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Conditions

(Note that some of these are different from the original UAC, so please read carefully, and ask if you need further clarification.)

1. Construct a one-level hold, with the same hold and level name, and at most 12 rooms.

2. The total number of monsters must be exactly 12 roaches, 11 goblins, etc. (as in the song above). Note that this counts initially placed monsters: unlike the original UAC, having roach queens does not allow an unlimited number of roaches. (The queens are presented to you in frozen storage.) However, there is no limit on the number of monsters that may be spawned during play of a room.

3. Monster swap: Shady Sam the Serpent Man offers you a trade. You may give him your entire stock of one monster type, in exchange for one brain or snake (any length and any type: red serpent, rattleserpent, adder, gentryii). This trade is optional. If taken, it counts as a permitted exception to Rule 2 above.

4. Slayers: If you use a room-edge Slayer, every enterable edge tile of that room must be set to Slayer entry, and this counts as one towards your total.

5. Tar: The room with the tar mother may have any amount of initial tar (but no initial tar babies).

6. No other monsters. Except for the 12 types mentioned in the rhyme, and the possibility of taking Shady Sam's deal, you may not have any other monsters. Except for invisible characters, everything on the monsters tab counts as a monster, so this means no wubbas, no preplaced mimics, no stalwarts, etc.

7. No monster generators. The following are forbidden, since they can generate monsters: fluff vents, all forms of tarstuff (except for tar in the tar mother room), tarstuff switch tokens, the "Appear" and "Generate entity" scripting commands. For potions and horns, see Rule 8.

8. Drinks for Santa. You may include a maximum of one of each type of potion and horn. You don't have to include potions at all, and if you do, you don't have to use all types, but for any type you do include, you are limited to a total of one.

9. Other objects: Orbs, bombs, mirrors, etc. are not restricted. Use as many as you like.

10. Don't take the rhyme too literally. The actions are not important; for instance, your waterskippers may be on land, and your queens may be on a floor type that prevents laying. The rhyme is only there to restrict the number of each type of monster.

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×

Here are some comments on all the entries. I'll try to give some general remarks on each, then mention specific rooms. I'll always try to include some commentary on the entrance (since that's the most important room in any level as it sets the tone) as well as my favorite room in that level. I won't mention my own numerical rating since I had a hard enough time putting an actual number to a lot of these and I'm not 100% satisfied with my ratings. I will say that I tried to rate entries based mostly on how much I enjoyed playing them, but also tried to judge each entry for what it was trying to do (i.e. was it going for an interesting overarching concept? trying to be hard? trying to be easy?). I also tried to judge rooms based on what I thought the intended solution was supposed to be even if it was badly broken.

Twelve Evil Roaches
This entry was really well polished (save for the glaring break in 1W) and had some absolutely outstanding rooms. Some of my favorite rooms in the entire contest were in this one. Unfortunately some of my least favorite rooms were in this one as well. I loved the rooms with tricky linchpin or resource management style solutions. There were also a few rooms in which it was immediately clear what needed to be done, but discovering the tricky sequence of manipulations to get there was mostly trial and error. The overall concept (each room has one roach and all the enemies of any particular type) was really well done, and I enjoyed the aesthetics overall.

The entrance: I liked this room a lot in the end. It took me a bit to get started, but once I figured out what type of setup I needed for a solution, there were more than enough mirrors to make it so that the manipulation was never too arduous. This was a pretty good intro room for the level.

1N: Possibly my favorite in this entry. This was a super interesting tar cutting puzzle of as kind I hadn't seen before. I like that the tar mother timer never seemed tight. Great room!

2N: Ugh, the manipulation in this room! Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if I had been asked to do something similar with just three skippers (which I know doesn't really work with the contest constraints and theme together). But this was too much. I won't lie, I just gave up and checked the demo for this one after fiddling with it for way too long.

1E: This one is also possibly my favorite from this entry. It was super fun figuring out exactly what needed to go on each plate and how to get it to happen. The manipulation was never so demanding as to get in the way. Very nicely done room!
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Trollmas
Well, this was an entry. I suppose it achieved it's purpose. Thanks at least for including the special command shortcut! My favorite room by far was 5E.
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Twelve Days of the Winter Solstice
This entry had a lot of good things going for it. I like that the architect scripted hints and the scripted room names. The final room was pretty funny too. I checked the hints afterwards though and most of them were either hints for fairly obvious things or things that I didn't end up using in my solution for the room. I also liked that the rooms were compact and easily parsed. The emphasis in most rooms was on execution though, and a few rooms ended up having somewhat fiddly manipulation.

The Entrance: This was a really strong opening. A nice manipulation linchpin that involves techniques that show up later on in the level. The room is easier than average for this entry, but that's actually fine by me. It does a good job introducing the level themes while staying short and simple.

1E: I'll be happy to never have to kill a goblin with a pickax again. That's all I have to say about that.

4E: The hint said something about having the guard turn his sword to cut briar, but it seemed a lot easier to just push him into the briar diagonally to cut it. This was one of a few instances in which I checked the hint scroll after solving the room and seem to have done it completely differently. These rooms are pretty open so it's okay I guess.

5E: I think this one was my favorite from this entry. It had a nice linchpin (which you could do in at least a couple of ways) and was fun to figure out. The manipulation was tricky without ever feeling fiddly. Great room!

6E: I read the hint and am pretty sure I did this an unintended way. I only used the decoy to hold down the pressure plate at the end and didn't use to immobilize anything.

7E: I wish I had read the hint for this one before solving it. I didn't stash the skipper away and had to deal with it the whole time. And no you should definitely not make that a challenge.

