably best that those rooms were marked as secret.
I managed to clear the required rooms in the entry in no too much time though, so I guess this would probably rate maybe a 6 or so. I had the most difficulty with the rooms that involved the briar seeds, mostly because it's a bit hard to predict how fast the stuff will grow so placement is a bit "
guess and check"
. The rooms were mostly fun though. The difficulty was more on the execution side, but it never felt tedious or excessive. Some of the rooms here hit pretty close to five brains, and I ended up enjoying those a lot.
2S and
1N hit that spot for me. I'm not sure if you have three giants in
1N1E just for symmetry, but I ended up not using one of them at all.
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"Serious Seepage"
This entry was one of the few that
definitely undershot. This felt like maybe 4 brains max. That being said, it was still a fun little romp. Some rooms, like
1S1W, required a little bit of thought at least. And
1N provided a little bit of challenge in the form of guard manipulation (still slightly under 5 brains) But rooms like
1N1E, where you pretty much just have to lead the seep down the different paths, feel like maybe 2 brains max. There's really nothing to do other than the thing that you obviously need to do. I guess you have to be a little bit careful not to lead more than one seep down the same path, but it's still really straightforward. Most of the rooms here were similar. I could pretty much just mindlessly stumble through. That's not necessarily a bad thing though. It was still fun and relaxing to play.
1W for instance had a nice little linchpin to it and was a fun room even though it was under 5 brains for sure. This was a fun hold to play through, but five brains should be at least a little bit of a challenge. I can't entirely blame the architect for undershooting though since there isn't much consensus as to what constitutes five brains. To be honest, this level felt like it could have fit very nicely right into KDD or JtRH, both of which have been considered to be five brains in the past.
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"Master of the Mundane"
If I had to call out one entry for nailing the 5 brain mark it would be this one. This is pretty much exactly the kind of difficulty I think of when I think 5 brains. I really enjoyed almost all the rooms in this level (the orb puzzle I could do without.) Pretty much all of them had enough of a puzzle to require at least a bit of thought, but nothing was a brick wall. I liked the scrolls in each room too. The scroll in
1N1W was actually helpful in pointing me in the right direction for solving the room by directing me to pay close attention to the details of the mud setup. It's hard to single out any single room here since everything seemed pretty darned close to five brains. I really like that for most of these the difficulty was in figuring out what to do and the execution was not too bad. I guess that's again due to the fact that I tend to rate execution difficulty higher than linchpin difficulty. There was a nice use of misdirection in a couple of rooms (
2N1W and
3N1E) which is hard to pull of while still keeping the room at 5 brains. Man, I really wish I had more to say about this entry, but it's hard to say much as this is pretty much spot on in terms of both difficulty and fun.
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"Duplication Desert"
So again I'll mention that levels involving custom elements will automatically feel a bit harder than normal just due to the unfamiliarity with the elements in question. That being said, this entry was only just a little bit over five brains for me. Maybe a light 6. The puzzles are probably at about the 5 brain level if you discount the added difficulty of an unfamiliar element.
2S1W is a good example of this. The puzzle is pretty straightforward if you know all the details of how movement order work for the element, but that's a big if. It'd probably feel like 5 brains if the duplicator had been a standard element that we'd been working with for years though.
Most of the other rooms were pretty close to the 5 brain mark. I liked the guard manipulation in
1W, not too demanding, but fun to do. And cutting the tar properly in
1S1W was a neat little puzzle too. The citizen room (
1E) was a bit weird. I didn't really think through what had to be done in that room. The possibility space is so small I pretty much just stumbled into the solution without trying. To be honest though I can't complain. It was relatively painless for a citizen room. Still, that room probably undershoots 5 brains. Note for compilation: I think I may be doing
2S1E wrong. I didn't need the wraithwings for anything.
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"This architect couldnt follow the rules"
I should point out that this contest was named "
This architect couldnt follow the rules"
by the architect, and that the architect did, in fact, technically follow the rules. That being said this was an obvious troll and was clearly intended to be more than 5 brains. I'd probably call it a 7 or so, with the bulk of the difficulty being in the
entrance and the super secret room which both felt like "
guess and check"
exercises. Some of the rooms actually felt like they hit pretty close to 5 brains.
1E for example, though I may have broken that one since I didn't use the time token at all.
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"Hordes"
I can't tell if this is a troll entry or not. It took me a good half hour just to solve the entrance. That doesn't bode well for a level that's supposed to be five brains. The fact that everything else was gated from there made me almost decide to just skip this one. Once I did finally manage to get through I was even more convinced that this must be a troll. Took a look at
1W first. You want me to deal with how many tar babies each spawn?
1S really looks like it should be tractable, but I got nowhere with it.
2S? No thanks!
1S1W? No thanks with a timer on top. Maybe I'm just bad with horde rooms but this was easily 7.5 brains.
EDIT: After watching Chaco's LP of this one it turns out I'm just ridiculously bad at horde rooms! Also,
1S1W is super cool in retrospect. I wish I had given this entry more of a proper shot now. But one good takeaway lesson for just about everyone in future contests: do yourself a favor and make your level open access! If you green gate stuff you're making it harder for the folks judging your entries to see how awesome the rest of your rooms are! If I hadn't been so exhausted by the entrance, I probably would have been more focused for the rest of this level and enjoyed it a lot more. Thankfully I didn't vote in this one, but something similar happened to me in the last contest with at least one entry.
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"Five-Pointed Spear"
First of all, I love the minimap art for this one. I really hope this entry wins something just due to the lovely level design here. Super cool. In terms of difficulty this was probably about 5 brains. It definitely felt really close to that at least. Part of that was due to some really cleverly built in flexibility in terms of room solutions. For example, there were two rooms that involved monster generators (
7N with a tar mother and
11N with roach queens). In both of these rooms you can take a more execution heavy approach or you can do a bit of careful planning to minimize the difficulty of execution (Like killing the tar mother up front so that you don't have to worry about the time pressure or killing a bunch of the trapped roaches before opening the arrows).
If I had to critique anything about this level, it's that the difficulty curve was negative. Most of the rooms in the opening stretch and all along the central column felt like they were pretty spot on at five brains. The rooms in the "
points"
of the "
spear"
felt a lot easier for the most part. On the other hand, I kinda wandered into
11N1E,
11N1W, and
10N1W and did them without much thought. In
10N1E I feel like there must be something to the fact that you can get a barrel free and kill the wraithwing in the arrows with it, but I guess it may just be a coincidence based on the level art. At any rate, those rooms felt like maybe 3.5 or 4 brains at most. It's a minor complain though as the level on the whole definitely averages in at about 5 brains and was super fun to play.
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"Keeping It Simple"
The name for this one is quite accurate, and I'd say this is one of the few entries that dramatically undershot in terms of difficulty. Pretty much all the rooms here didn't really push back in any way. It was clear what needed to be done from a quick glance at the room and the execution was straightforward. The rooms were fun still, but nowhere close to five brains. Again, this may be due to the architect trying to go for KDD and JtRH levels of difficulty, as the rooms here could have fit in the first half of either of those holds.
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[Last edited by Insoluble at 04-10-2017 02:33 AM]
