DiMono
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Here are some tips for hold creation. Some of what follows comes almost directly from the DROD architecture help files, which should be read as well.

1) Make sure every room is solvable. The last thing any player or architect wants to deal with is an unsolvable room. If Beethro and his sword must be in a specific orientation to complete the room, make sure there's a way back to the previous room so the player can get in that orientation.

2) Make sure there's a way to the exit from every room in the level. I once played a hold where the entrance was unexitable. If you plan to have a path from which you cannot return, make sure you include a scroll that warns of this in some way.

3) Make sure stairs go where they're supposed to.

4) Include Checkpoints. Even if the room doesn't involve a puzzle, killing monsters is long work. Would you want to kill 500 roaches, make a typo, and have to kill those roaches all over again?

5) Aim for fun, not difficulty. Remember that people will play your hold because they think they'll enjoy it, not out of some unspoken duty. If your hold is unreasonably hard without being fun to figure out, people will stop playing it.

6) Avoid trial-and-error puzzles. Having to restore and try option seven is no fun. Good ways to avoid these puzzles are not covering things with tar, avoiding puzzles based on specific monster movements, and limiting the number of orbs in a given room. This is a guideline, not a rule, as a little bit of anything can be interesting.

7) Avoid exploiting quirks. Don't make rooms that depend on some game anomaly you discovered by accident. If you find one and just can't resist, include a helpful scroll.

8) Don't have too many slashfests. Mowing down monsters can be entertaining, but doing it in every room gets really old really quick. If you really want a room with tons of monsters, design it in such a way that the player is forced to make some tactical decisions, so some variance to alternating between q and w appears. Also, if your point can be made with 50 monsters, don't use 500.

9) Don't give incomplete levels in your hold. Every once in a while someone uploads 2 1/2 levels, where the third level is a work in progress and not actually ready for public consumption yet. This gets frustrating from a playing perspective, as you find out there was no reason for you to have spent the last 2 hours on this level you'll just have to replay in the next version of the hold. If you're offering something for download, make sure it's a finished product, even if that means only including 1 level of an eventual 20.

[Edited by DiMono on 01-23-2004 at 10:29 PM GMT]

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Oneiromancer
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These are all good points. Some of the more important of these ideas are already presented in the sticky thread at the top of this forum. But to point out one thing...

DiMono wrote:
3) Make sure stairs go where they're supposed to.

There is currently a bug that resets the end stairs to take you to the last level again. It sucks. So, if something like this happens don't necessarily blame the hold author.

Game on,

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Mattcrampy
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Hmm... DiMono, would you like to make this wordy so I can put it up onto the site?

For now, I'll sticky it.

Matt

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Tscott
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1) Make sure every room is solvable. The last thing any player or architect wants to deal with is an unsolvable room. If Beethro and his sword must be in a specific orientation to complete the room, make sure there's a way back to the previous room so the player can get in that orientation.

To this I'd add, Make sure you actually solved all rooms yourself before uploading the hold for comments. It doesn't count if you've "worked it out on paper" or "think it should be solveable". Actually play all the rooms you make (and if you change them somehow, play them again). There maybe something you've missed that makes it unsolveable-like not leaving a space to step off the last trap door, for example. This example has happened twice (that I know of) to two different hold designers with both authors just assuming the room would work.

For best results, actually play your entire hold within the game, instead of testing each room on its own in the editor. Another way of thinking about it- If YOU can't be bothered to actually play through the torturous-ultra-clever-and-devious hold (or even a simple one) you've just designed, what makes you think others will want to?

[Edited by Tscott on 12-15-2003 at 02:54 PM GMT]

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The_Red_Hawk
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Well, I find that playtesting can work in a way where I solve two parts of a room separately, just one change to kill the last roach, etc., etc. It's worked for me.

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Tscott
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The_Red_Hawk wrote:
Well, I find that playtesting can work in a way where I solve two parts of a room separately,

What's to say that the time taken to solve the first part of a room won't cause the second part to be unsolveable? Like the room pictured at the top of page 5 of your thread- You may have tested to make sure (Part one) the 100 so wraithwings could be killed upon entering the room, but didn't take into account (Part two) the queen on the small island that needs to be killed by a mimic before she spawns.

just one change to kill the last roach, etc., etc.

