Ezlo wrote:
No, I kind of phrased that wrong, I meant so I could at least feel like I actually did something. I really get down on myself when I end up missing deadlines and such. 
Ah! That, I understand completely.
Also, a few thoughts on the problems of aesthetics in DROD (or at least in DROD 2.0), which I'll secret in case someone thinks reading them might influence the voting.
Click here to view the secret text
×As I said above, Eytanz is right that many of the holds have similar flavors of aesthetics and appearance. What struck me, walking home just now, is that DROD offers a remarkably limited tool set to use. For instance:
(a) Colors. In Foundations (which I'll use as the example, since everyone has access to it), you have six "colors" of floor to choose from, and they're not properly colors because they carry certain textures--rock, sand, stone, tile. (I used "Deep Spaces" in my entry because I at least preferred the wood-like default floor to the white-and-gray Foundations default floor.)
For walls, you have purple; plus to some extent yellow, green (if you're willing to put in an unkillable monster), blue (if you're...unfinishable room), red (if you're...undroppable trapdoor), or black (if you're...unclearable tar). And these latter ones have consequences: a lot of the rooms in the contest entries had stretches of tar trapped behind pits or walls, because otherwise you just couldn't have black "walls" in your rooms.
(b) Obstacles, aka "set decoration". Boulders, plants, skulls (ew!), shiny thingies, desks. Go ahead, clear out your living room at home and redecorate it only with those; tell me how it works out for you. You can make some decent limited use out of them, but it'll only go so far.
Particularly for a castle, this is a severe restriction. Want furniture? windows? a treasury? anything else at all? You're pretty much out of luck.
(c) Scripting. Characters can: appear and disappear, move, speak, or strike orbs. That's pretty much it. If there was a lot of dancing in these rooms, that's because dancing involves clear, broad movement. If there wasn't a lot of reading books/typing at keyboards/watching TV/cooking dinner/what have you, that's because these things are fairly indistinguishable from standing still, especially in the absence of clearer bits of setting (and see point (b) above).
People did, I think, what they could: Techant, for instance, did a nice job with fireworks/dancing/wraithwing training, but it's clear how limited she felt. The fireworks, for instance, don't really have the proper effect if you press "wait" once every ten seconds; you have to hold down the key. The wraithwing, in contrast, doesn't have the proper effect if you hold down the key; you have to press it slowly. Similarly for the dancing: hold down the "wait" key, and the dancers are literally out of the room before the leader has had a chance to say "Take your partner...."
I don't mean this as a criticism of techant; I felt exactly these limitations, and I use her hold only for illustrative purposes. Speech and movement, especially when related to aesthetics, are incredibly hard to control in a turn-based game.
(d) Pixellation. Open the first room in Elfstone's hold, and you've got a circular sort of spiral. So do this: open a graphics program and draw a circle roughly the same size as her spiral. (Her, yes?) Now, count the little square blocks in your circle, and count the little square blocks in Elfstone's. Better yet, don't bother: your circle has orders of magnitute more, which is why it's a lot smoother than the spiral here, which is limited to literally about 1200 "pixels" for the entire space. Speaking concretely: a diameter-30 circle in DROD will have an outline of about 94 squares in its perimeter (i.e., about 30*pi), whereas a circle of the same screen-size in a graphics program, whose diameter is 660 pixels, will have an outline of about 2073 squares. That's a lot smoother.
Long story short: diagonals in DROD are chunky, and curves are worse. It's very hard to work in anything other than straight lines, at least within a single room; you can draw curves on a larger scale, making the overall appearance prettier, but at the expense of local appearance. (For those who've mastered Metdroid Echoes: Pilchard's hold art is amazingly cool, with some very nice lines, but that's in the minimap; would you call any one of those rooms particularly "aesthetic"?)
So your aesthetic is pretty much "straight lines", unless you're as talented as Elfstone (and even she had to compromise with some fairly rough circles). I would have loved a circle for the guards to fence in in 1N1W of my hold, but I had to settle for a sort of weirdly irregular diamond/octagon shape.
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Bottom line: aesthetics are incredibly hard, especially within [what I took to be] the context of this contest, which was "build a castle". As I noted in a previous post, I thought Elfstone's rooms were singularly pretty, but she added a lot of color with monsters; I thought this was terrific in the Seasons hold, but didn't work as well here.
OK, that was long. But I noted before that, when Eytanz says "
I would have loved for at least one entry to invent some new way to make a hold pretty"
, I myself couldn't think what he could possibly have in mind. I wanted to lay out some of the reasons that I couldn't. I'll end with a question--and this may not be the best place to ask, but at the moment it's the most obvious: what
can you do to get around the limitations I discuss in the secret text, i.e. to make a hold "
pretty"
in some new way?
I spent alot of time working on the whole design and half of it on the scripting I think. I never could quite get that copy/paste to work for NPC's. So I had to put all those guys in there one by one. I wanted to do more but the lack of control just made it too frustrating.
. Very mellow, a nice break with no sword swinging required. I thought this entry fit the contest as well as any. As others have mentioned, it could have used just a little more spice.