8E I did this one fending off roach queen spawns and got most of the way to the end before realizing that wasn't allowed. A gentle reminder at the beginning of this room that queen spawn is a fail state would be appreciated. Honestly I feel like the room was more fun dodging roaches than it was having to stun the queen every 30 turns though.
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Xmas Contest Hold
This one was mine. I tried to break out of my usual pattern of having an over arching theme and spending a ridiculous amount of time making each room. I tried picking elements that seemed like they might play nicely together and arranged rooms with them without having any sort of well formulated plan for the room ahead of time. My main goal for this one was to try to make an entry that, while maybe not particularly special, was at the very least was not tedious or annoying to play. Unfortunately I don't think I succeed in this with some rooms. 3N for instance I don't particularly care for. It wouldn't be so bad with only two or three goblins, but I needed to use up the rest of them so in they went. That room was sort of thrown together and not very good. 2S1W also is another one that probably would have been better with half the number of roaches, but the contest constraints had me putting all the remaining ones in. On the whole though I enjoyed forcing myself to make rooms quickly. I made a lot of rooms that I think turned out okay that I wouldn't have ever made with my usual process.
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How to Build a Room
This one was super neat! The concept was great and pretty well executed given the constraints of having to complete it within the time limit of the contest without beta testing by others. That being said, those constraints led to things ending up not as tight as they could have been. Some rooms ended up having multiple solutions, which in all honesty is fine and not something that really needs to be changed. The bigger flaw (and this is really minor) is that in some of the rooms towards the end it felt a little bit like "rinse and repeat". For the most part though the architect did a super nice job making it so that the monsters could be (and needed to be) used differently in subsequent rooms.

The entrance: This room sets the tone. From the intro text you kind of know what to expect, and when you see the overly simple setup of this room, you start to form ideas about what's to come.

3E: This is where things started to get really good. Based on some discussion in chat I tried to do this one the intended way (using all the tools provided) from the get go and really enjoyed the solution. Others have commented in chat (and I'm sure in the comments on this page too) that there is an alternative way to get the Aumtlich to stay on the plate that would be pretty easy to remove. It may be just fine to leave this as it is though. One of the great things about this hold is that there are multiple ways to do each room and pretty much all of them are interesting.

8E: This one was probably my favorite. A lot of things get done differently and I think I used just about every monster in a different way from the previous room. The various tricks involved are neat too.

9E: I felt like this was probably the weakest room. I literally did nothing different from 8E other than kill the wraithwing at the start of the room.

10E: Oh man, the slayer manipulation here. I pretty much just fiddled until it worked. To the extent that when I had to do the exact same thing for 11E I still had no idea what I was doing and it actually took me longer to find a series of moves that worked. This was for the breaking the crumbly wall bit, Getting the slayer to hit the orb was fine. Probably this is also mostly due to my lack of slayer manipulation chops. And when all is said and done it's still a fairly short manipulation which makes it not all that bad.
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Abandoned Warehouse
I think this was probably a good level, it's just really not for me. It took me a while to just get over the visual assault of the room layout. It's interestingly designed in a way, but the design aesthetic really doesn't work for me. In addition to making it incredibly hard to parse what are already very busy and complicated rooms, all the extra crates and stuff get in the way making it somewhat annoying to just walk through a room. I honestly wasn't sure how to vote for this one. I ended up watching demos for some rooms, not because I wouldn't have been able to solve them, but because I was too exhausted by the level to want to play it. There were still some fun puzzles in here, but more often than not there was just too much going on in each room.

That being said, this entry went with a theme and did it consistently. The room layouts were all very thematic and the puzzles were pretty consistently similar in level of complexity. I feel like the most difficult rooms were actually closer to the entrance but the difficulty felt well balanced on the whole.

The Entrance: I actually skipped this one and came back to it. It was one of the more complicated rooms in the level in many ways. Not the most difficult, but one of the more involved rooms in that there are a ton of tasks that need to be accomplished to clear it. The overall messiness of the room makes it difficult to see what's going on at first and at some point you just need to take a leap of faith and start doing things. Unfortunately, like many rooms in this entry there are a couple of "gotcha" moments where you think you're getting somewhere, but no, you had to keep that roach alive. Admittedly it wasn't as bad in this room as it is in some of the others, but it left me feeling somewhat frustrated.

1N: So I actually really liked this one. It still had more than necessary going on (The guard and Aumtlich in the beginning seemed to be completely unrelated to the core puzzle of the room and felt unnecessary). But the main puzzle was pretty fun. I'd say this was probably my favorite on this level. The cluttered layout worked will with the puzzle without actually getting in the way too much. This was one of the first ones I solved on this level and it was pretty satisfying.

2N: This room was a real slog. Maybe I was doing things very inefficiently, but this reminded me of a lot of AE era holds with massive tar mother on trapdoor horde rooms that take 1000+ turns. I got trapped in unwinnable situations a ton of times and honestly felt like I just blundered into clearing the room in the end.
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And Then There Were None
This one seemed to focus on intricate movement order puzzles. While that may not be everyone's cup of tea, I think the architect did a decent job working with this theme. The layout and aesthetics were really nice too. That being said, I ended up looking at demos for a bunch of these rooms, especially towards the end.

The Entrance: Actually does an okay job as an intro room. It lets the player know fairly quickly that this is going to be a movement order level. While I did it mostly by trial and error, I can see how I could have teased out the required order.

1E: Fiddling with goblins to get them into some magical order that will keep formation though? No thanks.

1N3E: This one was my favorite in this level. It was a fun little puzzle and did what I think more movement order puzzles should try to go for. The setup makes it trivial to get the eyes in any order you like, the main difficulty is in figuring out what order will work. That can be solved just using logic (and a bit of math). I thought this room was super fun.
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The Quest for The List
On the whole this one was pretty fun. I like that there was a bit of a story to go with it. A couple of the rooms felt a bit tedious but the ideas were good. As a reminder, the scroll that was supposed to be deleted still needs to be deleted.

The Entrance:Probably my favorite; I'm a big fan of rooms in which you get to carve out the playing field before unleashing the monsters.

1E: This one definitely was just a fiddle-around-with-it-until-you-stumble-upon-the-right-move-sequence room for me. This definitely felt like the repository for all the monsters the architect had left over after making the other rooms. Which, to be fair, is something I did too, so I can't really hold it against you

1N1W: I did this one without needing the last golem for anything. Challenge maybe?

