First of all, I'll start off by saying that it's wonderful that we have another RPG hold being started, and that at this rate it's very plausible it'll be finished within a reasonable amount of time
I think the difficulty of this hold is pretty good - there's definitely a challenge in getting enough resources to beat the bosses and still have enough life left over to continue onwards, and it was interesting to figure out what order to fight each monster in the hold.
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Now for the inevitable part where I suggest things that would make the hold better:
The first thing I should note is about hot tiles. In this hold, hot tiles do a constant amount of damage, unlike default behavior. I'm glad this is explained. While I think there's some puzzle potential in this, I think unfortunately the way they're used right now pretty much trivializes most rooms they're in. For example, in Abyssal Floors: Twice South Once West, the main point is that there is a +1 DEF gem, and the question is how to get it with the least loss. However, there are only three ways to get it: either take a constant 30 damage, fight a Fighter Roach (which does a lot of damage early on) or spend a yellow key and take a hit from the fighter roach.
In theory, this is fine, except that because of the hot tile choice being available very early on, it's best to just take the 30 damage and get +1 DEF for every single monster fought in the entire hold. A yellow key to save 15 damage is a poor trade, and the choice to take hundreds of damage for 3 greckles isn't really a choice, especially when you can come back much, much later and kill the fighter roach anyway.
Similarly, in Thrice South Once West, you can either spend a green key (!) for +1 ATK and +1 DEF, or you can just take 10 damage for that same +1 ATK and +1 DEF, and make up for that 10 damage almost immediately by fighting some monsters.
Similarly, in Isolation Level Twice North Twice West, it's so obviously better to take 30 damage from the hot tiles to get to the upper part for rewards than to fight either an Evil Eye or a Blade Holder, since 30 damage just isn't much to worry about. You can even come back later and kill a spider to get the remaining stuff, and you never have to kill a blade holder.
Now, of course, by avoiding fighting these tricky monsters I am losing out on some Greckles. However, you get enough Greckles from fighting more mundane monsters (such as evil eyes and spiders) that as long as you have 50 GR for the +5 ATK chamber, you really aren't in danger of running out of money and not being able to purchase more health to fight the Mud Mother at the end. After you kill the Sentries and get the Wooden Shield, you're pretty much set for money - I had over 100 GR at the end of the second level just from killing monsters that couldn't hurt me anymore.
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Okay, so point 1 is just to watch out for "
not-a-choice"
choices. What's next?
I guess the only other suggestion I would have is that you have a couple of rooms where you get to make a choice between more-or-less free rewards, at the cost of sealing off the other ones. Rooms like Abyssal Floors 1S1W, Isolation Level 2W and 4N2W. The trouble here is that nothing is blocking them - you can walk right up and just take whatever you need, and typically you want the ATK so you can fight the level boss, or keys so that you can either buy ATK gems or buy health. For instance, in Isolation Level 4N2W there is no reason to ever fight the Blade Holder for the +1 ATK when you can pick up three yellow keys in that same room, and only spend two of them opening yellow doors to bypass it.
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So, what's the solution to these problems? Well, I'm not really exactly sure what to suggest, since I'm admittedly inexperienced myself at addressing these kinds of issues in my own hold. But I think it's important, when setting up a decision point, to not only think about what the decision means in terms of resources lost and resources gained, but what resources are plentiful in the hold as a whole, and which ones are rare. In this case I had plenty of keys but needed to be very careful with my HP.
The other thing to keep in mind is the unstable equilibrium. We've already introduced an example here, which is the wooden shield: the earlier you can manage to get it, the easier the hold will be in the long run. I managed to get it at 31 ATK, where I had just enough HP (and gained enough greckles) so that I could make a clean getaway, and that pretty much streamlined the rest of the level. Anyone who was still struggling at this point, with fewer HP and fewer keys, would probably have to spend keys to get more HP, which would leave him with fewer keys compared to me in the next level. (Or they could restart until they do get the shield earlier, with fewer keys spent.)
One thing that might make the issue about when to get the shield more interesting by offering an alternative to getting it as soon as possible (that is, making it more attractive to wait for getting it) would be to actually
increase the number of sentries guarding the shield. For example, you could put the four of them behind a force arrow along with a +200 HP potion, such that the player couldn't get the potion without having to fight all four sentries. Since each sentry did about 114 damage to me when I fought them, this wouldn't really change the difficulty of getting the shield, but if a player waited until he had more ATK to get the shield, they would save a whole bunch of HP relative to the player who rushed in. Then it would be a complicated comparison of HP saved between getting the shield early or late, which might mitigate the unstable equilibrium thing.
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So, ultimately, I don't really have any specific advice for you, just some words of warning. Also I think you should probably get some people to proofread your hold for English stylistic conventions, and also you should play through your hold several times so you don't miss oddities like the useless force arrow in Abyssal Floors 2S, the tunnel blocking automatic pathing in Isolation Floor 1W, or the text cutting off in "
Isolation Level Mud Cleared"
score checkpoint to become "
Isolation Level Mud Cl"
.
(And now I need to take a break.)
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[Last edited by Chaco at 03-26-2012 09:25 PM]
