Ever glued a quarter to the pavement and watched people try to pick it up? Or put a thumbtack on a chair? Or gave somebody a laxative under the pretense it was a normal candy bar?
"
Maybe I did things like that when I was ten, but these days I'm above mean pranks."
Awwwww, come on. Quit acting all holier-than-thou! It's time to play cheap tricks! With what I have in mind, nobody will get hurt. Well, no permanent damage, anyhow. Err... no permanent
physical damage, that is to say.
In this contest, you will make a hold that has a cheap trick in it. The hapless player will set out dutifully to solve your hold and come across some nasty problem that isn't at all fair or sportsmanlike. You could leave a few hundred red herrings laying about. You could blanket terrible mazes in tar. You could make the player go all the way back to the beginning of a challenge after a small mistake. Or the player might even discover through some painful process that your hold is not even solvable.
Rules
1. Each contestant must post his hold as an attachment in a reply to this topic before the deadline, which is...
Local Time:08-06-2007 at 01:00 AM
2. When posting your hold as an attachment, you should specify the right licensing option for your hold. If you don't care how other people may use it later, (i.e. to add a copy of it to a compilation) then you can just leave the default selection of "
Public Domain"
. If you're confused about the licensing options, please just ask, and someone will help.
3. Your hold can be of any size, small or large, and contain any combination of elements.
4. You can embed custom graphics and sound into the hold, but no permission will be given for use of graphics/sound/other media from any of Caravel's commerical products. All of the media from
DROD: Architects' Edition is available for your use. You must create or gain permission for any other media you use in the hold.
5. No setup steps other than importing the hold are allowed. You can't require the player to install modded graphics, for example. No instructions for playing the hold can be given outside of the hold. In general, anything that requires the player to reference information or do something outside of the game isn't allowed.
6. If your hold has a solution, there should be instructions inside of the hold that the player can use to reach a solution. These can be given in the form of a victory demo, a series of scrolls, a character speech, or other ways. But whatever method, it should be easy to discover and understand. And if the player doesn't want to cheat, it should also be easy to avoid reading the solution accidentally. The judgment of how well you've given the solution will be left to voters.
7. If your hold doesn't have a solution, there should be an explanation of this for the player inside of the hold (i.e. "
Since you can't ever reach the northwest chamber in 1N2E, that room can't be conquered"
). The same guidelines for describing a hold solution apply to a non-solution explanations--make it easy to discover, easy to avoid.
8. Each contestant can submit from 1 to 3 holds.
9. You can update a submitted hold with a newer version as long as you do it before the submission deadline. You can replace an existing attachment or make a new reply post with the new version. For the latter method,
be sure to remove the obsolete attachment. If you leave multiple versions laying around, voters may be confused and vote based on the wrong version.
10. After the submission deadline passes, we'll have a poll where all submitted holds are rated. Voters will be asked to rate how much they "
appreciated"
each hold with a focus on the trick itself. Originality will probably be a factor here in voting, but I know that it is about impossible to know every authoring trick that has been used in previous DROD holds. I don't know if the trick I used in my example hold has already been done, because I've only played a small subset of the holds.
Winners
The author of the highest-rated hold will receive 100 rank points and any item of his choosing from the
Prize Pile. The author of the second-highest-rated hold will receive 50 rank points, and third-highest will receive 25 rank points. If you have more than one submitted hold, only your highest-rated hold will be considered for placement.
Anyone who hasn't participated in a CaravelNet contest before will get a "
rookie"
bonus of 10 rank points.
Strategy Considerations
You want to be mean, but also you want to be clever. It's no good to just run up and punch somebody in the face. But if you build a devious face-punching machine, then the guy that gets his face punched will surely admire your work! I've attached a hold I made that is perhaps somewhat clever so you can have a concrete example. I think the classic cheap trick hold is probably
The Fool's Errand by Ricky. Here the trick is so good, that you don't even mind how evil it is.
I personally think that the hold should be centered around the trick, and you shouldn't attempt to gain favor with voters by including a lot of story or puzzle content that isn't integral to the trick. It may take one room or one hundred rooms to pull it off, but don't add non-essential content.
You run a risk of confusing voters by posting multiple versions of one hold. Or you might "
spoil the punchline"
by an earlier version not carrying the trick as you'd intended. Test well, then submit your hold.
-Erik
____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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[Last edited by ErikH2000 at 08-05-2007 08:32 PM]
