Insoluble
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Xindaris wrote:
Well, there haven't been any comments from anyone but me in about..two months. Is it time to submit this hold for final approval? And if it is, should I remove the bomb-mimic challenge in IB's exit room as probably unbeatable? And are there any others I should remove for that reason?

Ohh, sorry! I kept meaning to give that challenge a more serious attempt! I really enjoyed what I've played of this hold so far, and kept meaning to play through more of it but haven't had the chance. At the moment I've only actually tested out Temporal Symmetry and Invisible Brains. If you want more feedback on some of the other levels I'll happily check them out this week if you don't mind waiting a few days. I can even post my demo for you once I complete it if you haven't yet recorded one for the HAs.

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kieranmillar
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Invisible Brains: Good concept for a level, most rooms are way too tedious. Didn't bother.

Tick Tock: This level is not for me, sorry.

Rank and File 1S1W: Press 5 for 137 turns to win. Intended?

Little Cages 2E: I got the challenge but didn't leave the room in a state where I could leave it. Might want to change the challenge to not fire on room clear, but once you reach the tunnels after clearing the room.

Little Cages: 1N2E: Please make the serpents about less than 1/3rd the size they are, because right now it's over 800 turns of playing ring-a-rosie with them. Also what's the point of the staff, I just immediately swap back to my dagger and stab the brain.

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[Last edited by kieranmillar at 10-14-2015 10:42 PM]

Xindaris
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Insoluble:
I have demos for all the rooms, but the challenges that scrolls mention I haven't solved I don't have demos for solving. I'm under the impression more demos is better, so I'd appreciate that if you want to do it.


kieranmiller:
Let's go over these..

IB--Can you tell me which rooms you found tedious and which not? If you bothered with any of them at all, that is.

TT--Fair enough, this is probably the toughest/most frustrating one. Did you at least try 1N by itself? I have a guess at what you don't like about this level, but not every room is about abusing the "invulnerability" of standing on a door.

RaF 1S1W--not really intended; rooms like this in this level were built in a sort of chaotic way, and then repeatedly tested and tweaked. Your solution requires the player to enter on a specific tile of the four available; I'm considering either leaving it as-is and putting in a funny challenge for that solution or else putting a hot tile on that one spot.

LC 2E: Easy fix, added a "wait while player at". Thanks for spotting it, this is one of the challenges I wasn't able to complete at all in the first place so I didn't notice the issue.

LC 1N2E: You are not solving this room in the intended way. My solution comes to a grand total of 420 moves and I did it in about a minute of real time. If you want a hint on what the intended way is:


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[Last edited by Xindaris at 10-15-2015 05:17 AM]

Insoluble
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Xindaris wrote:
TT--Fair enough, this is probably the toughest/most frustrating one. Did you at least try 1N by itself? I have a guess at what you don't like about this level, but not every room is about abusing the "invulnerability" of standing on a door.

Well I'll give it a whirl. I played through a bit of the level (Tick Tock) and got to 1N (since you recommended that)

Overall: I actually don't mind the standing on door invulnerability mechanic at all and like the idea of exploiting this somehow in a level. The thing that really got to me was the game effects. I had to turn sound effects off completely and the lightning bolts streaming across the screen every few turns were still really distracting. I wish there were a way to turn those off. I know you are basically done with the level and hoping to publish it soon, but I would find the whole level much more enjoyable if the mechanic were implemented slightly differently to minimize the distracting game effects. Instead of builders setting off pressure plates (with the sound and visual effects that those entail) perhaps implementing something with scripting similar to Eye of the Storm with it's platforms that disappeared on a cycle. Unfortunately this wouldn't work for force arrows and other orbs that change the room state though, and would probably be very time intensive. I'm not really sure if there is a solution to the problem to be honest, but I suspect that this is at least partially why kieranmillar said that this level was not for him.

The Entrance: I thought this room was fine. Finding a safe spot was key, and I managed by killing the roaches in the western alcove as quickly as possible then hiding out at (13,6) to clear everything else. I didn't step on the checkpoint a single time other than at room entrance, so perhaps placing checkpoints more spaced out from the center would be better.

