stigant
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Could be from JtRH:L16 (iirc). Adam made the room I'm thinking of there.

I think you're thinking of 2S2E, and that is not the one I'm thinking of (though I can see, from my description how you might think of that room). No, I don't think this was in a canonical hold (definitly not one of the big three). It was based on a logic puzzle where you have to find an orthogonal-only path from the upper left to the lower right of a grid and there are numbers on the outside that tell you how many squares in each row or column the path passes through. You have to figure out where the actual path is. Well, the architect implemented the puzzle in a neat way. Basically, you had a grid of 3x3 squares that you had to walk through. (This was to avoid the effects of diagonal shortcuts... I don't think ortho squares would have worked either because they would be too close together) Along two sides of the grid were golems, each in its own hallway going either vertically or horizontally, and each ending in an arrow trap (similar to the set up in the room above). There was some mechanism to ensure that end solution required getting all the golems within 1 (maybe 2) squares of the trap so that you could go through at the end and kill them, but not let them fall into the trap. Each golem was a different distance from the trap (representing the number along the sides in the original puzzle). When you stepped on a square, the two golems in that row and column would move towards their traps, thus enforcing the rules of the puzzle. I thought it might have been The Puzzle Palace, but I didn't see it there just now.

There was a room like that in Chaco's Hold too.

No, I think I see the room you're talking about and again, its not it.

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[Last edited by stigant at 04-11-2007 06:43 PM]

Chaco
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Close, but not quite.

To be honest, my idea in that room wasn't really original, I stole it from Blue Rooms : 2 - Blue Rooms : 2 North, 1 West, which is an awesome room, and just applied it to killing golems with pathblocking instead of killing seeps.

So, yeah, unless Adam made the room before Blue Rooms, this was the first room using this sort of path-determination.

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Abbyzzmal
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Doom wrote:
Finally, something I just remembered at the end of this post: Slayers were terribly underused. Since they were to just suicide almost immediately most of the time, it might've been a better idea to stay away from introducing a complex element at all in puzzle rooms...

Slayers might have been underused, but what really shocked me was the almost total lack of wubbas. I remember seeing them in three rooms, 1 in Homeward Ascent, 1 in Forgotten Ruins, and 1 in the tutorial. Where did they go? I just opened up the editor to see how Adders and Wubbas interacted, and I am appalled that there were no rooms showcasing their interaction. It's also odd that they never appeared around hot tiles or briars or platforms. With so many new ways to destroy the mostly undestroyable, I find it perplexing why none were utilized.

AF 2N, 2W was probably my favorite room in the hold. I have always thought that Crumbly Walls are the most underutilized element in DROD, and now that we have mirrors, I expect them to be utilized even less. Crumbly Walls under tarstuff is something I have toyed with but have never been able to really make interesting, but this room does it very well.

RH 3E was the last room I solved and I had to resolve it after I solved most of it several times, but the entire frustrating process was enjoyable and fair. The third portion of the room became the easiest and the most fun in the end, and it's interesting when that happens.

I'll have to think about my least favorite rooms. They probably involve fegundos or briars.

mrimer
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Abbyzzmal wrote:

Doom wrote:
Finally, something I just remembered at the end of this post: Slayers were terribly underused. Since they were to just suicide almost immediately most of the time, it might've been a better idea to stay away from introducing a complex element at all in puzzle rooms...

Slayers might have been underused, but what really shocked me was the almost total lack of wubbas. I remember seeing them in three rooms, 1 in Homeward Ascent, 1 in Forgotten Ruins, and 1 in the tutorial. Where did they go? I just opened up the editor to see how Adders and Wubbas interacted, and I am appalled that there were no rooms showcasing their interaction. It's also odd that they never appeared around hot tiles or briars or platforms. With so many new ways to destroy the mostly undestroyable, I find it perplexing why none were utilized.

Yup. With so much new stuff in TCB, we had to pick and choose what to show off most. I think exploring the unexplored is a good idea for future Smitemaster's Selections.

____________________________
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Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

Tahnan
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Abbyzzmal wrote:
Slayers might have been underused, but what really shocked me was the almost total lack of wubbas.

Me too. No, wait, not "shocked"; the other one. "Pleased".

