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Caravel Forum : DROD Boards : Holds : The Great Adventure (Crazy Things...)
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3.2/10 (16 votes)
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Author Name:ema
Submitted By:DyRsOfDh14
Hold Name:The Great Adventure
Theme:Crazy Things...
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Number of Levels:13
Number of Rooms:121
Number of Monsters:2308
Version:DROD: The City Beneath (3.2)
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Hold Karma:0 (+10 / -10)
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File: The Great Adventure.hold (768.2 KB)
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icon The Great Adventure  
City, beach, house, ranch, cemetery and lot of more things...
05-07-2009 at 07:22 PM
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mxvladi
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Okay, I'm almost through the Cliffs of Dover(only 1S, which is actually nice room, left), and have to say that there're some things that I don't like in this hold.

1. Checkpoints are usually placed in places which even non-optimiser(I don't even talk about optimisers) won't visit, so I often had to restart room after making a stupid mistake.(for example, I'm restarting 1S 10th time already)

2. There's a room(one with a lot of slayers) which slowed down my computer(and not only mine)

3. Quite bad room design(for some reason I don't like that)

However, there were some good rooms. For example, 1S 1E. It seemed random, but with trick I used in Wolly Olly And The Adder: On The Surface 1N 2W it ws fun for me. 2E was also nice. Simple, but nice. :) 1N 2E contained maybe a little too much adders and tarstuff, but was fun to optimise.

So, so far I'm giving 4 for fun and 3,5 brains. My rating can change when I finish though.

[Last edited by mxvladi at 05-07-2009 10:36 PM]
05-07-2009 at 10:35 PM
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Tahnan
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All right, mastered.

I'm going to be really, really honest here, because no one's going to benefit from false praise, least of all the architect.

This hold was terrible. Not universally; there were things in it I liked, including some genuinely good puzzle rooms, which saved it from getting rated a "1". But it has, among other sins:

* An occasional lack of checkpoints, for instance in Abduction: 2N3E (where there are checkpoints that are easy not to hit, and not where they're most needed) and, fairly egregiously, Cliffs of Dover: 1S, where the only checkpoint in the room is nowhere near where it's needed.

* Rooms where you have to guess where the exits are, specifically the Outer Space level, which consists of nothing but guiding platforms to screen edges and bumping against square after square in the hopes that one of them is the right place to exit the room.

* Rooms that are needlessly dark, such as Dark Caves: 1E and especially Castle: 1N1W, where darkness is used to cover walls. (Note to innocent victims: there's also a set of secret rooms whose entrance is hidden by darkness.)

* Empty levels like Home and the levels off of the City (the beach, the shops, the graveyard...). Actually, The City itself also mostly consists of empty wandering.

* Terrible proofreading. I recognize that English isn't the architect's native language, but I wish he'd recognize that fact and ask for help with the spelling and grammar.

* Irritating, occasionally nigh-random scripting, such as leaving Short Road to City: 1E, or the bit of empty space that kills you in the northeasterly secret room in Abduction.

* Some really awful puzzle rooms. As mxvladi already mentioned, there's the Cliffs of Dover: 1N4E, which slows the game to a crawl (and heaven forbid if you have to undo!). There are also some boring ones, like Abduction: 2N2E; and the aforementioned Castle: 1N1W once the darkness is removed.

Any of these things, or perhaps all of these things, could have been fixed with playtesting and feedback. I don't know the history of this hold, but it certainly plays as if the architect didn't bother getting comments on it (or else did but ignored them).
05-08-2009 at 06:42 AM
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mxvladi
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Aand conquered.

Well, everything that Tahnan said is right - this hold has a lot of problems and actually could be pretty good without those problems. Checkpoints are placed badly in a lot of rooms(they're placed well in Dark Caves 1S 1W though), rooms itself are often quite annoying(I still curse Dark Caves 1N 1E), there're some rooms where player needs to guess where's exit(I mean Outer Space). And I thought I will give it 2 or 1 fun-rating, but the last two levels were actually pretty good. So, because of nice last levels I'll give it 4 for fun.