2N: Got the challenge because it was the way of doing it that came to mind first. The other way seems like it would take forever. Interesting room idea, and I got a nice sequence going for moving both queens and roaches. Raft manipulation rooms are always going to feel slightly tedious though when you have to juggle between more than one raft and move monsters about.
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A Scattershot Holiday Hold
This was an okay entry. The title is appropriate for sure. It definitely felt a bit all over the place. I guess this was the only one-room entry that actually really only was one room so that's something. But it felt like there were too many disparate ideas and the whole thing felt very incoherent. It was also long. Really long. I never finished it though I did get pretty close to doing so (I realized too late that I was supposed to stop the tar mother from growing so much and really didn't want to replay the 1000 or so moves it took me to get that close to the end.) I feel like this could easily have been split into at least three separate rooms and have been better for it.
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Unabridged 12 Days
I actually didn't mind this one, it's probably my favorite of the one room entries (yes I completed this one 100%). The concept is clever. And while it is tedious, so is the song it's based on. It actually would have felt like a lot less of a slog if the tar mother had been constrained a bit more in a smaller space where the tar growth was guaranteed to always be cuttable. I do appreciate how the way you deal with some of the monsters changes on subsequent visits to the room.
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A Very Vihartly Christmath Special
This one was pretty simple to complete, but hey! Math! I can get behind that! And you know what? Sometimes it's fun to just smite a scattering of monsters without having to worry about linchpin puzzles and the like. This one really felt like 3 brain AE era hold for that reason. It was a bit simplistic, but I enjoyed it. And, again, math. Also, I had never heard of Vihart so I got to look it up and was treated to a rather engaging 30 minute video about composing 12 tone serialist music to go with nursery rhymes about laser bats. That alone was worth it.

2S1E: This was probably the only room I wasn't too keen on. It would have been much better without so many goblins (I suppose you'd have had to have come up with another room for the remaining ones though.)

1S: Definitely NOT cringeworthy! This was super cool! Also, if you are into math I hear there is a recently published hold containing some. Something to do with a torus I gather...

3S: Pythagorean Theorem? I wasn't sure since the resolution is so coarse. The rest of them were pretty clear though. Nicely done
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Lazy Architect's Basement
This one had me stumped on most rooms and I ended up having to watch demos for a lot of them. It was definitely going for difficulty that relied on obscure edge cases and mechanics, which is fine but not going to be everyone's cup of tea. I definitely liked the rooms I was able to figure out, but a couple of these rooms (the slayer ones specifically) seem like the mechanics they relied on were just too obscure.

The Entrance: The hold makes it pretty clear that this room is the unused monster repository. Unfortunately this puts what is essentially a throw away room as the player's first impression of the level. It wasn't bad for a horde room, but it definitely gave off a misleading impression about what this entry would be like.

1W: and 1E: I watch the demos and still don't have a clue what's going on here. These rooms are super weird and seem like they are making use of extremely buggy behavior (that will probably not be changed at this point, but still.)

1S: This was probably the least difficult room in this level (aside from the entrance) and also probably my favorite. The concept is fun and the invisibility potion makes the execution fairly forgiving. Really nice room.
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Last-Minute Shopping This was an interesting entry for the most part, but a lot of the rooms felt overly busy. In a lot of rooms the various bits and pieces of the rooms felt almost unrelated and would ideally have worked better as more thoroughly thought out separate puzzles in separate rooms. I like the concept a lot though, the speech text was super fun. Beethro repeats the same dialog every time you re-enter a room which feels a bit repetitive after a while, maybe consider changing that for the compilation. In some of the rooms, the "save the gift" solution ended up being easier than the "ruin the gift" one, but that's not really a problem. On the whole, very neat idea.

The entrance: This goes for some of the other middle rooms as well, but the room felt overly busy with stuff, not all of which got used for both solutions. Just parsing the room was the main challenge, after which there was a bit of slightly fiddly manipulation. The outer rooms felt a lot more tight and purposeful.

1N: for example, made use of it's elements in a much cleaner way and both solutions seemed like they used things differently. There was still a little bit of fiddling, but the shallow water was placed well to make this minimal.

1N1E: This was probably my favorite room in this entry. Both solutions use the rooms elements very differently and both were fun to work out. Soldier manipulation is usually a bit of a chore, but was not bad in this room since it's mostly narrow passages that minimize the unpredictable pathing.
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A Collection of Titles
This entry was a lot of fun. I liked the mid range difficulty level a lot and the fact that there were a variety of different types of rooms (classic linchpin, monster manipulation, trapdoor mazes, horde like rooms.) I also liked the touch of giving each room its own name via scripting, though some of the name choices were a bit weird.

The Entrance: This was a decent room to lead off with. It's pretty clear what needs to be done though it may take some thought to figure out exactly how execution will work. That makes it a pretty good representative for the whole level actually.

3N: This room was my favorite in the level. I really enjoyed the concept of having several different monsters to have to deal with in a positioning puzzle. The invisibility potion took away any sort of fiddlyness and made it all about coming up with a good way to get the monsters into position. There was enough space in the room to make it never feel frustrating. I also like the linchpin of needing to use one of the monsters (construct corpse or slayer) as a temporary block for another one. Not sure if that's required actually, but it was a fun tactic to come up with.
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Grab Bag
Oh man, this entry was exhausting. I never did finish it, but I got though the first few passes and feel comfortable calling it after that. The idea of doing one big multi-pass room for this contest is interesting, and I'll give the architect credit for that. But room itself, at least the passes I went through, is very execution heavy in very tight spaces. It felt like a long string of magic move sequences. They were not too long at least and relatively guessable, but I ended up getting tired of all the guess-and-check very quickly.
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Beethro and the Cold Corridor
This one had some good rooms mixed in with a couple that were on the tedious side. On the whole I liked the difficulty level though and it was nice and concise.

Entrence: The very first room felt a tiny bit on the magic move sequence side. Though to be fair, once I thought a bit harder about how goblins move I figured out how things needed to be set up fairly quickly.