I've found that sometimes minor changes can break other things in a room. It won't happen every time, of course, but if you add a few roaches, add a couple more trap doors, or whatever, it's best to solve the room from the start to make sure it doesn't cause something else to break. I've actually broke a room where I took out a brain from the room. Taking out brains generally make things easier, but in this case it made a solveable room unsolveable. Of course I found out the room was broken by playtesting the room right after making this "minor" change and long before I ever uploaded that hold to this forum.

It's worked for me.

how many corrections have you needed to make to your room because other people playtesting your hold have found something broken? From just skimming through your thread, I see a lot of people pointing out impossible rooms and missing puzzle elements and other problems that could've easily been found by you if you had fully playtested your holds before uploading.

Using me as an example, I downloaded one of the very first versions of your hold, played it until I found myself in an unsolveable room. I then got frustrated that I'd been wasting my time on it and swore I wouldn't download your hold again until it was clear you were FULLY testing every room to make sure they're solveable... (sorry, I may give this another look soon. Is it almost done?)

Anyway, unless it's a room for a longest-room contest with a billion move solution or some arena challege that you've marked as unrequired, because it's unknown if it's solveable-- is it really too much to ask that you play through your own rooms before you expect others to try them?



[Edited by Tscott on 12-16-2003 at 09:45 AM GMT: toned down a few opinions and tried to stick to factual examples]

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The_Red_Hawk
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First, calm down.

I remember someone (I think it was you) saying an almost exact copy of this letter under an earlier thread of Deep Hold.

Tscott wrote:

How many corrections have you needed to make to your room because other people playtesting your hold have found something broken? From just skimming through your thread, I see a lot of people pointing out impossible rooms and missing puzzle elements and other problems that could've easily been found by you if you had fully playtested your holds before uploading.

All that was in levels 1-3 which I made before knowing the "rules" of architects. The recently found level 2 error was from long ago, it's just that people were already all higher up and no-one played it.

I swore I wouldn't download your hold again until it was clear you were FULLY testing every room to make sure they're solveable.

I have been doing this since level 4.

Is it really too much to ask that you play through your own rooms before you expect others to try them?

As said before - I *do*.

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eytanz
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Individual holds aside (and for the record, I agree with Red_Hawk's assessment that the major problems in his hold are confined to the early levels - there were one or two hiccups later, but that's bound to happen in something that size) -

This is all good advice, and I'm glad it got stickied. An important corrolary I want to add (to no-one's surprise):

Use checkpoints. I know some people don't like checkpoints. That's why Erik and the dev team, in their ultimate wisdom, added the option to turn them off. Let those people do so, and design your hold for the rest of us. There are only two kinds of rooms I can think of that don't need checkpoints - A - rooms which never require a restart, because it's impossible to either die or get stuck in them, and don't contain "soft" restarts either (cases where a mistake causes the room to return to it's initial state and you have to start over - this can mainly happen in orb puzzles), and B - rooms which can be completed in 50 turns or less. While some rooms just can't have checkpoints, the ideal should be that any room that doesn't fall under either catagory should have one, at least. And remember that a checkpoint isn't any good unless you place it somewhere which makes sense from the room progress-wise (don't place a checkpoint you can only reach after 1% of the room, and no checkpoints for the rest of the 99%), and which can be reached by the player without much chance of screwing him or herself over.

Using checkpoints as red herrings is fine, but trap checkpoints aren't sufficient to satisfy the above conditions - if you have a room with one, and it's doesn't fall under A or B above, add a real usable checkpoint as well.

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Tscott
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The_Red_Hawk wrote:
First, calm down.

Don't worry. I'm calm.

Sorry, I really didn't mean to single out your work. I've seen similar mistakes by nearly everyone, even me, but since you replied with a 'I don't really have to test things too strictly' sort of response I decided to use a few of your rooms as concrete examples that you (and others) would be familar with to illustrate my point. I should've left any personal opinions out of it as they weren't needed.

I did go back and edit my reply with that in mind where I could (but I didn't touch the parts you quoted, out of respect to your replies). The point I was really trying to make is:

When I test my holds, I play my entire level within the actual game (not the editor) and once I complete it I always travel back through all the rooms to make sure it possible to backtrack. I also try to find any trivial solutions, or alternative solutions on my own. I think of it as a courtesy step that should be done before uploading a hold here. It makes it easier for the others who I'm asking for help by testing and giving opinions on my hold.