1W: This room maybe was a bit on the overly long side. my demo was in the 900 move range. Timing and efficiency were important for killing the tar mother, but I found I could take my time after that. I'm not sure what the mirrors were for in the northwestern portion, but I didn't use them.

2W: This room was a lot of fun. Which is pretty rare for a water skipper nest room. I really liked the use of stealth and opportunities for back swiping in clever ways.

1N: This was another neat room. I'll admit to using a bit of trial and error for some of these, but at the very least I like that the ideal pattern can be reasoned out for all of these. Very nice.

A quick scan of the level looks like there's a mix of rooms like 1W and ones more like 2W and 1N. I like the latter rooms much more than the former, but that's the type of thing that will vary from one player to the next. I haven't made a serious attempt at other rooms yet, but will try to give them a shot this week.

There is one back tracking issue that you'll probably want to address before publishing this. It is possible to clear 1W (dropping the green doors) then create a tar baby that un-clears the room, then exit to the N, W, or S. If 1E is also unconquered, this makes it impossible to clear either 1E or 1W. Granted this is an exceedingly dumb thing to do and most players know better than to use the "make a tar baby after the room is cleared" trick when green doors are placed in a way that prevents reentering, but it's still a backtracking issue and might get you held up with the HA review.
Never Mind, I was just being dumb and not paying attention to the obvious!

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[Last edited by Insoluble at 10-15-2015 04:36 PM]

Xindaris
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Ahh, right, the annoying noises and bolts. I agree it's annoying, even while watching a demo of a room, but I honestly just have no idea how to fix it. It's at least better than putting a decoy on an orb, because the orb noise is definitely more annoying to hear repeatedly. The ideal would be some kind of scripting command that sets specific pressure plates to not have sounds and effects, but I don't think there's any way to do that.


Entrance: The original draft didn't have a speed potion, and I'm pretty sure it was solvable without it, but really hard. It occurred to me the player had to beat this room to do any of the level at all and I decided to try and make it a relatively easy room.

1W: I don't consider this room terribly inspired, to be honest. It replaces a way harder room that I threw into the Scrap Heap for being too ridiculously picky. I still wanted to use the idea of tick-tocking with tarstuff, but It's definitely not the best room. The mirrors are just kind of decoration, not intended to be used for anything.

2W: I always thought of this room as being another slog like 1S, I'm glad it's liked. The level overall is about evenly divided between slogs where you run around and kill lots of things by standing on doors (sorta like 1W, but mostly better designed maybe? There are at least spots in 1S, for example, that require a specific set of moves to not get trapped during) and rooms where you just take advantage of the tick-tocking another way (like 1N, 2S, and 1S1W).


Backtracking: Are you sure about that? I'm looking at the maps now, and exiting N, then going one room E via the tunnel, takes you to a part of 1N you can always access, so it should be possible get back to the Entrance and from there re-solve 1W if necessary. Right? The tunnels in 1N definitely make it possible to play 2W and such before playing 1W or 1E.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 10-15-2015 05:03 PM]

Insoluble
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Xindaris wrote:
Backtracking: Are you sure about that? I'm looking at the maps now, and exiting N, then going one room E via the tunnel, takes you to a part of 1N you can always access, so it should be possible get back to the Entrance and from there re-solve 1W if necessary. Right? The tunnels in 1N definitely make it possible to play 2W and such before playing 1W or 1E.

Opse! That's my own stupidity. Somehow I didn't notice you could access 1N from the entrance when I was playing through these last night! Please ignore.

1W has some good ideas but I guess it's just a bit overly long. The first two mothers have some sort of interesting twist (efficiency for the first and the tar stuff switcher for the second.) But by the third one I guess it just feels as though the point has been made and it's just more of the same. But keep in mind that's just one person's opinion. Different people like different styles of rooms and game-play, and someone who is seriously into optimization may get a lot more out of that third tar-stuff mother than I did.

