Neather man
Level: Roachling
Rank Points: 6
Registered: 09-23-2012
IP: Logged

File: Kira Compilation.drh (1.6 MB)
Downloaded 64 times.
License: Public Domain

My friend Kira made these holds, and I compiled them. If you want to know why there are so many empty rooms in the third hold, this is for size exaggeration (So the name fits.) She is a newbie architect.

Odyssey
Level: Master Delver
Rank Points: 124
Registered: 09-09-2009
IP: Logged

I will be honest, this is a terrible hold. There doesn't seem to be much of a challenge nor many decisions to be made. I liked the first hold given that it had an interesting trapdoor + grappling hook lynchpin which unfortunately raised my expectations far beyond the scope of this hold.

It seems as though a fair amount of effort was put into the hold, purely from a scripting/custom imagery standpoint. The idea of an enemy in DROD: RPG that approaches Tendry exactly how a DROD enemy would is interesting, but not implemented very well here. The player has to guess that these seemingly harmless Evil Eyes can kill you instantly. Not to mention that the player must guess that stepping on a defence gem will also kill him instantly.

The most irritating thing was the silly rooms filled with nothing but attack/defence gems, and handing out the Really Big Sword + Oremite Shield too early on. Having 100,000 HP and 10,000 ATK doesn't really make the game much of a challenge at all.

As I said, there were lots of custom images which I thought were... interesting. I had to collect a 'toilet suit' which didn't seem to serve any purpose at all, although the same graphic was later used as a 'wet suit' to get to the 'underwater guard'.

There were several rooms which contained nothing (although you did point this out) but given that most of the hold wasn't like this, I don't see how it made a difference to the hold size.

I hope I'm not coming across too negative -- there were some nice aspects. As I said, using the grappling hook wasn't trivially obvious (I actually had to go 'unsheathe' my sword so I wouldn't drop the trapdoors the first time), and the very first level did require some decision making.

There is a lot wrong with this hold but if you worked on the nicer parts (and for the most part, get rid of the rooms filled with treasure), it could be decent. I would work on the first hold (the one with the word 'cookie' in the name).

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55th Skywatcher

da rogu3
Level: Smiter

Rank Points: 491
Registered: 04-06-2011
IP: Logged

Unfortunately, the effort gone into writing that post will be wasted - the architect is famous for not listening to constructive criticism.

Fortunately, he seems to have stopped making holds altogether, which is probably a good thing.