Looking over the rooms, I've noted that in a lot of cases (particularly the rooms 4N2W and 4N4E) the architects seemed to expect much greater ability of progression than was actually given. I'd like to call attention to the fact that both of my rooms (6N4W and 6N2E) can be passed through in any direction without messing with anything.
Some comments:
*In 4N2W, what's the big idea with the character that builds an open tar gate at (4,11) when all trapdoors are dropped? Why not just make that square a trapdoor gate and thus indicate its function?
*mxvladi's zombies, while a good idea, are really powerful. Consider the fact that they have 50 HP and 5 DEF. This means that in order to kill them in
five hits, the player needs 15 ATK, or 5 ATK gems picked up on the level. This is a lot of ATK, considering how stingy the rest of you seemed to be with the gems. Zombies always get at least one more hit on the player than the player gets on it, so without any DEF upgrades, zombies do 22 damage per hit. Again, since DEF upgrades are few and far between, this amount isn't going down very much. What we end up with is something that is going to take a lot of HP for the player to kill (~100-150 when prepared, ~200 when not), and this is just for one zombie - which can revive itself in two turns once killed. (Plus zombies are blocking all of the entrances to mxvladi's rooms, so they can't even be crossed without fighting two, and they'll reappear later. Urgh!)
What we could do is either reduce the zombie's HP (possibly to 40) or not give it the first attack on the player. It's a good idea to have tough monsters that the player has to think about preparing for before attacking, but I don't like how this idea is combined with regeneration in bits where the player really doesn't need it, in addition to difficulty.
*It also seems like a lot of you implemented incremental challenges that depend on the player having already gathered a lot of statistics (4N2W, 2N2E, 4N2E, 4N4E) wherein a reward is sealed off if the player doesn't work hard enough to get at it. One or two of those per level is fine, but I think we have too many here.
*We should keep in mind that the skeleton key in 4N4E could potentially be used on the blue door, and that it's not too hard to get to if the player enters by the lower west entrance. Nuntar, are you OK with people skipping the level boss in this manner? Skeleton keys are good for opening greckle doors that require billions of greckles to open.
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Anyhow, since my room 6N4W contains the only blue key on the level, Nuntar is going to be working on that room to replace the wraithwing with a scripted character boss that should be approximately as hard to defeat as the original wraithwing. Nuntar may be changing the reward structure of that room, since getting the blue key is now compulsory in that room and thus renders my reward structure irrelevant.
Overall, I was expecting all of you to be far more generous to the player than you ended up being. It looks as though this was an assumption everyone made at the same time. I'll try and help out with fixing this level's impossibility, (has everyone spotted that it doesn't seem particularly possible to bring more than 1,500 health to 6N4W to fight the wraithwing boss?), as well as making the level easier. I mean, come on, this is level 1. People shouldn't be having problems with it; it's supposed to be a nice easy warmup.
Anyhow, that's the end of my rant. Hopefully this project should turn out OK.
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[Last edited by Chaco at 04-26-2009 08:32 PM]