I somehow came a way with a completely different perspective of 2W! As I said before, I actually really liked that room, which is surprising because I usually can't stand skipper nests. I almost thought of it as an anti-hord room. The key was to use timing and stealth to avoid skipper spawns. There were also some nice lynchpinny moments when deciding exactly how to emerge from the shallow water so that my sword would be positioned just right to take care of whatever spawns there were.

As for the game effects, yeah I can't think of a good way around them unfortunately. There is a scripting command to add bolts and sound effects, but I know of no way to suppress them.

I'll try to play through the rest of the level tonight and tomorrow to give more feedback.

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kieranmillar
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Apologies for the curtness of my previous reply, it was getting late, and I wanted to write down my comments. I was also feeling a bit frustrated, which didn't help.

Xindaris wrote: IB--Can you tell me which rooms you found tedious and which not? If you bothered with any of them at all, that is.

In the end I solved 1E, 1N, 1N1W, 2N and 2N2E (and Entrance) and didn't bother to try the others, I just left the level and moved on.

My comment about the rooms being tedious stems from a general design, particularly in these earlier levels where the rooms tend to be very large and repetitive, in some cases as though the room deliberately fills out the entire space just because it can. There's nothing wrong with hoard rooms or long rooms, they can make for a refreshing change of pace, but when you get hit with a load of them at once it can become quite tiring. Specific room comments:

1N: This room is the best of the bunch in the ones I played in this level and quite good, I have no problems with it.

1E: This room exemplifies my issues. The main issue you face in this room, and one that is quite interesting, is how to hit the orbs and then escape. The problem comes from the fact that you then have to do this 4 times, and there's absolutely loads of "clean-up" involved in this process. Turn count: 1,478 moves.

1N1W: Here's how this room went, I traverse a large open space killing loads of eyes that pose no threat. Then I get the 3x2 platform and use it to let the citizens open the way to the monsters. Then because of the fact the massive roach and goblin hoards would only be released a few at a time because I had to keep retoggling the pressure plate, I went back and forth manipulating the platform for ages where I killed about 50 roaches in batches of 4 at a time. Turn count: 1,441 moves.

2N: Killing masses of waterskippers with invisibility isn't interesting but is very time consuming. Waterskipper nests tend to have a bad rap and it's mainly due to rooms like this one, which offer very little but take a lot of time. There is nothing gained by having the room be perfectly symmetrical so I have to do exactly the same thing a second time. Turn count: 1,443 moves. (These turn counts all being around 1,400-ish moves wasn't deliberate I promise!)

2N2E: I just looked at the automated description for my demo and it gave me big laughs right now: "Player conquers the room after slaying one just monster but it takes forever. Then he leaves." This room was quite fun but again it felt like it went on for much longer than it needed to, and after looking at the other rooms in the level it was around here when I finally lost patience with the level. This room had the issue of being quite fiddly but lacking in checkpoints, so I had to resort to undoing a lot, but when rooms take ages and also include brains, undoing starts to take a while due to the way the game replays the room from the beginning every time you undo and brain pathmapping hundreds of times can get a bit CPU intensive. Turn count: 1,203 moves.

Xindaris wrote: TT--Fair enough, this is probably the toughest/most frustrating one. Did you at least try 1N by itself? I have a guess at what you don't like about this level, but not every room is about abusing the "invulnerability" of standing on a door.

I don't think I deliberately used standing on a door to not get hit all that much, I didn't like this level because coming off the back of IB it looked like another level full of overly large rooms and hoard rooms, only this time the gimmick was that it takes a bit longer because of the constantly toggling doors you have to keep waiting to get past.

I solved the Entrance by moving into one of the roach alcoves then held down the + key as they trickled in one at a time.

Then I solved 1E which was fine, had to restart it a few times due to hanging around the north of the room instead of the south at the start and then found myself unable to get that red serpent out of the long alcove.

Then I took one look at 1W, groaned, took a peek at the other rooms and left without really trying any of them.

