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Red-XIII
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Hello guys!

This hold was supposed to be an entry for the current RPG contest but sadly I didn't have enough time to complete it until now. Even though the hold is conquerable there are still several things that must be changed but I'd like your opinion on the overall gameplay first.

As the name suggests, in this hold you can only go North or South and there are 13 rooms. The peculiarity of this hold is the item multiplier, which works like this: in the entrance, 1N, 11N and 12N the item multiplier is always 1; elsewhere it depends if you have less than 100 HP and on room coordinates.
For example, if you enter 4N with less than 100 HP (100 is included) than the item multiplier is 4, if you enter 7N with more than 100 HP the item multiplier is 1, otherwise is 7, and so on...
I'd like to know what you think about this and if you find it interesting.
The script is quite easy so I don't think I made mistakes, it should not be breakable.

About the hold, I didn't manage to complete it with skeleton key in my possession, probably because the secret boos is not well balanced and very similar to normal boss. Also, I'm afraid that the portable orb might trivialize things since with it you can immediately take the wyrm smiter.
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What do you think about it? Any suggestion is helpful!

EDIT: Hold send to HA.



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[Last edited by Red-XIII at 11-21-2016 08:34 AM]
10-19-2016 at 09:25 PM
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Nuntar
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icon Re: One way (0)  
Well, this is extremely hard, no mistake. After pushing myself at it as hard as I could, I was at least able to reach the final boss, and get all gems at maximum value (unless I messed up somewhere). My final stats:

HP 2036
ATK 214 (Wyrm Smiter)
DEF 197 (Knight Shield)

The Pirate does over 10,000 damage, so getting his stash is out of the question. The Evil Pirate does 5151, which seems more reasonable, but it would require me to leave all the health in 10N until the endgame. I needed most of that health to get the ATK needed to kill the Fake Gel Baby for the Wyrmsmiter.

The lack of yellow keys and health refills is extremely frustrating. It feels like you've built this hold around a particular sequence of choices, and the player is required to guess your correct sequence in order to win.

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10-20-2016 at 03:00 AM
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Red-XIII
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Thanks for your comments, I think you're right, there's a sequence that makes things a lot easier since I didn't have any problems with yellows keys and managed to kill the pirate with less than 5000 damage. About that, as it stands now it is possible to get 219 ATK, so maybe you skipped something.
On the other hand, if there aren't many routes avaible the hold is no good, and if it is frustating it's even worse, so I'll change it a bit and I think I know how to do it. Later this day I'll try to post a new version.

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10-20-2016 at 09:30 AM
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Red-XIII
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New version attached.
I modified many things and now it's definitely easier, I managed to kill both bosses (with speed potion) using 2 completely different routes.
Here's what I modified:

- Speed potion instead of portable orb;
- More health and yellow keys;
- Replaced many monsters with some others and added more choices;
- Added more gems, now you can reach 227 ATK and 202 DEF.

Hopefully the hold is more balanced, though I think that taking wooden sword is too easy now.

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[Last edited by Red-XIII at 10-21-2016 03:13 PM]
10-21-2016 at 03:12 PM
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Nuntar
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icon Re: One way (+1)  
Yes, I think the hold is a lot less frustrating now :thumbsup The extra ATK makes it easier to reach 100 (for the Swordsman) at a crucial time, which helps tremendously.

Final stats:

5791 HP (Evil pirate does 4172, without speed potion)
220 ATK (I must have missed some again but I really can't see where.... must have got some at x1 without realising)
202 DEF
3/1/0 keys, alternatively I can spend these keys to reach the speed potion

Black pirate does over 10,000 damage, so seems to be only possible to kill if I get all the ATK. That's fine, but the problem is that even if I did get it all, his damage would be over 4000, high enough that you can't kill the Evil pirate afterwards, and the cache behind the Black pirate isn't worth the damage taken. How about making the multiplier rule apply to 12N as it does to the other rooms?

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10-21-2016 at 08:24 PM
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Red-XIII
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Maybe you "skipped" the ATK gem in 8N on red door?
With maximum attack evil pirate does 3300 damage so it's pretty easy to kill him without speed potion even after killing the black pirate (assuming you left some health in the previous rooms).
Perhaps I can add more health in 12N? You'd get way too much health with item multiplier 12.

Maybe some other player feels differently?

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[Last edited by Red-XIII at 10-21-2016 08:44 PM]
10-21-2016 at 08:43 PM
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Nuntar
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No, I got that. (If I'd missed it altogether I would have been 8 short...)

At maximum ATK, the Black Pirate does roughly 4000 damage (100pts) with the speed potion, and you get back 300 health and keys (67pts) in addition to using up the speed potion, which could save around 2000 health (50pts) on the Evil Pirate. So the return isn't nearly enough. It's up to you how you want to rebalance it; you could add more health, or add more keys or gems. If you changed the multiplier to x12, the return would be 3600 health + keys (150pts), which is about right. Also, when you have invisible scripting like this, it's unfair to the player to change it for one room, since that messes with the player's expectations. So that would definitely be my preferred solution.

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10-21-2016 at 08:55 PM
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Red-XIII
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Even if you didn't get the +8 ATK you'd still get the +1, which means that the extra ATK that you get in xN, if you enter with less than 100HP, is x-1, right?
To be honest I didn't calculate the score points, I was just thinking that with item multiplier 12 you'd be too much powerful. On the other hand, I agree that scoring must be balanced, so I'll change it with your solution in the next update.

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10-21-2016 at 09:11 PM
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kieranmillar
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icon Re: One way (+1)  
Alright I gave this a playthrough.

The dynamic of having to keep getting to low health is interesting. I love it! Having to leave and re-enter the room to get the higher multiplier which then stays until you leave the room is quite interesting too. Lets you collect resources en-masse at the right time, but then again you sometimes don't want to so you can easily drop your HP again, so that's neat.

Beat the super boss with max stats, 2k HP spare and 7 yellow keys, but I didn't take a green key for 1 swordsman hit in 7N.

A minor nitpick: The storage spot for the sword and shield in 4N is not all that useful, the place they would be useful is 8N as I ended up running back and forth a whole bunch just to use the wooden equips in 8N. Alternatively, don't block access to the shortcut by the orb at the top of the room and just make it immediately accessible once you make it to 8N.

As far as rewards behind the secret boss goes, it doesn't really matter. At the moment you optimise both scorepoints by killing one, loading and then killing the other. If the rewards behind the secret boss were worthwhile, this process would instead just be killing the secret boss then immediately killing the regular boss, and that's equally as uninteresting IMO. Both scorepoints are optimised via the same process in both cases.

The hold is pretty cool overall. I enjoyed it. A fun gimmick. Interesting that when optimising at the end you can only really take advantage of the health in 10N to the full extent as any other health caches all don't get to take advantage of the multiplier. Makes saving keys still work out despite many trades being like 1,000 HP + for a yellow in many cases. :thumbsup Then again, the amount of HP you have for the bosses is basically just all the HP in 10N and HP saved elsewhere has little impact.
10-31-2016 at 10:10 PM
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Red-XIII
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Nice timing Kieran, I just made some changes! I added a storage spot for sword and shield in 8N as you said but I left the black door. On the other hand, now you have a third option to strike the orb and take the gems, hopefully it's balanced enough (by spending 400 GR and a yellow key).
I also added more health in 12N, I don't know how it affects scores (though as you said it's no big deal since the route to optimize both scores is the same) but it definitely helps to kill the normal boss later without speed potion.

If there are no more issues and these changes are good this could be a possible release version.

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There's just this one, just this rock.
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11-01-2016 at 09:41 AM
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