Nuntar wrote:
I am, however, deeply unimpressed by the "find the one correct way to proceed" style of design. A choice very early on between taking an ATK gem before getting the sword or not doing so should make a difference to my score, possibly make the hold harder to complete, but should not force a restart and playing the entire level again.
I'm not very impressed with Nuntar's remark here. For me, on the other hand, sounds like that you are imitating the way it is done in Tendry's Tale, especially in Rule 6, but parts of that hold is "
find the one way"
and sometimes it's okay.
Completionists won't like it that an optimal route requires leaving some rooms unvisited, although the fact that greckles don't add to your score mitigates this.
That's simply not true. Real completionists will try to visit every rooms anyway whether it requires a restart or not. For example, I know many people who play Pokemon who really restarts a game to get all the monsters. What's the point of a hold if there is no choice at all in between choosing which room you should visit?
What's the point of a choice between fighting three wraithwings and losing 30 greckles or fighting three evil eyes and losing 30 greckles? There must be some advantage to choosing the harder fight, or there's no choice.
This is just as a choice as every other, the only difference is that this choice is more obvious.
It's not much fun to drop all of a large block of trapdoors. Make there be some puzzle to it.
On the other hand, I thought he wrote somewhere that this isn't a puzzle game but only a game with some choices, and I doubt putting a puzzle in there doesn't make that room any better.
Don't punish the player. Write it on your wall in letters of blood if it helps you remember. An example of punishing the player is this: Level 3 starts with a tough fight against four monsters, necessary to kill to make any progress; there is no way to amass the needed HP or stats if you don't have them already; the bonuses you need to survive the fight are at the beginning of Level 2 (so the player has to remember to make the trek back); and once you enter Level 3 there's a gate that prevents any backtracking.
It's not really punishing. Just put a savepoint before the gate just like every other normal DROD hold and no-one complains about it anymore.
Some of the harder-to-reach rooms should have been secrets
He meant "
hidden"
.
Overall, I think this hold has a lot of potential, but currently the flaws tend to get in the way of appreciating the hold's good points.
I agree with that, although most of what he mentioned didn't sound like flaws to me.
I considered the possibility after I'd written the entry on evil eyes in the DAA Architect's Handbook but didn't want to change the pristine unedited state of my posts.
I never trust holds on this board if it's the very first version, but now it seems that I shouldn't trust be trusting text that hasn't been edited yet.
But I will probably be playing the next version.
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[Last edited by Tim at 02-03-2009 01:28 PM]