Rank and File
In this level I solved Entrance, 1W, 1S1W, 1S2E, 2E before deciding to leave. I liked 2E, although it was a large waterskipper hoard room (sort of), something that I moaned about in IB, this room was actually quite cool. I liked how it played out and you moved the stalwarts about while they held their own killing waterskippers, it was cool. 1S2E was another overly large and long hoard room.

Illusion
I've not seen this gimmick before so that was cool, and the level was over by the time I thought I'd seen everything it had to offer, so I was happy with that. This level is fine and needs no changes, although the minimap tends to give the game away (not that you can do anything about that).

Little Cages
This level is great. Really enjoyed it. Stopped for the night without solving 1E because I was tired but solved the rest, and enjoyed all of them, barring the issues I raised in my previous post) (1N1E seems lacklustre though, there's nothing to it and it's really easy, even with the challenge?)

Xindaris wrote: LC 2E: Easy fix, added a "wait while player at". Thanks for spotting it, this is one of the challenges I wasn't able to complete at all in the first place so I didn't notice the issue.

Please be careful before including challenges that you can't solve yourself. If you can't solve it yourself it's a lot harder to guarantee that it's both a) fun and b) possible. Is it actually possible to leave the room at the same time as beating the challenge? It might be, but it's best to make sure.

Xindaris wrote: LC 1N2E: You are not solving this room in the intended way. My solution comes to a grand total of 420 moves and I did it in about a minute of real time. If you want a hint on what the intended way is:

Click here to view the secret text

×Think about how what weapon Beethro is holding changes his interactions with things other than enemies.

Specifically

Click here to view the secret text

×trapdoors

If it's possible to solve a room in an unintended but really boring or frustrating method, and that method is much easier to spot, then people will just try to do that while not enjoying themselves. I found this out the hard way when it happened to one of my own rooms. If my method is unintended, you should really try to ensure it's not possible.

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[Last edited by kieranmillar at 10-15-2015 08:38 PM]

Xindaris
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Invisible Brains:
I can understand that complaint with IB; many (though not all of the rooms there were among the first DROD rooms I ever tried to make. 1E is actually a less tedious version of the very first room I made, there are some comments earlier on the thread about it. There's actually a lot less cleanup if one is careful with timing the approach to the orbs, but that probably doesn't completely solve the problem you've expressed. With 1N1W, the idea is to not toggle the plate a bunch, but to make a bridge and wait on it, at least for the north side. But I digress...

Here's something else instead.
List of proposed changes to IB:
(I want feedback please on whether this will fix the issues with them or at least mollify them somewhat, and whether the make the rooms less fun in some way)

1E: Remove all but about 8 roaches each in the north and south obstacle-filled areas, which eliminates most of the annoying in-out setup before even hitting a single orb in the north or south and reduces the problem to minimizing spawns and cleaning up what does get produced.

1N1W: Remove the eyes and just make that platform available from the start, remove most of the roaches and goblins, making the puzzle as much as possible about building the bridges instead of using them. My intent with this room in the first place was (at least eventually) to force the player to build bridges that are somewhat hard to build, so if I can manage that I'll at least be sorta happy.

2N: Remove majority of water skippers, leaving mostly just the nests and brains. Would make the room far less tedious and make it more about not coming into sight of a brain with the "wrong" timing.

2N2E: Add more checkpoints. I'm going to do this anyway, but I would appreciate help with where it would be best to put them.

Tick Tock:
As I mentioned earlier, this is almost evenly divided among awful horde rooms like 1W and 1E and more "specific puzzle rooms". Here's the breakdown, maybe you could try the latter ones to see if they're more likable to you?:

Horde: Entrance, 1W, 1S, 2W, 1N1E, 2E

Puzzlish: 1N, 1N1W (some horde here, but it's more about quickly doing a specific set of things), 2S, 1S1W, 1S1E (though you may find this as tedious as IB 2N2E, it's on a similar conceit), 1E.