I think the lack of slayers after you was a good thing; it wouldn't quite have fit the plot, and anyway, It's Been Done. The entire premise of JtRH is "there's a slayer after you"; I didn't need more rooms with them. (I don't really like slayer manipulation all that much.)

Oneiromancer wrote:
AF 2S wasn't meant to be as hard as people found it to be...[s]o I added the second platform (and the puzzle to unlock it) so that you could have the mimic on the second platform cutting the gel, with Beethro out in the middle of the room and free to move...

Blink blink.

I tried to free that other platform without dropping the red door, and I just couldn't see how to do it. So I gave up and went back to the gel. Not once did I notice that killing the gel wasn't a necessary step to dropping that red door...

stigant
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You know, I think I prefer having the slayer after me to having the briar after me. The briar really IS unassailable. And also, the thorns are sharp. The roots will find you, the branches will follow? Ok, I'm done.

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Perndog
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Funny. I just finished Frozen Depths and came right to this thread to congratulate the designer of 2 North. I thought it was brilliant.

Rabscuttle
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stigant wrote:

Could be from JtRH:L16 (iirc). Adam made the room I'm thinking of there.

I think you're thinking of 2S2E, and that is not the one I'm thinking of (though I can see, from my description how you might think of that room). No, I don't think this was in a canonical hold (definitly not one of the big three). It was based on a logic puzzle where you have to find an orthogonal-only path from the upper left to the lower right of a grid and there are numbers on the outside that tell you how many squares in each row or column the path passes through. You have to figure out where the actual path is. Well, the architect implemented the puzzle in a neat way. Basically, you had a grid of 3x3 squares that you had to walk through. (This was to avoid the effects of diagonal shortcuts... I don't think ortho squares would have worked either because they would be too close together) Along two sides of the grid were golems, each in its own hallway going either vertically or horizontally, and each ending in an arrow trap (similar to the set up in the room above). There was some mechanism to ensure that end solution required getting all the golems within 1 (maybe 2) squares of the trap so that you could go through at the end and kill them, but not let them fall into the trap. Each golem was a different distance from the trap (representing the number along the sides in the original puzzle). When you stepped on a square, the two golems in that row and column would move towards their traps, thus enforcing the rules of the puzzle. I thought it might have been The Puzzle Palace, but I didn't see it there just now.

Sounds like Dodecahedral Hold : Twelve Faces-Twelve Rooms : 1 South

stigant
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that's the one! Thanks!

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Strabo
Level: Delver
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Rabscuttle wrote:

stigant wrote:

Could be from JtRH:L16 (iirc). Adam made the room I'm thinking of there.

I think you're thinking of 2S2E, and that is not the one I'm thinking of (though I can see, from my description how you might think of that room). No, I don't think this was in a canonical hold (definitly not one of the big three). It was based on a logic puzzle where you have to find an orthogonal-only path from the upper left to the lower right of a grid and there are numbers on the outside that tell you how many squares in each row or column the path passes through. You have to figure out where the actual path is. Well, the architect implemented the puzzle in a neat way. Basically, you had a grid of 3x3 squares that you had to walk through. (This was to avoid the effects of diagonal shortcuts... I don't think ortho squares would have worked either because they would be too close together) Along two sides of the grid were golems, each in its own hallway going either vertically or horizontally, and each ending in an arrow trap (similar to the set up in the room above). There was some mechanism to ensure that end solution required getting all the golems within 1 (maybe 2) squares of the trap so that you could go through at the end and kill them, but not let them fall into the trap. Each golem was a different distance from the trap (representing the number along the sides in the original puzzle). When you stepped on a square, the two golems in that row and column would move towards their traps, thus enforcing the rules of the puzzle. I thought it might have been The Puzzle Palace, but I didn't see it there just now.

Sounds like Dodecahedral Hold : Twelve Faces-Twelve Rooms : 1 South

Wow! Someone remembered a hold I designed! I was rather proud of that puzzle.

ClaytonW
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 961
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voyager wrote:
RH 2N1E:

Click here to view the secret text

×This was like a handheld sliding marble puzzle from hell.

YES! That was EXACTLY the source of my inspiration.