And, of course, I'm not perfect. Each hold I've made so far, I have needed to make some changes to based on comments by others, even after testing many times on my own. Of course, those changes were much less than I would've needed if I had done no testing at all.

[Edited by Tscott on 12-16-2003 at 10:21 AM GMT]

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its bearings on Cair Paravel. O my love, O it was a funny little thing to be the ones to've seen.
-Joanna Newsom "Bridges and Balloons"

Mattcrampy
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One thing that I want to add is that playtesting makes it really easy to see where you'll need checkpoints. As a rule, you should place checkpoints so they can be reached immediately after doing something that requires a lot of effort, and they should be placed so that it's unlikely that moving to it will break the puzzle, otherwise it's pointless. Unless that's what you mean to do.

Another thing I've found useful is that if your hold has an unusual design, for example you want players to go over a room four times, it's a very good idea to actually do that, not just test the room. You want to try and break the room before your players do. This is only really a huge concern on rooms where you're putting a lot of pressure on the design (I've got a few I can't resolve, which is why my 10-room hold hasn't grown to 30), but it's good to remember.

Matt

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The_Red_Hawk
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Eytanz, how do you turn off checkpoints? (I try to add them wherever needed, but sometimes I miss some).

Anyways, Tscott, I used to test my holds normally, but then something happened and I lost a few levels of data, so I don't do that any more.

And Matt, if you need to play four times, I play it four times.

[Edited by The_Red_Hawk on 12-16-2003 at 05:31 PM GMT]

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DiMono
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This sort of turned in to "Let's pick on Red Hawk because he's made some mistakes in the past," which I didn't really want it to...

Anyway, all that aside, I'm certainly willing to make things more verbose for inclusion on the website. I'll work on this today and add it to the bottom of this thread ...later today.

Something I want to add, that I'll put here so I don't forget it:

Test your rooms AS YOU BUILD THEM, as this will save you time later.

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DiMono
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Alright, here's what I have for a list of hold design tips that can potentially be used on the site:


Tips for Architects:

These are some helpful tips for those who wish to add to the growing library of places where Beethro Budkin has murdered everything. Some of what follows is copied from the DROD-AE help files, which you should also read.

1) Make sure every room is solvable. The last thing any player or architect wants to deal with is an unsolvable room. If Beethro and his sword must be in a specific orientation to complete the room, make sure there's a way back to the previous room so the player can get in that orientation. In addition, make sure you can play through every level from start to finish. You might find something unexpected while you do this, so it helps identify potential problems as you go.

2) Make sure there's a way to the exit from every room in the level. I once played a hold where the entrance was unexitable. If you plan to have a path from which you cannot return, make sure you include a scroll that warns of this in some way. It's also a good idea to make sure you can always return to the entrance, which is along the same lines.

3) Make sure stairs go where they're supposed to. Occasionally an architect might misclick on the destination for the stairs, making them return to the beginning of the hold, restart the current level, or skip one entirely. The easiest way to make sure of this is to play your hold all the way through, and make sure the right levels come up at the right times.

As of 1.6.4 there is a bug that causes some staircases to return to the beginning of the hold instead of ending it. If this happens and it looks like your stairs go where they're supposed to, then verify the stairs go to the right place and leave it alone - it's just a bug.

4) Include Checkpoints. Even if the room doesn't involve a puzzle, killing monsters is long work. Would you want to kill 500 roaches, make a typo, and have to kill those roaches all over again? As a rule, any room that takes more than about 50 moves to solve should have a checkpoint. Also, all checkpoints should be in logically useful places.

5) Aim for fun, not difficulty. Remember that people will play your hold because they think they'll enjoy it, not out of some unspoken duty. If your hold is unreasonably hard without being fun to figure out, people will stop playing it. As an easy test, play the hold yourself. If you can't get through it without becoming frustrated enough to stop playing, neither will anyone else.

6) Avoid trial-and-error puzzles. Having to restore and try option seven is no fun. Good ways to avoid these puzzles are not covering things with tar, avoiding puzzles based on specific monster movements, and limiting the number of orbs in a given room. This is a guideline, not a rule, as a little bit of anything can be interesting.