Let's see if I have enough patience to find those secret rooms in Outer Space...

[Last edited by mxvladi at 05-08-2009 10:50 PM : a little typo]
05-08-2009 at 09:19 PM
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Tahnan
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mxvladi wrote:
[Checkpoints] are placed well in Dark Caves 1S 1W...I still curse Dark Caves 1N 1E
Agreed on both counts. It's things like the checkpoints in Dark Caves 1S1W that in some ways make the rest of the hold worse. It suggests that the architect knew how to put useful checkpoints in, and just decided not to bother.

And 1N1E was indeed irritating. It's also, somewhat less relevantly, the least attractive room I've seen.

Incidentally: there's been discussion before of people being expected (though not required) to post some sort of explanation if they give a generally-liked hold a low rating. In this case, the current votes on this hold are five in the 1-4 range, and one 9. Which means that someone really liked the hold, in contrast to at least five of the rest of us; I'd encourage that person to join the discussion and say what they liked.
05-08-2009 at 10:32 PM
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DyRsOfDh14
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I give up, I suck creating holds ¬¬
05-10-2009 at 09:10 PM
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12th Archivist
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DyRsOfDh14 wrote:
I give up, I suck creating holds ¬¬
You should fix that problem. If you put yourself down and just give up, you will never learn how to make a good hold. Do you want to just sit in failure, or would you rather please us DRODiacs with a good hold?

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05-10-2009 at 09:26 PM
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DyRsOfDh14
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12th Archivist wrote:
DyRsOfDh14 wrote:
I give up, I suck creating holds ¬¬
You should fix that problem. If you put yourself down and just give up, you will never learn how to make a good hold. Do you want to just sit in failure, or would you rather please us DRODiacs with a good hold?

Well, I began creating a hold in another computer, where you chose if you want to be: Beethro, a Mimic, a Decoy, a Stalwart, or a Guard, and that will be my last hold, if it's bad, I give up. But thanks for that, I needed it. :D
05-10-2009 at 09:32 PM
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Insane
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Heh. About half the rooms are incredibly easy or trivial, the other half are staggeringly hard / near impossible.

I haven't even gotten past Cliffs of Dover.

Ranch:
Click here to view the secret text


Cliffs of Dover:
Click here to view the secret text


Overall more checkpoints and less trivial / boring / repetitive rooms, also less "filler" levels and empty spaces would improve the Hold a lot, as some of the puzzles are genuinely fun.

Also..
Click here to view the secret text

05-10-2009 at 09:41 PM
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DyRsOfDh14
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File: TGA Cliffs of Dover 1S2E Victory.demo (2.5 KB)
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icon Re: The Great Adventure (0)  
Okay...
I didn't understand the last one of the castle...
But, here I will give you a demo if you want...
Tell me in another post if you want one for the slayer one

[Last edited by DyRsOfDh14 at 05-10-2009 09:48 PM]
05-10-2009 at 09:46 PM
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Insane
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Oh wow, I didn't realize
Click here to view the secret text


And yes, I do wonder how the slayer room is to be managed.
05-10-2009 at 10:13 PM
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DyRsOfDh14
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File: TGA Cliffs of Dover 1N4E Victory.demo (1.4 KB)
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icon Re: The Great Adventure (0)  
Okay, demo attached
05-10-2009 at 10:16 PM
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Tahnan
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DyRsOfDh14 wrote:
I give up, I suck creating holds ¬¬
The problem isn't whether you somehow inherently suck or don't suck, and there's enough nice stuff in this hold that I don't think you're actually bad at making holds.

What you are bad at is taking advice. I gather from the Architecture thread that people were trying to give you feedback, but rather than listen, you went ahead and sent what you had to the HAs.

