admin
Level: Legendary Smitemaster
Rank Points: 8
IP: Logged

File: Unfriendly Islands.drh (33 KB)
Downloaded 888 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

A hold I was working on, on and off, for nearly a year.
No plot as such, not too much scripting. Should keep you occupied for a while.

Blondbeard
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1486
Registered: 03-31-2005
IP: Logged

This hold is really good. It is huge, quite non-linear, and has lots of shortcuts for easy navigation.

zex20913
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1723
Registered: 02-04-2003
IP: Logged

Aside from story points (there aren't any), I feel like this is how an RPG hold should be. There is a definite sense of progression, and a sense of vastness. Plus, it's all on one level, so you don't have to find stairs all of the time.

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The Stew Boy
Level: Master Delver
Rank Points: 247
Registered: 05-10-2005
IP: Logged

Thanks guys!

deftriver
Level: Delver

Rank Points: 77
Registered: 07-11-2007
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This has been one of my favorite holds from the architecture forum, glad to see it here!

Doom
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 3303
Registered: 07-05-2004
IP: Logged

Conquered.

Stats:


Some random notes:

- Early game money was important, later on you'd get it way too much for it to matter. Finished with 27.4k greckles or so. The 1.6k greckle gate pales in comparison.
- I never got the knight shield. Found it easier to just get the Oremite Shield straight away, since it wasn't much more heavily guarded (leading to roughly the same score for that and the guardian score point).
- Love the shortcuts. Ctrl+Arrow -friendly layout and the transport system were both extremely useful.
- It felt like the hold got easier and easier the farther I got. By the time I was on the last few islands I was wondering if I was meant to be there with the previous weapon+shield.
- Still don't like %-damage elements. Just as I thought it'd be safe to start stockpiling hp without leaving every potion behind for later (and then dancing back and forth every time you encounter a normal monster that needs the extra hp), the next room has a hot-tile gauntlet or a bunch of aumtlich. I hope people will start using constant damage hot tiles instead, it's easy to script and should have plenty of puzzle potential as well. Incidentally, constant damage bombs could have some interesting applications (weaken a strong monster with bombs before fighting it?).

Overall, a very nicely designed hold and a worthy addition to the currently-so-short list of released rpg holds.

The Stew Boy
Level: Master Delver
Rank Points: 247
Registered: 05-10-2005
IP: Logged

Probably the reason that it got very easy for you is that I had to make it possible for me, and I'm not very good at DROD

Midootje
Level: Master Delver
Rank Points: 110
Registered: 03-05-2011
IP: Logged

File: Unfriendly Islands Max Score.bmp (3.1 MB)
Downloaded 47 times.
License: Public Domain

Hey, I wanted to give you a shout out to say that this hold is great. A single level with stats ranging from 10 to 585, with such a vast amount of choices and optimisation opportunities - I simply loved it. Took me some time (lots of times when I met an aumtlich or hot tile setup I had to restore, and sometimes the rewards for going another way than I had done were bigger), but it was totally worth it.
On the matter of difficulty and fun I'd say this hold is averagely difficult, however, the beginning is quite hard, whereas at the end it becomes easier, thus allowing players to stop optimising when they reach around 250 stats. This doesn't ruin the fun, however, and personally I'd give this hold a 9 out of 10.

My stats after beating the guardian are in the attachment, I'll name them here:
16158 HP
585 ATK
533 DEF
27.4K GR
6/6/0/0 keys (of which around 8/2 were used in the end, for HP).
Like said, great hold!

Edit: also this hold has the greatest replay value of any currently available. I've played it through eight times now, and I've never had two identical playthroughs. Another point of excellence!
On a side note, the eighth playthrough yielded a higher score than has ever been registered on this hold. Vain as I am, I want to tell everyone about it.
After beating the Guardian:
16158 HP
585 ATK
533 DEF
15/7/0/0
Score: 5222.

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Don't worry, be happy, and slice monsters. You'll probably do better than me at all three.

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[Last edited by Midootje at 11-20-2012 04:01 PM]

Red-XIII
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 651
Registered: 08-05-2012
IP: Logged

After three failed attemps I finally conquered this!

This is another awesome hold with so many choices, expecially in the middle part, I loved it.
The beginning was pretty hard, then it becomes easier but I still had to optimize until oremite shield. As DooM, I also didn't take knight shield and I thought there were many hot tile, though the aumtlich were really well placed.
This was the first RPG custom hold I played and even if my status are pretty bad I'd like to share them.



EDIT: I replayed this after 2 years and I got a lot better at DROD RPG, still, this is a tricky hold, mainly in the first half.
Stats after second replay:



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There's not some other world out there where everything's gonna be okay.
There's just this one, just this rock.
-33th Skywatcher

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[Last edited by Red-XIII at 09-30-2016 02:39 PM]

kieranmillar
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 2846
Registered: 07-11-2014
IP: Logged

This hold is excellent. The single-level layout and quick travel tunnel system removes a lot of the chore of backtracking, which is good because this hold has a lot of it due to the hot tiles and aumtlich beams. Having said that dealing with those felt a lot less frustrating than it did in Tendry's Tale probably because the hold was constantly reducing me to low HP.

Another thing this hold did very well was give a feeling of adventure. Despite having no real story to speak of or any cutscenes, I felt like there was a feeling of being dropped in a world and going exploring, probably due to it being one large level. I thought it handled the slow transition from low stats to high stats pretty well, with nice use of custom monsters to fill in gaps in the default bestiary when necessary.

I'd say this is one of the better holds published so far, if you can push past the rather difficult start this hold is good fun.