7) Avoid exploiting quirks. Don't make rooms that depend on some game anomaly you discovered by accident. For instance, if you discover that when a goblin enters a square adjacent to a roach queen on the turn before the eggs lay, one of them will hatch before the others, don't make that part of the puzzle. If you do find a quirk and just can't resist, include a helpful scroll so the player knows what's going on.

Don't have too many slashfests. Mowing down monsters can be entertaining, but doing it in every room gets really old really quick. If you really want a room with tons of monsters, design it in such a way that the player is forced to make some tactical decisions, so some variance to alternating between q and w appears. Also, if your point can be made with 50 monsters, don't use 500.

9) Don't be afraid to put parts of your hold up in the Architecture forum for people to play through. The worst thing that can happen is the players find trivial solutions or room bugs that you didn't notice, and they tell you about it so you can make your hold better. You can always post up another version later, which will be played as well.

10) Don't give incomplete levels in your hold. Every once in a while someone uploads 2 1/2 levels, where the third level is a work in progress and not actually ready for public consumption yet. This gets frustrating from a playing perspective, as you find out there was no reason for you to have spent the last 2 hours on this level you'll just have to replay in the next version of the hold. If you're offering something for download, make sure it's a finished product, even if that means only including 1 level of an eventual 20.

11) If you're uploading a new version of an old hold, and all that's changed is the addition of some levels, include a staircase in the first level entrance to go directly to the new levels. Can you imagine having to play through 16 levels to get to the new level 17 every time a new level emerges?

12) Playtest rooms as they are constructed. This seems like a lot of wasted time as you do it, but in the long-run it will save you frustration. I always test every part of a room as I make it, so if something I add suddenly makes the room unsolvable I know exactly what it is. If I had designed the entire room and only then started playing it, I would have had to decosntruct every part of the room to isolate the problem.

I hope these twelve points help you design holds that are both fun to play, and fun to make.

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The_Red_Hawk
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Isn't that just most of the stuff listed under "New Architects, Please Read"?

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DiMono
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Some of it is, yes, but Matt asked me to make it verbose so he could put it up on the site.

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Mattcrampy
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Thanks DiMono! Perfect.

Matt

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DiMono
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My pleasure. While you're here, were you able to decipher the perl script I sent you?

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The_Red_Hawk
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DiMono: Two things.

First, under tip 11, did you say 16 because Deep Hold has 16 levels? (As far as I know, it's the only hold except Dugan's that's ever gotten that far).

Second, you forgot one tip that I have been reminded of several times in the early construction of my hold. "If you're going to include game elements, make sure they have a purpose." In other words, don't include extra exits, walls, etc. unless there's a reason.

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Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
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agaricus5
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The_Red_Hawk wrote:
First, under tip 11, did you say 16 because Deep Hold has 16 levels? (As far as I know, it's the only hold except Dugan's that's ever gotten that far).

That's going beyond boastful.

Please, Red_Hawk, do we need to have a running boast commentary about "how big and splendid and good my dungeon is/will be". It may be pure coincidence that DiMono chose 16 as his number and it just so happens your hold is 16 levels large, so I don't think he is pointing specifically at your hold.

Second, you forgot one tip that I have been reminded of several times in the early construction of my hold. "If you're going to include game elements, make sure they have a purpose." In other words, don't include extra exits, walls, etc. unless there's a reason.

That's silly. If you want to put walls, crumbly walls, exits or whatever, but that don't do anything, in your rooms, then it's purely a matter of taste. Plus, sometimes putting unnecessary things can help to improve the aesthetic qualities of a level as a whole. Putting elements that block up other objects in a room, or putting too many monsters to make the room impossible, or tedious (if the previous room(s) were tedious as well) is a bad idea.

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The_Red_Hawk
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agaricus5 wrote: Please, Red_Hawk, do we need to have a running boast commentary about "how big and splendid and good my dungeon is/will be". It may be pure coincidence that DiMono chose 16 as his number and it just so happens your hold is 16 levels large, so I don't think he is pointing specifically at your hold.

No, I am not boasting, I am just wondering if it is or is not a coincidence.