Tahnan wrote:

Click here to view the secret text

×LP: 1N1E - Worse, the room had a kind of bug in it: a builder got trapped on one of the spaces where they were trying to build a wall--a wall on either side, and three builders crowded around him. The three of them weren't leaving until they put a wall up, and he couldn't move.

Yeah, this was a known issue, but code was tweaked to minimalize this behavior. I hadn't seen or heard of it happening since the room was actually made.

ErikH2000
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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Beef Row wrote:
Maybe you could do a nice little hold like Smallsome Swicks in your spare time. Though I realize DROD is already somewhat a spare time activity. But it would be nice to see, if you ever found the chance.

I'm about 5/10s of the way through a simple little 10-room hold that is completely focused on Aumtlich. I worked on it on some train rides, where my inability to access the internet allowed me a fair excuse to shirk the other work I was supposed to be doing on my business trip.

If and when I finish the thing, I'll put it on Architecture and get some feedback. I feel that there are lots of architects out there that have learned more about designing rooms than I have, so I really won't be out to impress anybody with my stuff. Or in other words... go easy on me.

-Erik

____________________________
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Unspeakable
Level: Goblin
Rank Points: 17
Registered: 04-14-2007
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I've played the original DROD and JTRH and enjoyed TCB. The new elements are great additions to the game, my main issue with them is that all the various floor tiles are getting hard to distinguish now and it's caused me a lot of confusion while trying to solve rooms.

There were many good rooms but here are some that stood out to me:

Aumtlich/mirror rooms - These were clever and trapping the aumtlich always feels like a real achievement. I was disappointed not to see more aumtlich in the final levels.

Archival Catacombs 3S2W - felt like an Indiana Jones movie.

Torture Chambers 1S3W, Forgotten Ruins 2N2W - best use of platforms in the game, and two of the most fun rooms to solve because all the elements worked nicely together.

Frozen Depths 2N3W - memorable because the fighting here actually felt like teamwork

Pirate Hideout 1N1W - the best of the 'eyeball laser security grid' rooms.

Abyssian Fortress 2N -

Abyssian Fortress 1W -

River Dugan 3S4E -

Lowest Proper secret room -


Rooms I didn't like:

Quest for Knowledge secret room - this much backtracking would be acceptable with an old school orb puzzle, but not with the way this room is set up.

Rooms with too many builders in general - Their collisions with each other and other monsters in the room make things unpredictable and annoying. Lowest Proper 1N1E glitched on me too and it's bad when I see this as being a good thing. Also when



Rasarus Archipelago 2N1W, Abyssian Fortress 2S - This type of room where you have to clear tar with a mimic with no other interesting puzzle point is a pet hate of mine. Takes too long manoeuvering the stupid mimic around.

Abyssian Fortress 2S1W - Singled out as the worst example of platform abuse. Gathering all the little platforms together is really tedious. Abyssian Fortress was very much a love/hate level, in general the room solutions felt unnecessarily long but there were some great ideas here.

First few rooms in River Dugan - Being unable to slide diagonally on that 1 tile platform when next to a monster or piece of terrain caught me out. Repeatedly. It's just intuitive to try and slide diagonally after doing it for so long.

NiroZ
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Unspeakable wrote:
First few rooms in River Dugan - Being unable to slide diagonally on that 1 tile platform when next to a monster or piece of terrain caught me out. Repeatedly. It's just intuitive to try and slide diagonally after doing it for so long.

I feel your pain.

Banjooie
Level: Smitemaster

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Interlude: AGV

bandit1200
Level: Master Delver
Rank Points: 290
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I'd just like to say that Holding Vats - Twice West is a horrible, horrible room. In my opinion. It's the type of room that makes me want to give up DROD and go do some work instead. Architects who design rooms like this should have a length of briar shoved where the sun doesn't shine, and then be made to play Mystery Case Files clones for eternity.

OK, just one more try before I give up and go do some work.

Tahnan
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I'm pleased to hear that Erik's working on an aumtlich hold; I feel like they've got some really excellent potential that didn't come out in its full glory in TCB. Well, of course, that's the nature of TCB: lots of things to cover, so nothing's going to get used to its full potential. That's why we've got user holds. (I liked the aumtlich secret room a lot, by the way.)

