Xindaris
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1531
Registered: 06-13-2015
IP: Logged

For anyone looking for more ways to use limitations as inspiration to make DROD rooms, this is one approach that could be used. It could be used by an individual, or in a collab, and definitely for a contest.

The idea is simple: The architect of the (level, room, hold) is on a budget, and each possible element they could include has a price. Add up all the prices and see if it matches your budget; if not, you've gotta change something.

Obviously this requires some arbitrary decisions as to how much each thing costs, as well as some important decisions such as (for example) whether it costs money to make floor or to make walls (i.e., whether a zero-cost room is full of wall or full of floor). But I hope we can agree it would make sense for more "simple" elements to cost less and more "complex" ones to cost more. So for example, roach would be the cheapest monster, eyes slightly more expensive, queens and other monster-spawners very expensive, and a single brain would cost a hefty fee as well.

Once you've got a set of rules to work with down, though, you can do all sorts of things with the idea. The budget doesn't have to be a lower limit: Maybe it's a government contract and you've got to spend as much as you can on just a couple of rooms. Maybe it has to fall within a certain range. You could even aim to have each level cost in total a specific number of Greckles, no more and no less.

There is a bit of overhead to using this idea, of course, counting out how many of each thing that costs money you've got. I imagine there's a way to automate it on a hold file or via scripting with a "bean counter" character in each room (who costs nothing himself, of course!), but that's probably even more difficult. Still, I think the idea has potential.

____________________________
109th Skywatcher

Here are some links to Things!

---

[Last edited by Xindaris at 12-10-2015 10:17 PM]

Chaco
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3626
Registered: 10-06-2005
IP: Logged

This is similar to (but not exactly) what the Unfortunate Architect contest (and related compilation hold) used, but the idea of buying individual monsters (and all TSS elements being available) means the sets of monsters could look way different from hold to hold.

I think it's a neat idea and a good way to prompt more one-level holds.

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

---

[Last edited by Chaco at 12-10-2015 10:30 PM]

Xindaris
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1531
Registered: 06-13-2015
IP: Logged

File: Sample Budget Build.hold (2.4 KB)
Downloaded 40 times.
License: Public Domain

So, last night I had a mild fit of insanity and came up with a completely arbitrary pricing of basically every element. Maybe I missed one or two.

It's very roughly written because I was just throwing ideas into a text file as quick as I could, but this is what I came up with:

Edit: Yeah, even looking back at it now I see some potential tweaks. For example, probably tarstuff mothers should be a "[large amount] for first, [smaller amount] for each additional of same type" deal since a single tar mother eye spawns all the tar in the room.


And then, to test the prices, I had random.org roll up a couple of budgets for me, one fairly small and one fairly big, and tried to build a room for each. Attached to this post is the result, during the building of which I made a few minor tweaks to the pricing.

To be clear, while building I had the mindset that I was pretending to be a room designer for the empire; the empire gave me that much money to work with, told me not to go over, and said they'd give my department less money if I had a surplus. And my rooms were going to be judged by 256th Room Critic or something, so I couldn't just waste money on unnecessary elements that don't add to the puzzle. Ideally, this is the attitude anyone hoping to make something of this whole budget architect idea should have.

This was a really interesting exercise, and I highly recommend it. Having a low price to shoot for requires the builder to be a bit minimalistic and use few elements as efficiently as possible; having a high budget and trying to make yourself use all of it (in a meaningful way, not as random junk that doesn't actually contribute to the puzzle) can allow one to take a fairly simple idea to start with and complexify it into a more interesting puzzle if you're careful not to just bloat things.

As is mentioned on the scrolls in the hold itself, the first room was built with the smaller budget, 630 greckles. I managed to use exactly that much. The room originally had 4 more roaches on the pressure plate, but I realized there was no way to get back to the north end after clearing the room and returning from the south entrance, so I had to sacrifice 1 roach per green gate to make it navigible.

The second room got a weird budget of 2789. It turns out, thanks to the way I priced things, the only way to get a number not divisible by 5 is with a character, so I made a character who teleports the player onto a potion. It was kind of interesting having to come up with something meaningful for a fairly simple character to do in a specific number of lines, but I could completely understand an application of this idea just forbidding scripting and rounding to the nearest multiple of 5 or 10 instead. Things didn't really click until I was desperately trying to spend the last 600 or so greckles, at which point I came up with the side rooms containing seeding beacons. The room is now all about the player seeing into the future and making their job easier in the future by doing certain things in the present.
I still had a surplus and when I tried to spend that up with a nice long serpent chasing the player in their little square room I couldn't solve it. I tried cluttering the north end of the room with some pre-spawned roaches too, and just wasn't feeling it, so I decided to just put up with the surplus.

____________________________
109th Skywatcher

Here are some links to Things!

---

[Last edited by Xindaris at 04-16-2016 02:34 AM]