Rank and File:
This level has a mash of two puzzle styles: Big semi-chaotic battles like the entrance, 1W, 1S1W; and careful "stalwart manipulation" puzzles like 2E. The latter also includes 1S and 2S1E (which I'm kind of embarrassed to have put behind 1S1E in hindsight, but I'm not sure how to change now without breaking something), all of which I would list among rooms in this hold I'm most proud of. There are more puzzles relying on the same sort of Stalwart manipulation in Fusion, and those I'm also pretty proud of.

Little Cages:
For 1N2E, I can't think of any way to make the intended solution mandatory without giving away the whole point of the puzzle. Besides that, I've never once while testing the room found the tedious way you've described to even be possible for me, so I didn't know it was. I'd hope most players would notice that it's at least really hard and look for another way, notice the two elements in the room that can make it much easier, and then solve it.

For 1N1E, my first impression on testing the room was "Whoa how can I survive all these brained tar babies coming from all directions" and I got killed a lot, so it didn't feel all that easy to me, much less without escaping through the tunnel. (Though, I did eventually figure it out)


My general impression is that the later I made a level, the more rooms you like in it. But that may just be correlation rather than causation; if it's true, though, you might really like a lot of the rooms in Temporal Symmetry.

Also:
I made "I can't do it, can you" challenges in this hold specifically on the assumption that someone more skilled than me would be able to test their possibility or impossibility, and the final hold submitted to the HA's would only include the ones that were really possible.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 10-16-2015 03:12 AM]

kieranmillar
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File: Examples.hold (1.6 KB)
Downloaded 42 times.
License: Public Domain

All of your proposed IB changes sound like they would make the rooms better. For 1N1W I'd think about finding a way to enforce having to have the monsters come to you instead of allowing them to be dropped off of a bridge. This might require a complete redesign of the room. I cooked up a quick example room of one way to enforce this sort of room in the hold I've attached to this post in case you need ideas on how you can go about doing that. It's in room 1N.

For where best to place checkpoints in IB 2N2E I'd advise putting them in more of the "loop" areas, generally you want to place them in areas the player will naturally walk into them. There were parts of the room where I'd spend a while running around a loop but never hitting a checkpoint and so spend ages without touching one.

For LC 1N2E I've cooked up another example room in the attached hold (1E) that is me redesigning your room from scratch, from memory, as to the sort of thing I might do if I wanted to design a room with the sort of puzzle that I think you're going for here. I've done this in the hope that it gives you an idea for how you might solve the unintended solution for your room. In terms of the unintended solution to your 1N2E I think realising that the snakes can easily be killed with the dagger is a matter of experience, because snakes can't go round corners it's very easy to catch up with them from behind by just stepping round the corners as you go round the loop over and over. It's not quick, but you'll get there eventually. You'll get better at spotting these things as you get better at the game.

I think I agree with you in terms of me enjoying the levels more as they go along. I didn't have time today to play more of your hold but I'll give it another try when I can, particularly the remaining levels and the rooms you've advised in Tick Tock.

P.S. A matter of personal preference, but I consider releasing rooms/challenges that you don't know are possible to testers or the HAs in case they are possible to be generally bad form. People are volunteering their time for free and it's a bit crappy to waste their time trying to test something that's not possible (if that ends up being the case).

Xindaris
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I'm not in the right mood to do editing right now, but I do really appreciate the help and will be taking a careful look at that hold when I'm in the right mindset.


I'd never release a room that I couldn't beat myself, or in fact any room I haven't already beaten numerous times. My style of hold-building (or really, level-building in general, in pretty much any game with a level editor) is build->test->build->test->build ad infinitum until I'm happy with it. But these particular challenges felt like things I thought might be possible but outside of my skillset, and I don't really demand that anyone tests them for me. If nobody even wants to test them then I know they're probably bad ideas and I can remove them, but I can't help but feel asking someone who knows what they're doing with gentryii better than I do*, for example, to test a gentryii-based challenge, isn't really significantly worse than asking people to test any of my rooms in the first place.

(*-I actually consider myself to be pretty bad with gentryii.)