And the thing is, very, very few people are perfect at anything without taking advice. Top athletes still have coaches; novelists still have beta-readers and editors; politicians still have advisers. Everyone, no matter who they are, puts forth a "first draft" of their work and then changes it based on the advice they get in order to make it better. That's what you need to do, and if you had done that with this hold, you could have eliminated almost all of the problems I discussed above. Anyone who played it could have told you where you needed more checkpoints; people could have indicated that the "guess the exit" level wasn't fun; people could have done proofreading for you...

I'm actually glad to know you're working on a new hold. But please, please, please, test it. Put it in architecture, wait for people to play it and give you comments, and then change your hold based on those comments. That's how to make a good hold.
05-10-2009 at 11:10 PM
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Insane
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icon Re: The Great Adventure (+1)  
Oh wait, I don't have to kill the slayers?


Oh............ right. Wow, lol.
05-10-2009 at 11:23 PM
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skell
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Tahnan wrote:
novelists still have beta-readers
Oh, so true. And they usually mix you with mud and other weird ingredient.

I haven't played much through this hold yet. I have stopped at the second actual puzzle room (with snakes and mothers) and couldn't solve it in a quick way, so I left it for later.
You shouldn't say you're a bad architect though. Actually, I think I could second everything Tahnan said. I think you've got the puzzle part of making holds pretty much quite nailed down. But it's only 50%. Now you have to work on all the rest - visuals, order, free space, story, stuff, and other things. Take Tahnan's advice, and take advice :).

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05-10-2009 at 11:50 PM
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fratropea
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Mastered!
The preceding hold was best, but also in this there are a lot of pleasant and amusing rooms.
According to me, the worse levels are Outer Space because it is boring (except 2N 1W) and Cliffs of Dover because it needs checkpoint in the correct points... ;)

I give 3 brains and 6 for fun :)
05-11-2009 at 02:21 AM
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CuriousShyRabbit
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Hmmmm... maybe I should post here. I haven't rated this hold, because I'm still annoyed at what didn't happen in Architecture and what did happen during HA testing. I think the rating should be about the hold itself, and not about its circumstances. So I'll wait.

As described above, there are plenty of annoying features in this hold. I would add to that list the invisible scripted level entrances on room edges in Ranch and the secret room in Short Road to City - if the player steps on those squares in the process of solving those puzzles, they get teleported and must come back and start the puzzles over.

I'd agree with the opinions above that DyRsOfDh14 needs to be more responsive during beta testing - listen to advice, answer beta tester's posts, and correct problems as they are found. And he needs to be more patient - give people a chance to play his hold and find the problems, don't be in such a rush to submit to HA.

I'd also say that this forum is generally excellent at pointing out every last little thing that is wrong with a hold. But we're unfortunately rather lazy about pointing out the good things that we'd like to see in future holds by this architect. A new architect who wishes to make better holds needs to hear both kinds of feedback.

Here are some rooms in this hold that I really liked:

Magic Camps 2N1E, 1N1E, 1E, and 2E seem to be a tribute to the Oremite Breeding Grounds level in TCB. In each of these rooms, the player has a few oremite free patches of ground to kill monsters. The rooms are interesting and differentiated from each other because each one features monsters with different movement rules. (1S belongs in this series as well, but killing rattlesnakes under these restrictions turns out to be tedious.)

Magic Camps 1W and 1S1W are fun and more original too. These rooms are also covered in oremites, and include many close packed yellow doors infested with seep. The challenge is to safely manipulate a mimic or a clone to a pressure plate that destroys the seep. Even though the rooms look similar to each other, it's cool that they play quite differently.

Magic Camps 1N1W also deserves mention as a good room, as it's one of very few DROD rooms that includes stalwarts that's not either incredibly frustrating or incredibly easy. Here, the player must use pressure plates to create an arrangement of roaches that will be safe for the stalwarts to attack. Nice puzzle.

The Castle 1W is a room that initially looks like a mess... until the player looks more closely and realizes that the room has a simple and not-so-messy goal.
Click here to view the secret text

The Castle 2S involves some fun brained wubba manipulation.