2E: As you probably already noticed, this room breaks if you just go through the tunnel. This should be fixable during the testing that will happen before the hold gets published. Maybe just have a pressure plate next to the tunnels and along the east entrance that traps the roaches on arrows from the other side.

4E: This room was really neat. I liked having to come up with ways to move the aumtlich on the platform given different constraints. I'm usually not into rooms that ask you to herd monsters on platforms but this one was a lot of fun.

5E This one was my favorite. Very nice room.

6E This was definitely on the fiddly side. It wasn't terrible once I found a good strategy for dragging a wraithwing around with me, but it was probably my least favorite in this level.
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×Skell's idea generator: http://forum.caravelgames.com/ideasGenerator/view
Challenges Scoreboard: http://forum.caravelgames.com/challenges.php
Level map viewer: http://forum.caravelgames.com/map.php
Tactical DROD game: http://forum.caravelgames.com/tsspreview.php
(Note: Requires Flash)
Room Element Search tool http://forum.caravelgames.com/roomsearch.php
(Search through all published holds for rooms with various elements.)
Room position Heat Map http://forum.caravelgames.com/heatmap.php
DROD has a wiki! http://drod.wikia.com/wiki/Deadly_Rooms_Of_Death_Wiki
Skell's super cool list of turn sequence stuff https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QS9Vk3xsd4jlGF23J8p7c2IM5cmhwmoe6eCEaaAn8jY/edit#heading=h.ocovx14zokm4

It's not listed in "help", but [attachment] will embed the whatever image is attached to a post.

×
My Published Holds
Smitemasters' Selection - Finding the First Truth
Smitemasters' Selection - Treacle Stew
My YouTube Channel - Leylite

Holds I contributed levels to

Advanced Concepts
Advanced Concepts 2
Blind Race #1: On Your Marks
The Custom Element Contest Compilation
Doorless Hold Contest Compilation
DROD Flash Project Audition
DROD History Month
Elemental Showcase
Elemental Showcase 5.0
Good, Bad and Ugly Contest Compilation
King Dugan's Alternate Reality
Labyrinth of Mellenfral (unpublished contest compilation)
Lunchbreak Special
Lunchbreak Special 2 (unpublished contest compilation)
Take Five
The Mining Business
Twelve Days of Christmas
Way Forward

Holds in the Making

...MYSTERY PROJECT

Styles

Workshop - DROD 5.0
Voids - DROD 3.0
Cavern Redux - DROD 2.0
Laboratory - DROD AE
Snakepit - DROD AE
Twenty-Sixth Level - DROD AE

×My holds: Beethro's Brain, Entropy, Further Up and Further In, Washed Ashore, Hinterlands, Hypercube, jfflpnk, Lavender Levels.
Collaborations: Way Forward, Advanced Concepts 2

×
My Published Holds
Smitemasters' Selection - Finding the First Truth
Smitemasters' Selection - Treacle Stew
My YouTube Channel - Leylite

Holds I contributed levels to

Advanced Concepts
Advanced Concepts 2
Blind Race #1: On Your Marks
The Custom Element Contest Compilation
Doorless Hold Contest Compilation
DROD Flash Project Audition
DROD History Month
Elemental Showcase
Elemental Showcase 5.0
Good, Bad and Ugly Contest Compilation
King Dugan's Alternate Reality
Labyrinth of Mellenfral (unpublished contest compilation)
Lunchbreak Special
Lunchbreak Special 2 (unpublished contest compilation)
Take Five
The Mining Business
Twelve Days of Christmas
Way Forward

Holds in the Making

...MYSTERY PROJECT

Styles

Workshop - DROD 5.0
Voids - DROD 3.0
Cavern Redux - DROD 2.0
Laboratory - DROD AE
Snakepit - DROD AE
Twenty-Sixth Level - DROD AE

×
The Quest for the List: My immediate reaction was "I already hate it because I can't see it". Once I turned off alpha blending, I was able to tackle at least one room and felt better about the entry. Still felt a little too hard.

Xmas Contest Ho d: Fairly basic for the first several rooms. Not necessarily a bad thing, but also nothing groundbreaking. Kind of liked the two-aumtlich-and-a-construct room. Definitely missed something in 2N1W (why a mirror? why two paths?). 3N seemed particularly throwaway.

Unabridged 12 Days: The basic setup on this sold me; it's a very clever approach to the theme. On the other hand, it was more than a little tedious; it could have been made immensely better by simply containing the tar with yellow gates or breakable walls.

How To Build a Room: love the concept, but the introduction of the aumtlich meant that I was trying to manipulate things in a way that got more annoying than fun.

Vihartly: I like math as much as the next guy, probably more. The design here is cute. But it doesn't really play very well, which is a shame.

A Collection of Titles: Pretty solid. Mostly not trivial rooms, a few of them genuinely interesting. (3N1W and 2N1E felt a little simple and throwaway, but 3N took some thought.)

Beethro and the Cold Corridor: Apologies to the architect, but I couldn't make it through the first room, so I punted the hold entirely.

Trollmas: why. I suppose it's supposed to be...funny? Or something?

Twelve Evil Roaches: The theme is nice; I like the "one roach plus all of some other monster" setup for the rooms. But I solved 1W because it has what I think must be an unintended solution, and nothing else. I'm not sure when "contest entry" became synonymous with "eight-brain hold". (But at least I could get to and try all the rooms, as opposed to the holds that were both too hard and strictly linear.)

12 Days of the Winter Solstice: See, now, this is more like it. Rooms that are interesting but tractable. Finding several unintended solutions, which is a risk you run when you can't give your hold to testers, but liking it regardless. Approachable, and including hints is a particularly nice touch in that regard.

Abandoned Warehouse: I tried to play this, I really did. I went through several rooms, and even came back and did so a second time. But I had to give up. It's something of an eyesore, with so many obstacles cluttering the rooms, even if that's thematic. And it's just hard to navigate. And I'm not dying to play rooms where you have to lead monsters around.