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Xindaris
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New version uploaded
Changes:
-IB 1E and 2N have less monsters to start with, as mentioned above. My new demos for these rooms are significantly shorter; even though I was pretty inefficient at 2N my demo is a bit less than 850 moves.

-IB 1N1W is completely overhauled. I really liked the mechanism for making the player build a bridge, thank you so much. It has the player build a bridge three times, close to what I intended when I first made it, but each time has a different trick to it, so hopefully this will be a nice touch and not make it feel too repetitive.

-LC 1N2E adjusted to hopefully remove the unintended solution. I kept the general shape of things and snake sizes the same because the whole idea is to require the player to do a certain kind of trick to trap the snakes without blocking their way to the dagger, but the disarm token was definitely a good idea, thank you!

-RaF 1S1W now has a challenge awarded to any player who can solve the room without moving after entering.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 10-17-2015 06:11 PM]

kieranmillar
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File: XFH Little Cages 2E Victory.demo (12.7 KB)
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Not had too much time lately but I did manage to re-play all of the above rooms in the latest version. The rooms are definitely improved! The new IB 1N1W is cool, getting the eye woken up and manoeuvring the platform into the right place so it can move into the ortho-square tripped me up for a while, but in hindsight that was just me being dumb.

The room was lacking in checkpoints though, and so are a number of other rooms in the hold, I'd advise you look over each room again before release and try to add checkpoints to them if you haven't got any. For IB 1N1W it could specifically use one in front of each of the three trapdoors (note, not ON the trapdoor) so that if you mess up for some reason and aren't using unlimited undo you can revet back to moving the platforms.

I also found the time after replaying these rooms to finish off LC. The level is great, I like all of it! I also beat the challenge in 2E, I'll attach a demo to this post so you can see how it's done. (P.S. I'd update the scripting to not check for the player to be in column 1 or 3 when a mirror is smashed, but to check for the presence of a mirror in the two squares they start in, which is a good way to prove that the other one hasn't been moved before starting the challenge. The scripting should be a bit more robust that way.)

I think I found an unintended solution for the exit room though as I didn't hit the orb. I'll attach my demo for the room to the next post (because I can only attach one file at a time).

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[Last edited by kieranmillar at 10-19-2015 08:58 PM]

kieranmillar
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File: XFH Little Cages 1S2E Victory.demo (12.4 KB)
Downloaded 44 times.
License: Public Domain

LC exit room demo I mentioned above.

Xindaris
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Gah, I facepalm at myself every time I realize I've forgotten to add checkpoints to a room. It seems natural not to sometimes because I've never stopped using UU since I discovered it existed. Back when I was playing DROD 1 for my first time I kept screaming to myself "Why can't I undo more than once?! Whyyy!"

Anyway.

Thank you for the demo, I've added it to the collection of demos for the hold that I'll submit whenever it's time.

LC 1S2E: As..far as I can tell the orb isn't really necessary in the intended solution? It's been long enough I've forgotten exactly why it was there, but I think it was because I thought it would somehow help with manipulating the snake and gentryii. Even my own much-clumsier-than-yours victory demo, though I do hit the orb, makes no actual use of it. I'm inclined to leave it in as a red herring. The true thrust of the puzzle is making them get into a situation just like the one you used so the snake dies against the gentryii, it just takes me a lot longer to do it and I wound up on the west side instead of the east one.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 10-20-2015 12:08 AM]

Xindaris
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Uploaded new version with more checkpoints added. I've also added the room Level Select 1W, the "Credits Garden". Basically everyone who's posted in this topic will have thanks listed there.

I'm curious, is it rude to require the player to step on a couple of tiles that happen to have scrolls with credits on them in order to fully complete my hold? If it is I can un-require the credits garden.

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Chaco
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Xindaris wrote:
I'm curious, is it rude to require the player to step on a couple of tiles that happen to have scrolls with credits on them in order to fully complete my hold? If it is I can un-require the credits garden.