That's silly. If you want to put walls, crumbly walls, exits or whatever, but that don't do anything, in your rooms, then it's purely a matter of taste. Plus, sometimes putting unnecessary things can help to improve the aesthetic qualities of a level as a whole. Putting elements that block up other objects in a room, or putting too many monsters to make the room impossible, or tedious (if the previous room(s) were tedious as well) is a bad idea.

If they improve the aesthetic quality, they are not unneccessary. I was reminded a couple of times that it's not good to use them without a reason.

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Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
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DiMono
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If I recall correctly, game elements having a purpose is covered in the DROD help files. Even so, if used very sparingly something seemingly useless can add effect or storyline to your hold.

As for whether I was specifically referring to Deep Hold, that hardly seems relevant. If I wasn't referring to it, then it's just a big number to get the point across. If I was referring to it, then it's a hold people are familiar with and know about and can relate to, which gets the point across. Either way the same result is reached, so it doesn't really seem important if I was picking on you.

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Takvorian
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After playing a few levels of several new holds, i'm sure there's something wrong with these hold design tips. I'd like to postulate the REAL Architects 101 rules for level/hold design:

1) People who play your levels are your ENEMIES. Make their lives as miserable as possible.

2) Remember: You don't design levels for others to enjoy, but to annoy them. Make your point clear by dropping an appropriate scroll now and then.

3) Use monster generators (queens/tar mothers). Make sure they generate at least 29 new monsters each production cycle (30 turns). If the player can't kill a monster every turn..., well: it's not your fault...

4) Make sure your generators are nearly indestructable.
A good idea is to use tar behind force arrows.

5) Use brains so your monsters know their way around the room. A room without a brain isn't really a room.

6) Big hordes of monsters will sometimes move a bit erratic when brains are in the room. Exploit this quirk at all costs.

7) Design traps. Good ideas are yellow doors that can only be closed and never open again, or red doors that can't be opened at all...

Design rooms that depend on speed. Good ideas are passageways that get filled with tar and cannot ever be opened
after a few grow cycles.

9) Playtest every room. If you can finish it in less than 150 tries, there is something wrong with the design. It is way too easy.

I hope this will be helpful for hold architects-to-be

DiMono
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Do I detect a touch of cynicism in your tips rewrite?

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joker5
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*watches as the Cynic-O-Meter on the wall bursts into flames, completely immoliating everything in a five mile radius*

Nope.

~joker5

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agaricus5
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Takvorian wrote:
After playing a few levels of several new holds, i'm sure there's something wrong with these hold design tips. I'd like to postulate the REAL Architects 101 rules for level/hold design:

Clever and observant you are (To a point).

Admittedly some of this is the stance I take when designing rooms for playtesting, but only because I'm in the developing process now and need to create the difficult rooms first. After I have finished exploiting things, I'll then go back and add some more easy rooms to balance the levels out.

Oh, and these are general comments based on all the holds I have seen, not just referring to myself.

1) People who play your levels are your ENEMIES. Make their lives as miserable as possible.

This I do not agree with. Although I may say that sometimes people do create rooms to annoy, I believe that most really hard rooms are created to really challenge experienced players who have completed Dugan's Dungeon before and are expert swordsmen.

2) Remember: You don't design levels for others to enjoy, but to annoy them. Make your point clear by dropping an appropriate scroll now and then.

Again, this is only evident in one or two holds, although I have complained about this in the threads. On the whole, people don't tend to employ this method to frustrate the player, and some holds even contain a story that actually is encouraging to the player to play on.

3) Use monster generators (queens/tar mothers). Make sure they generate at least 29 new monsters each production cycle (30 turns). If the player can't kill a monster every turn..., well: it's not your fault...

Only in certain cases. This is usually due to poor playtesting or a solution that requires more subtle solutions requiring movement of spawners before killing them.

4) Make sure your generators are nearly indestructable.
A good idea is to use tar behind force arrows.

I think this is done for a reason. Putting tar behind a force arrow to stop a player getting to it too quickly is one way I can think of of prevented unintended solutions.

5) Use brains so your monsters know their way around the room. A room without a brain isn't really a room.