Lazy Architect's Basement: this hold is ten pounds of wtf in a five pound bag. It barely fit the contest criteria; it was "six rooms I wanted to build, and then eh, just throw everything else into one room so I can technically qualify". And I couldn't even get started on those six rooms.

Grab Bag: "Oh, look," I wrote in my notes, "one giant mess." And it really is. I made it out the first exit, but it just didn't take me long to get tired of trying to maneuver through it.

And Then There Were None: movement order tricks! bad lighting! can't get through the first room! If only there were terrible scripting, it would be everything I hate in holds! (And indeed, I gave up on the room, and since I couldn't see anything else in the hold: low rating.)

Last Minute Shopping: I love the concept! I found it more than a little difficult, but the concept carries it enough to improve my opinion of it much more than holds that seem to be difficult for difficulty's sake.

A Scattershot Holiday Hold: It's another "kitchen sink" room like Grab Bag, but this time it has the added bonus of swordlessness. "O joy", I thought, and didn't feel bad when I abandoned it after several minutes of useless wandering.

×Twelve Days of the Winter Solstice

I REALLY liked this one. Everything about it was just impeccable. The consistent theming with the small rooms using a pickaxe gave it a strong identity. It was just the right level of difficulty for me - I never felt stuck, though there were a couple of rooms that took me a long time to work out (the one with the series of doors, and to a lesser extent the one with the guard, water skipper, and bombs, which I'm not sure I did properly - I ended up pushing the guard into the bombs, but I get the impression I was supposed to do something else). The final room was a really satisfying way to end.

Favorite room: 7E. It took me the longest in the entry, but was highly enjoyable throughout.


Trollmas

I respect this for committing to its joke, but it really is just a quick "haha funny" unless for some reason you want to actually count to 12 in binary. The skip is appreciated.


How to Build a Room

What an amazing concept. Watching each part of the room evolve and take on new roles with the addition of more elements was fascinating. It felt to me like the difficulty peaked around 6E, and then went downward again for the rest of the entry - which is totally fine, but I found it kind of unusual. There are ways to solve 3E and 4E without using all of the elements, which led me to getting stuck in 6E because I didn't understand how to use them there. Once I went back and learned how 3E and 4E were supposed to work (with a little bit of help from other community members), everything made more sense.

Favorite room: 7E. This is where it seems like everything is orchestrated perfectly and works together like clockwork. The addition of the construct in 8E and beyond allowed me to trivialize some things, so I felt like those rooms didn't quite live up to their full potential the way the previous ones did.


Xmas Contest Ho d

Really charming and not too demanding. I appreciated the break from the brutal difficulty of most of the other entries. Quality rooms throughout, though a few felt a little bit underdeveloped (1S1W particularly comes to mind).

Favorite room: 1S. This feels like it must have been strongly inspired by Shattered Mine. I really like how much complexity there is to be found in an arrangement of so few elements.


A Scattershot Holiday Hold

I had a lot of fun picking apart how everything in this room worked. My first reaction was "oh geez this is total chaos, why don't I have a sword, I need my sword back right now"...then having it slowly dawn on me that I had to somehow do most of it swordless. One of the most memorable parts was trying to figure out how to activate the pressure plate in the southeast corner without dying. I also liked the open endedness of the decoy potion...where to place it was one of the last things I had to discover to be able to clear the room. Rampaging through everything once I had my sword back at the end was super satisfying.


A Very Vihartly Christmath Special

A cute little entry with some nice room art. The entire thing took me about 7 minutes to clear, and left me wishing for some actual puzzles. I can kind of appreciate what this tries to do, but it doesn't really stand out.


The Quest for the List

For whatever reason, this one initially seemed a little bit off-putting to me. Maybe it was the lighting. Once I got over that though, the puzzles were REALLY solid - every single room was genuinely enjoyable and felt good to solve. Difficulty balance was just right for me. Great entry!

Favorite room: 2N1E. Even after I got the concept, it still took a lot of effort to work out all of the constraints.


Unabridged 12 Days

I get that this is supposed to be somewhat of a joke entry, but I actually had a blast playing it. I could see how the tar cutting would get old for some players, but somehow it never did for me. The tree decorating interlude before the 12th verse was a really nice touch.


Twelve Evil Roaches

In my mind, the entry is mostly defined by its difficulty, but it's the particular kind of difficulty where I never actually felt stuck. The monster manipulation reminded me of Complex Complex. About half of the rooms felt like boss encounters - super demanding and hard to figure out how to even approach, but extremely satisfying to defeat. Even the slog that is the aumtlich room was pretty cool once I got all the tricks and managed to make it work.

Favorite room: 1S. I went through several iterations of "OK, now I understand how to do this...but wait, I can't do X because of Y" before getting it. Who would have thought six little roach queens could be so much trouble?


Lazy Architect's Basement

Of all the entries, this one had the fewest rooms that I was able to actually complete. I did the entrance and 1S, but all of the others were way beyond me. I think I understand the actions I'd need to take in 1N and 1W, but had no idea how to actually execute them. Even though I couldn't solve most of it, the rooms still seemed solidly built. Maybe someday when I'm better at the game, I'll be able to understand them more fully.


A Collection of Titles

This was pretty fun, though it felt a little bit underdeveloped to me. A few of the rooms (1N1W and 3N1W come to mind) seemed like they were just sort of there, and didn't have much to say. Not to say I didn't enjoy them, but I guess I've come to expect just a little bit more from DROD rooms.

Favorite room: 1N. Simple as the mechanism is, it's still really satisfying to put it all together.


Beethro and the Cold Corridor

There are some good rooms here. Unfortunately, my experience with this entry was marred by a few flaws... 2E was a room that I thoroughly hated doing the proper way, and is trivially breakable by just taking the tunnel to the other side. 1E needs either a challenge scroll or some sort of enforcement to not wake the evil eyes - I did it without waking them just for fun, but I didn't have any particular reason not to other than self-imposed challenge. I had a mostly OK time with the rest of the rooms.