The Castle 1N2W is a fun snake manipulation room. The player must lead a serpent through a maze of dead ends to a pressure plate on the other side of the room.

Other notable rooms in the hold:

The waterskipper horde rooms: Short Road to City Entrance and 1N, Dark Caves 1N, The Castle 2W. I felt that these rooms didn't have much to add to waterskipper horde management that wasn't already shown in The River Dugan level of TCB, although it could be argued that The Castle 2W was more original than the others (I also wasn't quite sure what the intended solution was). The reason I mention these rooms is they do still show a good quality of the architect - he selected rooms that required very different strategies to complete.

Dark Caves 1S and 1S1W are tight tarstuff baby avoiding puzzles. I think optimizers will like these. I keep getting the strong feeling that I've played very similar rooms before, but I just can't remember where... maybe someone could remind me?

Postmastery Area - Well I won't spoil the pleasant surprise for anyone who wants to get there. :)
05-11-2009 at 02:31 AM
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Briareos
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CuriousShyRabbit wrote:
Hmmmm... maybe I should post here. I haven't rated this hold, because I'm still annoyed at what didn't happen in Architecture and what did happen during HA testing. I think the rating should be about the hold itself, and not about its circumstances. So I'll wait.
Wouldn't the circumstances in this case be a case of negative hold karma?

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05-11-2009 at 11:38 AM
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Banjooie
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So, basically, if I tell everyone on the forum they're a goddamn idiot who needs to die in the fire in a single post, I'll lose two rank points.

But if I add content to the forum that isn't of a high quality, I lose eight?

WHAT?

[Last edited by Banjooie at 05-12-2009 12:22 AM]
05-12-2009 at 12:20 AM
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Remlin
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When you make a sucky post, you waste about five seconds of people's time. When you make a sucky hold, you waste a whole lot more.
05-12-2009 at 12:39 AM
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Briareos
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Remlin wrote:
When you make a sucky post, you waste about five seconds of people's time. When you make a sucky hold, you waste a whole lot more.
And ignoring/disregarding everyone's comments and suggestions on a hold in construction is wasting their time as well...

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05-12-2009 at 08:17 AM
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marg
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In magic camps 2E I am completely stuck trying to kill the golems, the other things I can do no prob but the golems!!!!!
Can anyone give me a hint please?
05-31-2009 at 11:36 PM
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Tahnan
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Marg:

Right below the "holds" board where you found this thread is the "Hints and Solutions" board. If you go there and click on "Get Help for a Room" in the upper right, you'll be able to select the hold, the level, and then the room. That'll be a much better place for you to get help.
06-01-2009 at 05:05 PM
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PMIT
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I have mixed feelings about this hold. On one hand, it has a lot of rooms that mainly annoyed me, with uninteresting horde rooms that drag on a bit too long, somewhat unpredictable scripting, important walls and monsters obscured in various ways, and of course the terrible Outer Space level which others have explained above.

But it also has a good number of easy to medium difficulty puzzle rooms that were enjoyable to go through, mainly the rooms in Dark Caves, Magic Camps, and The Castle. In contrast, the rooms in Cliffs of Dover and Abduction were mostly stinkers for me.

The aesthetics of some of the rooms are pretty bad, with water and pit mixing with no discernible reason, and generally ugly blocky room structure designs. It didn't feel like much of an adventure either, but the bizarre 'twist' partway through amused me if only for how random it was. There are also some custom images too, which I thought were a nice touch and helped differentiate the hold a bit. Well, at least I did when the walls weren't nearly indistinguishable from the pits in the outer space level.

Overall, while the low points of this hold are pretty bad, the high points are good, but not nearly good enough to redeem the lesser parts, and I'd be hesitant to recommend it.

Also, for those who care about high scores, there are two rooms in Abduction, 3E and 4N3E, that contain only scripted required monsters. The game didn't like recording demos for these rooms since they appeared unrequired upon entry, but they are both scorable, and I eventually had to manually record and upload demos for these rooms to count.

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