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Caravel Forum : DROD Boards : Architecture : Dimmers' Dangerous Dungeon (WIP)
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DimWiddy
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File: Dimmers Dangerous Demo.hold (273.7 KB)
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icon Dimmers' Dangerous Dungeon (0)  
My second attempt at building a hold after Onsuary in Oyst... or, sort of a follow-up to it. I abandoned that project but I rather liked some of the rooms and didn't want to abandon them completely. Hope that's ok, since about 95% of this is entirely new rooms. I tried to come up with some original ideas, even if the end result isn't too difficult. :blush

EDIT: Fixed some stairs stuff.

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[Last edited by DimWiddy at 02-18-2016 06:58 PM]
02-18-2016 at 06:47 PM
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navithmastero
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icon Re: Dimmers' Dangerous Dungeon (0)  
Had a (very) brief look at it. Firstly, the level design is really nice for the most part - recurring themes within the same level, nice map art etc. Be careful of over the top lighting (I'm looking at you Level 4: 1E)!

A look at the rooms: I'd be wary of execution heavy rooms (ie. Player knows what to do immediately, but the hard thing is doing it) - these types of room can be great, but can become repetitive and frustrating to do - I'm not saying the rooms are bad (I've played only a couple so I don't know for sure, some might be brilliant!) but of the ones I looked at, none made me really scratch my head. Just make sure your rooms don't become boring and repetitive and you should be fine.

As for putting in custom character art - insert a character, and click the character button at the top right corner. Then, you can add a new character with portrait art, custom tiles etc.

-nm

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02-18-2016 at 11:13 PM
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DimWiddy
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icon Re: Dimmers' Dangerous Dungeon (0)  
navithmastero wrote:
A look at the rooms: I'd be wary of execution heavy rooms (ie. Player knows what to do immediately, but the hard thing is doing it)

Sounds like you're going to like levels 6-8 and hate level 3. :P

Understood though--my first thought tends to be "ooh, this would be an interesting interaction to take advantage of." But making it into an obscure lynchpin is something I have yet to master...

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02-18-2016 at 11:27 PM
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Insoluble
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File: Dimmers Dangerous Demo.demo (16.2 KB)
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icon Re: Dimmers' Dangerous Dungeon (+1)  
Aww, I was enjoying Onsuary in Oyst! Well, looking at this in the editor it seems you kept a few rooms from it at least. Here are a few thoughts so far after having played through the first level and some of the second.

You mention on a scroll about wanting to learn to script cut scenes better. Skell has done some terrific introductory videos on this. You can find them here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOyLLvNgx3FuWOyhz1hcP0IkuDVdwibkP

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOyLLvNgx3FsuKz4_NJy-_lpEgBTexx7k

Feel free to ask questions about how to script certain things in the architecture forum though, people are usually pretty helpful about that kind of thing. You can even ask questions in this thread.

On the whole so far I tend to agree with navithmastero that the hold is beautifully designed with very nice attention to level aesthetics, but with quite a heavy emphasis on execution and horde management rooms. I did like the "D"s scattered about through the hold, I though that was a nice touch. Here are some thoughts mostly on level 1 (since levels after that seem to be only partially complete.)

In general you could probably do with more checkpoints. 1S1W and 2S1W have none! I was playing with Unlimited Undo anyway, so I can't really offer helpful suggestions as to where they would be most useful. A few of your rooms with weapon tokens have them placed directly on top of force arrows. This can be somewhat hard to read, and the general recommendation is to try to set things up more like you have them in 3S1W with an arrow-token-arrow combo. I'll secret tag the room by room comments below.

Click here to view the secret text

I've attached my demos so far as well, though most of these rooms are fairy open ended so there probably aren't any unintended solutions. I wasn't able to worm out of the movement restrictions anywhere in level 1 at least :)

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02-20-2016 at 05:46 AM
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DimWiddy
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Thanks a ton for the feedback! I'm not super-fond of 2S1W myself either, so I may get rid of it, though I liked the other rooms so I'm glad they didn't attract any negative feedback. Looking forward to feedback on other levels!

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02-20-2016 at 06:14 AM
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Insoluble
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File: Dimmers Dangerous Demo.demo (26.3 KB)
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icon Re: Dimmers' Dangerous Dungeon (0)  
Okay, I finished level 2 and part of level 3. I'll attach demos to this post as before. I'm going to make an attempt to finish level 3, but I'll be honest, a lot of these rooms seem to be very heavy on repetitive trial and error solutions and I'm getting a bit worn out with them. Some of my comments below are not positive, but I don't want you to come away from this thinking I don't like the hold. I definitely think it has a lot of great ideas in it and a lot of potential. It also has a lot of rooms that are just plain too much. I don't mean that they are too difficult, since difficulty is often appreciated, I mean that you take what is an otherwise interesting idea for a room and repeat that idea four or five times in the same room. Some of these ideas involve fiddly manipulation that is mostly trial and error. There are definitely people who are into holds like that, but I think you'll find that a lot of DROD players these days are going to find it tiresome. Again, please don't take this the wrong way, I think the hold is off to a good start for sure. I just think that paring back some of the rooms so that you only have to do the same task once or twice will make for a much better experience on the whole.

I'll comment on rooms that you labeled unfinished as well as the finished ones this time since I actually rather enjoyed some of the unfinished ones.

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[Last edited by Insoluble at 03-08-2016 05:47 AM]
03-06-2016 at 08:40 AM
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DimWiddy
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icon Re: Dimmers' Dangerous Dungeon (0)  
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03-07-2016 at 08:04 PM
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