Grab Bag

This was a nifty multipass setup. A lot of the challenge for me was in filtering out the noise of an entire room full of chaos to focus on just the elements that were necessary to get to the next exit. I REALLY appreciated the hint button that showed me where to go - I think my experience would have been siginificantly worse without it. Now that I've talked to other conquerers and seen some demos, it seems like there are multiple ways to approach a few aspects of this - I went through every pass of the room as recommended by the hints, but others found ways to skip some of them. There was also a lot of variability in approaches for dealing with the roach queens on the final pass of the room. My method was to use all four powder kegs and detonate them with the mimic. I feel like the final pass might have been more satisfying without drinking the speed potion, since it trivializes a lot of the combat, but since it was available, it was just too tempting to pass up.


Last-Minute Shopping

I love the two-rooms-in-one format of this entry. I ended up spending the most time of any entry on this one, since it had basically twice as many puzzles as the other 12-room entries. I was able to complete all of the required rooms, and get both challenges in all of them except 1S - with the sword, I just never had quite enough turns to kill the water skipper without the construct reviving, and despite my best efforts, I could never figure out a briar pruning strategy that would let me make the final run while stepping on only one pressure plate. Both of the secret rooms were just totally beyond me.

Favorite room: 1E. The dagger route wasn't too big a deal to figure out, but I had to try just about every imaginable combination of actions before I worked out how to get the sword route to make sense. I kept trying to keep the aumtlich alive and use it to somehow protect me against the evil eyes, but that never worked. It wasn't until a lot later that I realized I could push the powder keg out of the way without killing the guard. I did work out a weird method for killing the slayer with my sword without even having to blow him up with the powder keg - somehow, if I got a monster behind him to hold him in place, he didn't make the appropriate moves to defend himself when he wanted to step north away from me. I'm glad this wasn't the only way to kill him though, since it was super fiddly to figure out.


Abandoned Warehouse

My initial reaction to this was "AUUGGGHHHH MY EYES". I put off playing it until I'd completed almost everything else because I just couldn't deal with the eye-searing clutter all over the place. However, once I got over that and actually started working through the entry, I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun I had in it. Every single room was genuinely enjoyable. I had to dock my score for how horrific everything looks, though - why would you do this to players!?

Favorite room: 2N. Old-school tar cutting at its best. It seems like this style of room has fallen out of favor, but I still love it and appreciate its inclusion here.


And Then There Were None

While I appreciate the effort that clearly went into this entry, I ultimately found it pretty unpleasant to play. Basing puzzles so heavily around turn order is always a risky strategy. I was brick walled at the entrance for a pretty long time, so I didn't get to even see the rest of the rooms until I managed to work through that slog, largely by luck. I think I broke 1E by extracting a goblin from its prison to have it step on an on-off pressure plate to let the rest of them out, and just killing them manually with my sword. I conquered the rooms up to 1N3E before giving up (skipping 2E after figuring out what it was asking me to do, because it looked like it was going to be zero fun to pull off). There were a couple of OK rooms, but most of them just seemed like they were made to be a pain. Also, I noticed that the wrong water skipper talks in 2N3E - it took me a while to realize it was supposed to be the one on the pressure plate. Maybe something to fix before the compilation is published.

Favorite room: 1N3E. This was a genuinely cool number constraint puzzle that I worked out in a text editor. Definitely the most fun I had in the entry.

×
Twelve Evil Roaches

In terms of puzzle quality this was one of my favourite entries. 1S was probably my favourite room in the entire contest. Entrance and 1N1E were also a lot of fun. On the other hand 1E and 1W seemed a bit too easy compared to all the other rooms and 1N1W wasn't that enjoyable because of the quirky slayer manipulation.

Trollmas

Nope.

Twelve Days of Winter Solstice

The consistent theme is nice: Pickaxe puzzles with gradually increasing complexity. The rooms were perhaps more execution-heavy than I'd like and the last few rooms suggest the author ran out of time/ideas. I wouldn't say that the entry was unpleasant to play, but it was missing something to be able to compete with some of the really high quality entries.

Xmas Contest Ho d

I really liked this entry. Approachable rooms and clean puzzles without any weird interactions. Favourite rooms were 1S, 2S1W and 2N1W. 1S1W felt out of place as "just a simple trapdoor puzzle".

How to Build a Room

The difficulty curve in this is pretty weird. It starts simple and quickly ramps up to advanced guard manipulation tricks. I think you even needed to get one to stab a bomb. After 6E you start to get extra tools that let you bypass the hardest tricks and the difficulty goes back down. A lot of the rooms felt too repetitive and could be solved in very similar ways. The theme had potential, but I found the execution lacking.

Abandoned Warehouse

Overall this one had decent puzzles. 1E and 3N stood out as my favourites. It had a few significant drawbacks though: Unnecessarily tedious rooms (a lot of my solutions had 4-digit move counts) and a really distracting visual theme. I actually ended up replacing the obstacles in 2N1W with walls in the editor. And it made the room ten times better to play!

And Then There Were None

This entry has two main themes. Movement order puzzles and obscure element interactions. Not really a fan of either type... had to ask myself a few times who would make a room about this. A lot of rooms were breakable and in a few of them I'm not sure what you were supposed to do. Despite all the terrible stuff, there were a few decent rooms. 1N3E is fine because it's more of a math puzzle than a movement order one. 3N is actually very interesting, even if it relies on yet another weird trick. Apparently the aumtlich/orb room might rely on a bug? I couldn't tell, since I didn't even try to comprehend the room and just placed aumtlich randomly in the editor until it worked (being able to break two orbs prematurely helped).

The Quest for the List

Another more approachable entry. In the context of this contest anyway. I liked 1N, 2N1E the most. 2N was really tedious because of awkward platform shapes and all the walls in the middle. Fun level overall.

A Scattershot Holiday Hold

Surprisingly playable for how messy it looks, since you can mostly do each part independetly without affecting other parts of the room. Would probably still prefer something more focused. Felt like there wasn't any big trick, besides figuring out where to place the decoy. The rest is just luring monsters on hot tiles/spikes/firetraps in manageable numbers.