I'm with Unspeakable on a lot of his (her?) opinions. (Except perhaps FD. The stalwarts still just confuse me more than anything else; manipulating them still feels like a little bit of random guesswork.)

Banjooie: ouch. I wonder how painful that was. But not enough to in fact try doing it.

And I totally sympathize about Holding Vats: 2W. It's pretty solidly my worst score in TCB, other than a secret room I wasn't remotely trying to optimize. (Well, I had a few that were worse, but I've improved those. The thing about HV:2W is that the thought of tackling that room again kind of scares me.)

Briareos
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Tahnan wrote:
Banjooie: ouch. I wonder how painful that was. But not enough to in fact try doing it.

Eh? For me, it wasn't painful at all - you can step diagonally across an Aumtlich's gaze when he looks diagonally, that makes things a lot easier. Also, starting off with the rightcorrect Aumtlich also helps.

np: New Order - Everything's Gone Green (Singles (Disc 1))

____________________________
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R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

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[Last edited by Briareos at 04-14-2007 07:40 PM : fixed an ambiguity there]

Yellow_Mage
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Haha, Banjooie... that was interestingly done. Sigh, I wish I had a demo of AF: 2N. It would probably the most laughable demo I've ever made, but I checkpoint restarted that room so many times I don't know where it has gone...


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Banjooie
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Actually, I started with the second from the right. But nonetheless, yeah, that wasn't so bad. Didn't even drop any off of platforms.

Tahnan
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Briareos wrote:

Tahnan wrote:
Banjooie: ouch. I wonder how painful that was. But not enough to in fact try doing it.

Eh? For me, it wasn't painful at all...

What I didn't realize was that you could step on a monster to kill it (having gone through the Negotiator level clearly unable to do so, I just didn't think of it). I thought he had to drop them all off the platform, which sounds much harder.

Briareos
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Tahnan wrote:
I thought he had to drop them all off the platform, which sounds much harder.

Heh. That's what I did, but all it requires is stepping on the one edge of the platform that allows you to land it and disembark again in two turns - not that complicated if the platform only has 9 tiles (hint: it's one of the edges).

np: Richie Hawtin - Noch Nah(r) (DE9 - Transitions)

____________________________
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

Kevin_P86
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Tahnan wrote:

Briareos wrote:

Tahnan wrote:
Banjooie: ouch. I wonder how painful that was. But not enough to in fact try doing it.

Eh? For me, it wasn't painful at all...

What I didn't realize was that you could step on a monster to kill it (having gone through the Negotiator level clearly unable to do so, I just didn't think of it). I thought he had to drop them all off the platform, which sounds much harder.

But didn't you need to kill them that way in 2N1W of the same level (which you had to have beaten to drop the blue door in 4N)?

____________________________
+++++[>+++++<-]>[>+++>++++>+++++<<<-]>.>+.>-------.<++++.+++++.

Tahnan
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Kevin_P86 wrote:

Tahnan wrote:
What I didn't realize was that you could step on a monster to kill it (having gone through the Negotiator level clearly unable to do so, I just didn't think of it).

But didn't you need to kill them that way in 2N1W of the same level (which you had to have beaten to drop the blue door in 4N)?

Don't go confusing me with facts, buster.

Basically, what I meant was, having seen the fegundos in the room it didn't even occur to me to kill them otherwise; and much later, when Banjooie posted his comment, I'd forgotten you could.

Perndog
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Oh wow. I didn't see those fegundos either. But I didn't think the room was that hard..

Pinnacle
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So, I just conquered TCB. I considered it to be forty-one hours, eleven minutes and seventeen seconds well spent. My favorite level was probably AF, with PH a close second. So when will DROD:TSS be coming?

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Twice (adv.): Once too often.
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Banjooie
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I would assume in about...

mrimer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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Well...well...TCB beat DNF to release. So there!

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

Tahnan
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2460
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Sorry, what? I haven't quite been following the thread--I just got my copy of The Last Dangerous Visions.

AlefBet
Level: Smitemaster
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mrimer wrote:
Well...well...TCB beat DNF to release. So there!

I guess TCB made a pretty sorry showing for the Vaporware awards. Oh, well. We can try again with TSS.

____________________________
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++Adam H. Peterson