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File: Xindaris First Hold.hold (97 KB)
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As the title suggests, the first hold that Xindaris ever tried making. The result of a bunch of experimentation by someone relatively new to DROD to see what kinds of puzzles could be made. Consists of seven levels of roughly 12 rooms each, along with a level select allowing the player to try said levels in any desired order.

Difficulty and nature of the rooms fluctuates throughout, as some of these rooms are the first I ever made while others are late additions or complete redesigns of old ideas by someone who had slightly more of a clue what he was doing.

Insoluble
Level: Smitemaster

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I suppose I'll go ahead and be the first to comment on this. I'll start by saying that I'm really excited to see more architecture by Xindaris. There are some really interesting Xindaris holds in architecture at the moment that have very nice puzzles in them. That being said, this first hold is a bit rough around the edges at times, but still worth playing. At the time of writing this, six people have given this hold a numerical "fun" rating and no two ratings agree. I think the reason for that is that the rooms in this hold vary a lot in both style and quality.

The hold has quite a lot of variety in it, and the architect tried out some very different somewhat experimental ideas. I appreciate this, and I do like it when architects take risks and try out unconventional things, but some of these experiments fell flat for me. The level Illusion for instance, uses custom images to hide or obscure information from the user. While an interesting idea in theory, I found it somewhat frustrating to play these rooms. It's a short level though, and I'm sure that some people will enjoy it.

There are also some more traditional DROD levels. The Rank and File level deals mostly with managing hordes using Beethro doubles, and feels slightly similar to War in that regards. I suspect that hard core optimizers will enjoy it. Little Cages is perhaps the strongest level and has a lot of minimalist lynchpin type rooms that modern player seem to like. One of my favorites was the time clone level, Temporal Symmetry, in which one must break the symmetry of a room to find the optimal solution.

There are a decent number of rooms that will probably be more tedious than fun for most players. There are quite a few rooms where the top score is in the thousands. Some of them are pretty mindless hack & slash style rooms. That being said, the saving grace of this hold is that it's in a completely open format and you can access pretty much any room from the start. It's easy enough to skip through the less enjoyable or tedious rooms. I think there's enough good stuff in here to warrant checking it out.

Lastly, as someone who did some beta testing for this hold, I'd like to say that Xindaris was really enthusiastic with soliciting and incorporating feedback. While I didn't enjoy everything here, there was a good number of solid rooms and it looks like Xindaris' holds will only become better with time as long as he or she incorporates the feedback from this one.

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Tahnan
Level: Smitemaster

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Insoluble wrote:
There are a decent number of rooms that will probably be more tedious than fun for most players.

Ay, there's the rub.

Full disclaimer: I haven't finished the hold yet. But there are a lot of rooms that are...well, it's not even always a matter of "tedious". There are a lot of rooms that are annoying. "Illusion" is a set of fairly trivial rooms whose only interesting feature is that they're visually designed to annoy the player. I just spent 1064 moves on a room (Tick Tock: 1S1E) with three serpents in it, plus a lot of toggling doors to slow down movement, and a builder putting out spikes to kill the snakes...slowly.

I'm enjoying some of it, but I have to stress for Xindaris my standard piece of advice to architects: don't irritate the player.

disoriented
Level: Smitemaster

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Rank and File 1E:
Backtracking issue if the clone potion is taken, and a clone is placed at the northern entrance and leaves to the N while the room is unsolved.

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[Last edited by disoriented at 01-27-2016 09:17 PM]