Unabridged 12 days

Funny, even if tedious and uninteresting puzzles

A Very Vihartly Christmath Special

As nice as the decorations are, it'd be nice if the author included some puzzles too!

Lazy Architect's Basement

This one is a mixed bag. Definitely one of the hardest entries, but mostly because it requires knowledge of weird interactions. The puzzles themselves aren't that complex if you know what's going on. 1N and 1S1W were both excellent and fun to figure out. 1S is also decent. I had to subtract some points for extremely poor use of Slayers. 1W makes sense if you know how their AI works (they pathfind to orbs if they're standing next to a door for a turn and there's no path to player), but 1E is just inexcusable and very likely relies on bug abuse. In particular I don't understand why the Slayer keeps going for the orb after encountering the player, when no path to player is a prerequisite for pathfinding to orbs.

Last-Minute Shopping

Definitely one of the strongest entries. Almost all of the alternate solutions are interesting. I liked the 1S, 1N2E the most and 1S1W the least. Two puzzles in every room hurts readability a bit because every room has some elements that are used in only one of the puzzles. The speech after each puzzle is a very nice touch.

A Collection of Titles

Another more approachable level, but still fun. 1N, 2N and 3N1E are all nice, simple puzzles. A few of the other rooms are filler-ish but not to the point of leaving a bad impression of the entry. I've learned to not pay any attention to the coordinates while playing, so I missed most of the custom titles the first time.

Grab Bag

This was honestly not a very good solving experience. The last pass through the room is so demanding that it took more time than everything before it combined. Most of that was because of having to restart after not noticing a random failstate on the other side of the room, possibly triggered hundreds of moves ago. I needed some questionable tactics to do the part with the roach queens, but see now that there was a more elegant solution (however it would've once again required restarting the entire room). The puzzles in this entry would be more reasonable individually. Combined in one room it's all just too much.

Beethro and the Cold Corridor

This entry has some good ideas, but suffers from a lack of playtesting. 1E and 2E are both very easy to break. 3E and 5E are some of the better rooms in the entry. 4E is an idea that could probably be developed further. It's not quite as interesting as, for example Quest for the List: 1N2W. Somewhat mediocre entry that could become good with more work.

×
The spear room was the first room I made; since we were only allowed tar in one room, it was pretty natural to use that for the spear and its tarstuff . Then I thought about what the sword could do that the spear couldn't, and that's when I added an aumtlich.

The soldier horn room was next, that was also pretty straightforward as an idea. I made two "impossible" setups that a soldier could get you past, and made each route involve a different one.

Then came the pickaxe room, which was a real monster to put together. I knew I wanted a construct because the pickaxe can destroy them, but then working out the puzzle took some time.
The goblins were originally roaches so the spikes would kill you if you brought the pickaxe, and I should have kept it that way; I thought later "oh, I can use up the goblins" because they'd work the same way with the timer, but I didn't think of how they'd move differently up close.
The briar growth "puzzle" was a late addition that I probably shouldn't have included. Originally, the puzzle was that you had exactly 30 moves from killing the construct, but you'd end up on the spikes on Turn 20. But then I made the spikes double as a timer mechanism on the other path and I liked that, so I tried to add the briar root as a symmetrical (since I already had the briar as an obstacle the pickaxe could clear).
I plan to fix this by replacing the goblins with roaches again (speed potion room gets the goblins, this won't change it much) and simplifying the briar "puzzle"; I could remove it, but I feel including it in some form is important since it was there for the contest judging. I'm also restoring the length of the path to take 30 moves, so it will hopefully be clearer that you have to do something different.

After that room, I was feeling more confident and I don't recall any particular issues with making most of the rooms, though the decoy room and squad horn room ended up really complicated. That's why I made them secrets, though it happened to work well with the intended recipients too. Especially the decoy room, although it does mean you have to work hard for that particular joke.
The only particular comment I have on these right now is that the roach section in the clone potion room was inspired by a joking comment by Dischorran when I was having trouble making something else work. It was something like "Hold the goblin in place while the guard kills the roach."
Originally, I put that part in the decoy room, but I concluded it made things too complicated. Instead I made a simpler room about preserving a guard and goblin to use for that part, with the clone mostly trivializing it.

The caber room is a bit of a mess. It was my second-to-last room and I tweaked it a fair amount, accidentally messing up the intended solution to the caber-free version in the process. Although the intended solution was more of something I worked out how to do and then said "yeah, I'm going with that." It's basically what Doom did, except you're supposed to get the golems on the north and south pressure plates. Unfortunately, due to a decision I made to block certain trapdoors in the sword route, that doesn't quite work because you can't get an aumtlich beam to go where it's supposed to.
I've since modified the room a bit so the solution involves something I considered during construction but eventually dropped. Might change that if it's too complicated, though.

I made the speed potion room last. I didn't make a real puzzle out of getting the potion, just a simple timed challenge that has plenty of leeway. I had the basic idea before I was done working out the caber room, and the room came together pretty quickly afterwards. As noted, I'm planning to replace some of the roaches with goblins, which won't affect the room immensely.

×
My Published Holds
Smitemasters' Selection - Finding the First Truth
Smitemasters' Selection - Treacle Stew
My YouTube Channel - Leylite

Holds I contributed levels to

Advanced Concepts
Advanced Concepts 2
Blind Race #1: On Your Marks
The Custom Element Contest Compilation
Doorless Hold Contest Compilation
DROD Flash Project Audition
DROD History Month
Elemental Showcase
Elemental Showcase 5.0
Good, Bad and Ugly Contest Compilation
King Dugan's Alternate Reality
Labyrinth of Mellenfral (unpublished contest compilation)
Lunchbreak Special
Lunchbreak Special 2 (unpublished contest compilation)
Take Five
The Mining Business
Twelve Days of Christmas
Way Forward

Holds in the Making

...MYSTERY PROJECT

Styles

Workshop - DROD 5.0
Voids - DROD 3.0
Cavern Redux - DROD 2.0
Laboratory - DROD AE
Snakepit - DROD AE
Twenty-Sixth Level - DROD AE

×MyScript Primer and Reference!

