My final batch of notes on the hold.
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Fourth Level
- 1S1W: Very easy to make an early mistake and only discover it much later. Too tedious for me.
- 2S1E: Proceeded directly into the roach killing zone, which was immediately obscured by the mimic's inane dialogue. The Grinfidel was never this stupid.
- 1N1E: Not sure why I need to beat the mimic. I killed all the tar, then went through via the trapdoor, without needing to get past the door which closes.
- 1E: Not sure why some other posters had trouble with this one, although I wouldn't want to do it more than once.
Fifth Level
- The Entrance and 2W: Brained roaches in orthogonal mazes are pretty easy to handle.
- 1S1W: A solid room, though the trapdoor maze seems a little random. Using goblins to limit mud growth is a puzzle element I can't recall seeing - nice one.
- 1E: Stuck behind the blue door. Is there more to this level? Does 2525252 have some significance?
Sixth Level
- 1N1W: Some checkpoints in the middle of the room might be handy. Apart from that, a reasonably challenging room, especially getting both goblins out of the NW part.
- 2N1E: As far as I can tell, one needs to kill all the tar, then loop back through both serpent chambers and then to the room exit, while keeping the brained goblin alive and leaving a viable path. Too tough for me, which (along with the lack of anyone edit) is why I can't do the rest of the level.
Seventh Level
- 1N: Randomly placed trapdoors under tar and mud - too annoying for me to do without using a transparency mod.
- 2N: Checkpoints checkpoints checkpoints. I died from silly errors far too many times.
- 1W: The same (badly spelt) message appears for whichever entrance you use, and regardless of whether the room has been cleared.
- 2S3W: If the player clears this room and doesn't immediately go north, they won't be able to later.
- 1S4W: Yes, there is a lot of tar on this level. The tedium got to me on this room.
- 2S4W: And again. Where's the challenge here?
Overall, this level has some good rooms, but too much of the same sort of thing. Needs trimming.
Land's End
- 1W: I saw some mention of detonators on the forum, but I must have missed the room that explained them; which leaves this room unsolvable.
Eighth Level
- The Entrance: 'You dleved too far'?
- 5S1E: This is an easy room to kill the Slayer in. In fact, to me it seemed easier to do this than trying to kill the roaches while he was still around.
- 4S1W: Very easy to kill the Slayer before you exit. And yet he shows up in the next room. Hmm.
- There seem to be unreachable rooms marked as required (again). I've explored the Entrance, 1S through to 5S, 4S1W, 5S1W, 4S1E and 5S1E. The blue door in 5S1W blocks further progress.
Ninth Level
- The Entrance: those blue doors look interesting, but there's no way to return to this room when the level is complete (2S has force arrows). And Beethro says the same thing every time I enter the room. Actually, this happens a lot on this level.
- 3S: The timing is probably too generous - I finished the room with 12 complete growths to spare.
- 2S1E: At last, some thought is required. Dialogue repeats on re-entering the room.
- 2S2E: Enough with the tar clearing already!
- 1N1W: Once again, this was tricky enough without the Slayer. So I killed him (getting good at this). This room is actually good enough without him.
- 1N2E: A reasonable challenge, and some thought required to handle the goblin.
Tenth Level
- 3N: What's supposed to happen? No Halph, so no way of triggering the western orb, and no way of finishing the room. Maybe some scripting will activate when I do random thing X, but I have no idea what.
Y'know, going ahead and making more levels before fixing bugs in the early ones does make some sort of sense. It's a first draft, which you want to knock out to get a sense of the overall structure. After that, you can go back to edit, fix errors, and so on.
But your case is a little different: you've posted a work in progress, and people have found problems with it, which haven't been addressed. Is it any wonder that users are reluctant about testing it? I think that you need to either:
a) finish your 'first draft' - ie. all levels, before posting a new version (and calling for testers), or
b) fix the bugs that people have reported.
And in either case, I fail to see why you can't make the hold anyone edit. It will let testers bypass rooms (because of bugs or difficulty), check the required/secret state of the level, and pinpoint scripting errors. There's nothing to lose here; nobody's going to steal your ideas, and your hold will be the better for it.