Not always is this bad. Many times does a brain directed horde actually become much easier to kill than if there were no brain at all. In addition, A few brained monsters would make some rooms involving manipulation easier, and sometimes is necessary for a solution to work. (See L6 1S 1W of Bavato's Dungeon)

6) Big hordes of monsters will sometimes move a bit erratic when brains are in the room. Exploit this quirk at all costs.

Sometimes, but certainly not always. Like the above point, this is sometimes necessary.

7) Design traps. Good ideas are yellow doors that can only be closed and never open again, or red doors that can't be opened at all...

Admittedly guilty of this one myself. However, I don't know if it is really oftenly used (I doubt it) and do think that it's sometimes necessary to ensure complete clearout of a section of a room before moving on.

Design rooms that depend on speed. Good ideas are passageways that get filled with tar and cannot ever be opened
after a few grow cycles.

Something I am dabbling in properly right now. It's fun keeping players on their toes and forces efficiency. If players have to control tar growth from entering a corridor, it's even better!

9) Playtest every room. If you can finish it in less than 150 tries, there is something wrong with the design. It is way too easy.

Not really. Architects often know their rooms better than the players do, so while you are likely to need 100 tries to complete a room, the architect may know the solution offhand.

I hope this will be helpful for hold architects-to-be

Well, you could argue that...

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DiMono
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1181
Registered: 09-13-2003
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Something that should be noted is that not all suggestions are taken seriously, and not all things you see would be suggested methods. Some holds or rooms might be done in a very annoying way, but that by no means suggests that ALL holds or rooms should be done in the same way.

Everyone wants the player to get something different out of their hold, and that will be dictated by how they build it. Also, everyone has a different amount skill in creating holds that are fun, or puzzles that are challenging, or in mixing them together.

Any dungeon element can be used well, and any dungeon element can be used poorly. Sometimes an idea ends up just not working well, which is fine. This is a learning process for everyone, as we get more practice we'll get better at making holds, and the puzzles will become more fun and less annoying.

Just because a few holds are a pain to play through doesn't mean that all holds should be ignored on the assumption that they'll be the same. It's true that some holds are really annoying, but there are some others that are truly enjoyable. Just because your experience in playing user-made holds has been worse than you hoped so far doesn't mean it will continue in the same way in the future.

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Takvorian
Level: Roachling
Rank Points: 12
Registered: 01-21-2004
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DiMono wrote:
Just because your experience in playing user-made holds has been worse than you hoped so far doesn't mean it will continue in the same way in the future.

Thank you for pointing that out

I really enjoy playing D.R.o.D. (played through Durgan's Dungeon twice), and i'm a bit masochistic (as I bet most DROD players have to be ), but only to a certain point... So I'm really looking forward for new levels/holds that make my brain ache and not just my hands...

Bernd.

The_Red_Hawk
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 783
Registered: 09-02-2003
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Takvorian wrote:
So I'm really looking forward for new levels/holds that make my brain ache and not just my hands...

Well, there are plenty of user-made holds out there.....

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Slashing, whirling, diving, twirling,
Snapping, turning, rising, swirling,
Screeching, flipping, gliding, sliding,
The red hawk's dance of death.

.....the king of the skies.....

b0rsuk
Level: Smiter

Rank Points: 489
Registered: 11-23-2003
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I have a question. How much should .hold file be to keep it reasonable for download ? You see, my hold in progresss has 4 playable rooms and 70kb ! Of course this is due to image floor abuse. What do you think would be reasonable upper limit ?

Of course I will optimise the images, I know a few GIMP tricks.

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agaricus5
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 1838
Registered: 02-04-2003
IP: Logged

b0rsuk wrote:
I have a question. How much should .hold file be to keep it reasonable for download ? You see, my hold in progresss has 4 playable rooms and 70kb ! Of course this is due to image floor abuse. What do you think would be reasonable upper limit ?

Of course I will optimise the images, I know a few GIMP tricks.

The size (both in terms of rooms and physical data) of the hold probably has less importance to most people compared to the quality of the hold. I'm guessing people with the average internet connection nowadays wouldn't mind waiting to download a really good hold (in terms of puzzle quality), even if it is around several megabytes in size. Obviously, a hold that approaches the size of DROD itself might be too excessive, but it's highly unlikely people would abuse hold customisation to such a high level anyway.

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Resident Medic/Mycologist