My First Hold, also the first published!
Persistence, a mini-hold about returning to rooms.
The Spacetime Kerfluffle, a mini-hold I made once.
Variations, a collab hold I'm managing.
Beethro's Awakening Preview, Zelda and DROD?!

Alphabet Stream info, about my stream thing I do sometimes.

×Twelve Evil Roaches: Yeah, this one gave of a very blorxy vibe, but I was just never in the right mindset for a blorx hold. Looking forward to solving it in the compilation, though.

Trollmas: Yeah, seemed like a very Dischorran thing to do.

Twelve Days of Winter Solstice: Some nice rooms, some slightly tedious rooms, and in the end it seemed like time was getting short, but nothing too mind-bogglingly difficult. Giving hints was a very nice idea and the concept felt very nice overall.

Xmas Contest Ho d: I really thought this was hyperme's entry, mostly because of the self-deprecatory intro text. This had some nice rooms, and most importantly, it was actually very approachable, which was a nice change for this contest.

Abandoned Warehouse: Looked at it. Decided to come back later. Didn't have time for later. Sorry. Can't say much about the puzzles -- only seriously tried one or two of them -- but yeah, I think the aesthetics, while beautiful, were just too distracting.

And Then There Were None: Solved the first room using some trial and error, looked at the second and decided to put it off for later. Again, didn't have time for later, sorry.

The Quest For The List: For some reason, this also landed in the "Later" section. I liked the rooms I solved, though. If you turned off alpha blending, this (literally) looked like a very decent entry.

A Scattershot Holiday Hold: I probably broke this one by getting my sword back very early, but this made the room a lot more enjoyable for me than it would've probably been otherwise.

Unabridged 12 Days: Kudos for the most accurate implementation of the song! Not extremely fun to play (gave up after the sixth day or so), but a pretty good joke.

Lazy Architect's Basement: Cleared central room, which was actually kind of fun. Looked at the others. Realized it mxvladi. Put it on my "later" list. Sorry.

Last-Minute Shopping: One of the entries where I really would've liked to play more, since the concept is really awesome (and the "plot"-relevance was a nice touch). But yeah. Either this was too tough for me or too hard to parse. I think I only ended up solving one room, but it looks very polished and I'm sure it's a deserved third place.

A Collection of Titles: So I guess these are some Touhou references or something? Either way, I really liked many of the rooms (especially, there are some very enjoyable horde rooms in this entry), but 7-Coloured Puppeteer was too hard for me.

Grab Bag: Couldn't even make it past the slayer, so I just gave up here. Looked pretty impressive, though, and like a lot of work has gone into it.

Beethro and the Cold Corridor: The only one where I was sure it was by a novice architect, simply because there were so many broken rooms. There were also some very neat rooms, though, so I'd like to see more of you IQubic!

×How To Build A Room: Welp. The first concept I thought of when I read about the contest. I should've known I wouldn't be able to finish something I would be completely happy with in the short time span, but I guess it worked out okay(ish). As the other commenters have pointed out, 7E was probably the strongest room. This is because I worked towards it and just hoped I would have an idea how to continue afterwards. I didn't, which is why the remaining rooms probably feel a bit uninspired.
Also, yeah, a lot of you broke a lot of rooms, but I feel like this fits the entry

A Very Vihartly Christmath Special: The second concept I thought of, mainly thanks to this video. I wanted to focus on my main entry, though, so I didn't take the time to think of any actual puzzles for this one The complete absence of puzzles is part of the art, of course, questioning what makes a hold a hold and if a puzzle game really needs puzzles at all.
Honestly though, this might have been better as a serious entry, but it's still gotten a surprisingly high score, so I'm happy with that

×My holds: Beethro's Brain, Entropy, Further Up and Further In, Washed Ashore, Hinterlands, Hypercube, jfflpnk, Lavender Levels.
Collaborations: Way Forward, Advanced Concepts 2

×So, as people have figured out, my entry mostly consists of movement order puzzles. It was the first thing I thought of after reading the rhyme Nuntar wrote, as the idea for the contest hold.

However, something that nobody had pointed out is that ATTWN is also another instance of reference to Touhou Project in this contest (the other one being A Collection of Titles), specifically, Touhou 6's extra stage and its boss Flandre Scarlet. Originally I planned to name my entry "An Orderly Christmas", but then this connection came to mind and hence it became ATTWN.
In hindsight, the reference is incredibly subtle and not very well executed: Entrance hinted at movement order but not the intro dialogue of Touhou 6's fight (which I have now corrected); 3N aka the gentryii room has the number 495 shown on the fire traps if you activate the bottom two plates, which is also too subtle for anyone to notice unless explicitly pointed out. So I guess I failed to show off There is also kind of a pixel art of Flandre Scarlet in Entrance, as well as the briar which redundantly represents her weirdly shaped wings with rainbow crystals, which does look a lot like briar.
The lighting in the room and the weird room shapes are intended, and I think they come out very pretty. Lighting are mainly in rainbows or red-blue because again, the colors of Flandre's wings. It also serves the purpose of explicitly showing the relative movement order of the monsters; on the other hand, OCD has hit me really hard throughout the construction period so I'm required to make the rooms highly symmetric (also again, looking pretty). I especially liked the last room, 1N. Other subtle things like the 3N south exit setup and rooms forming a loop are intentional, too.

Final verdict: I'm very proud with this entry of mine.


Room comments:

Generally speaking, yes, lots of rooms are fragile and are still broken even after lots of debugging. I can't catch them all, after all. There are also a few rooms (2N, 2E and 3N2E) where last-minute changes turn out to introduce breaks. Most rooms involve finding a specific movement order related concept for a particular monster, implement it, then throwing in extra difficulty by either introducing execution difficulty, or making the required concept incredibly subtle.
Also, for some monsters there are... simply no interesting movement order related ideas to make a room for, which are then changed into something partially related instead.