Also, separate from the above, because I feel like being just a little self-indulgent, some designer's notes on my own.
×
A Visit to Mellenfral. I'm not sure where the inspiration came from; possibly Mattcrampy saying "
Oh, look, a labyrinth submission, I'm surprised,"
and me thinking, "
How could you make that work?"
Possibly Ezlo's Labyrinth of Mellenfral contest put the seeds into my head--I was quite busy that month and didn't even get a chance to play the holds, let alone submit one.
I'm not a very visual puzzle solver; I tend to go for word puzzles. Still, the logic involved in a logic maze does appeal to me, so I thought I'd throw together some reflections on mazes. The "
hand on the wall"
rule is probably familiar to most people (including Beethro), but I thought it'd be a good place for the Instructor to start his lecture. For that maze, I just set up a grid, opened passages more or less at random, and sent the instructor through it.
Of course, you can't say "
labyrinth"
without invoking thoughts of Crete (well, and David Bowie, but I decided against that one--fortunately, someone else picked it up), so the thread-through-the-maze was a sensible place to go, and DROD comes pre-equipped with thread. I feared people would hate this room; it was fun to design something where really all you could do was walk through and follow the thread, but would players appreciate it?
Who knows--I still don't--but as I said, it was fun to make.
Then the bureaucracy maze. As I said, I love logic, and
Robert Abbott's Logic Mazes are a terrific place to start. I thought about a number of his rule-based mazes, and DROD's doors-and-gates would make them possible to implement; but
the Bureaucratic Maze just cried out for use. I designed my own, rather than risk copyright issues by using one of his designs, and it was harder than I expected. Basically...
Click here to view the secret text
×I picked a path (guard -> mimic -> mud -> guard...), and then set up a grid, with all five desks across the top and down the side. Top meant "coming from..." and side meant "at...", so for instance if you were at the mimic and coming from the guard, you needed to be sent to the mud desk. So I filled in the grid based on the path; and then filled out the rest, adding options to most of the correct-path points and adding useless options to other points, with a few spots where you'd be sent back to the guard to start over (so that you wouldn't get lost in a loop).
Even then, it took a little tweaking to make sure the false leads didn't take you too far astray before sending you back to the start. And then there was the implementation: that, of course, is what those wubbas at the bottom are for. Basically, there are 20 possible states, depending on what desk you're coming from and what desk you're at now (i.e., the 5x5 grid, minus the diagonal). So five wubbas, one for each desk, move into the appropriate spots: state 16, for example, is "came from the guard, at the mud, can now go to mimic or tar." When you enter state 16, the guard's wubba moves back to its starting spot; the mud's wubba moves to the spot for State 16; the mud coordinator says the appropriate thing for State 16; the tar and mimic characters go into "wait for someone to come from the mud desk" mode; and the guard and decoy go into "sorry I can't help you" mode. Repeat for all nineteen states. Then throw in a few other wubbas that move through the unused spots in the corner at varying intervals or based on which side of the room the player's on, just to help disguise which wubbas are relevant.
Then take a deep breath and be thankful that's over.
The remaining three rooms were about single paths. I learned about the "
sacred"
meaning of labyrinths outside one of Adrian Fisher's corn mazes, and I was enthralled. What a wonderful idea--a maze-like path, but one with no challenge, no goal, no winning or losing, just a journey for the sake of the journey! When I encountered trapdoor puzzles in DROD, I found many of them, ones without monsters or orbs at least, to be the same way: work out your path, and then just walk through it. Very Zen, or as close as I can get to Zen while being unrepentantly Western.
So I threw in a very simple trapdoor "
puzzle"
: basically, just a walk-the-path, as a kind of setup. Then, the seven-circle labyrinth, for which I used
this site's photos as a guide (though the design itself is thoroughly classical). I gave some thought to just leaving it as a design on the floor and letting people decide whether to walk through it or run across it--perhaps with a disparaging comment from the Instructor about typical delver behavior, in the latter case--but then I thought, no, the red doors are so useful for single-path routes that I wanted to use them. (Even then, I considered using trapdoors and floor, rather than trapdoors and pits. But I figured, a little walking never hurt anyone, and maybe players would find it as meditative as I did.)
And that, I suppose, was that.
...wow, that was actually incredibly self-indulgent, not just a little. Well, you don't have to read it, after all.
, it's hard to get comments together on all of them without taking up a lot of space. I'm looking forward to playing them all, 
but I think I'm going to need glasses
afterwards. 
then I can post my votes.
THANKS!