No, it's not rude at all, as long as it isn't really arduous to do so (e.g. you make a really long space-filling path that players have to traverse to get to the scrolls). But if you just make a one-tile wide hallway so players can't avoid stepping on the credits scrolls, that is perfectly fine.

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Xindaris
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What I did was make a fairly small open room and put the scrolls on buttons that also turn on firetraps to kill brains in the room, so when the player steps to read the scrolls they clear the room, or when the player steps on the buttons to clear the room they have a good chance to read the scrolls. It's just two scrolls and they're really easy to reach, I think that'll be enough space for the text I'll need.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 10-26-2015 01:11 AM]

Xindaris
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In the interest of determining how well-tested it is, can I ask if anyone has run through (any part of) Fusion yet? There are a few rooms I'm antsy about other people liking there, like 1N2E. It basically throws a wall of roaches at the player, gives them a bunch of time tokens and a stick token, and says "go crazy". It's inspired by that one room in JtRH where the player is presented with an equal amount of mimic potions and has to kill an army of guards with them. My demo's over 3000 turns but it's wildly inefficient, I'm sure the "wall of blades" strategy I went with is probably the worst one that still solves it.

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109th Skywatcher

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 11-09-2015 10:15 PM]

Insoluble
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I haven't tested that level yet but I'll give it a whirl tonight. Sounds a bit like the war holds actually. And while that type of thing might not be everyone's cup of tea, there are certainly plenty of us on here who enjoy rooms like that. Interestingly khaim didn't use time tokens to create epic time clone roach battles in the only war hold released after TSS, so this is pretty much unexplored design space. I'm intrigued.

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Xindaris
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Any progress? I hate pestering people like this, but I'm so eager to actually have a completed hold in the holds pile.

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kieranmillar
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Oh yeah I never did pick this up again sorry. Please don't wait for me, I don't imagine having the time to pick it up again any time soon.

I'd say give it the weekend to see if anybody gives more feedback, but if not, just go ahead and submit it, ultimately it's better to push it out and focus on your next project rather than wait forever for testing that may never happen. Good luck!

Xindaris
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File: Xindaris First Hold.demo (149.8 KB)
Downloaded 41 times.
License: Public Domain

This is a utility post before putting the hold up for promotion.

Attached to this post is all of my demos for the whole hold, which includes demos demonstrating how to beat every room and complete every challenge.

Also, with regard to copyright there's this:



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109th Skywatcher

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Chaco
Level: Smitemaster
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C h a l l e n g e !

Invisible Brains: Once East

Solve the room without moving the mirrors from their starting positions.

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Quick links to my stuff (in case you forgot where it was):

Chaco
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With regards to Invisible Brains 2N1E: I'd like there to be some change to make the starting conditions more obvious. Right now it's possible to get surprisingly far in the room without a Halph, but run into some problems with getting the adder to enter some of the chambers.

I'd suggest either making the East entrance a Halph entrance in addition to the South one, adding a scroll somewhere giving you a hint about retrieving Halph from the South, or just pre-placing him in the South grass corridor instead of using entrance squares.

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Quick links to my stuff (in case you forgot where it was):

Xindaris
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Well..
I've uploaded a new version that fixes that issue in a third way.

I put north force arrows to trap whoever goes up to the north row of orbs up there until the room is clear, and a note on the trapdoor that says "There's a Halph/To the south" to be very clear on what's going on.

It should now be obvious that you can't solve the room by trapping Beethro in the north section (as there's no way for the monsters to get there, what with the trapdoor being dropped and all), and the note about Halph should inform the player what to do, given that.

Is this good?

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109th Skywatcher

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Chaco
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Yeah, that works great. It's not technically a Hold Administrator matter, but I thought I'd point it out to save everyone some confusion in the future.

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Quick links to my stuff (in case you forgot where it was):

Xindaris
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Tarstuff breakdown for backtracking issue purposes:


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109th Skywatcher

Here are some links to Things!

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 12-16-2015 09:51 PM]

bbb
Level: Master Delver
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I guess it is late, but here are comments on some rooms, and possible challenges.