Cool stuff so far. Some comments in unhidetime for later:
Really enjoyed this compilation for the most part, so if the comments below come off as complainy I apologize.
I tried my darnedest to vote on these things based mostly on the elements, but in the end some entries showed off their elements a whole lot better than others and that probably impacted my vote just as much as the elements. Entries that did a really good job showcasing the element and all the possibilities it had were more likely to get me to like the element after all. Whereas some entries had elements that I thought were potentially interesting, but it was hard to see if they really lived up to that potential based on the rooms in the entry.
I also will say that I was very heavily biased towards simplicity here. I tend to like custom elements best when they are simple to understand and don't come with millions of little edge cases interactions to remember. I love bizarre DROD edge cases as much as the next person, but with the standard elements we all know and love and have had time to digest and fully understand. With custom elements, I want to get to the puzzles as quickly as possible and don't really care to spend half an hour learning and remembering all their weird quirks.
I'll also mention something that came up for me a lot because there are definitely different schools of thought on the matter. A general unavoidable fact with custom elements is that the player is going to have to somehow figure out what the heck they do and what all their weird rules and quirks are. I'll be honest, I'm mostly into this game for the puzzles and don't care to fuss around with a new element for half an hour just to "
discover"
some oddity of it's behavior. I'd rather know the rules explicitly and up front. Some folks really like discovering what new elements so through experimentation and take offense when an explanatory scroll is placed there for the benefit of players like me. Here's the thing though, you don't have to read the scroll if you don't want to, where as I still have to fiddle around for half an hour (or more likely ask in chat) if the explanation isn't there.
Now some behavior rules are more obvious than others, and I don't necessarily think there needs to be a written explanation for everything. But as a general rule I tended to find it somewhat annoying if a behavior wasn't obvious and the architect didn't do his or her best to make it really super clear what was going on before tossing me into a room where I needed to know it for a puzzle. You can tell me to "
git gud"
or whatever the meme is, but I honestly just don't find "
guess the scripting"
to be any fun. I'd rather read the manual, know what the rules are, and solve puzzles based on logical deduction. It a completely subjective thing, but there it is.
Beethro Plays Hockey
I really loved the Hockey Puck element. What I did
not love was fiddling around with the stupid thing for 20 minutes just to accidentally stumble on the interaction it has with fire traps and hot tiles. Sure, sure, the entry room technically showed this off, but it's easy to miss. This is the kind of obscure interaction for which I'd like either an explanatory scroll or a much more explicit tutorial room. I
guess 2N was supposed to be a tutorial room of sorts, but it was really not all that explicit and quite easy to draw the wrong conclusion (the puck will pass straight through tar but not gel if it hits on an uncuttable edge?)
Other rooms in this entry were really nice and showed off the puck quite nicely. The goblin room (and the hilariously fun broken version) were both neat and lots of fun. To be honest though I think I would have liked this element better if it didn't have the hot tile/firetrap interaction at all. The puzzle in 1W for instance shows that there is a lot if interesting potential with just he plain "
unheated"
puck and I feel like that version of the element could easily have filled a level with interesting rooms. It's simple to understand, very intuitive, and yet distinct from any currently existing element.
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Darting Around
This was one of my favorite entries overall. The elements themselves are simple, streamlined, and well explained in the first room, allowing me to get to more complex puzzles involving them almost immediately. The level showed off some interesting potential for making puzzles by controlling and expanding the number of empty squares around the Dart Splitters. Rooms like 1S1E and 1N2E did a great job of this and were some of my favorites. Not sure why the room at 3E was un-required, it was a pretty basic puzzle compared to some others on the level (basically just involved counting) but I thought it was fun. This was my favorite entry of the bunch.
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Duplication Lab
This element was really neat. The behavior was pretty straightforward and the architect did a decent job of explicitly showing off how it behaved. Bizarre edge cases that show up by necessity were explained, but the architect seems to have had the decency to have not built puzzles around them. I say seems because I didn't actually solve that many rooms here before casting my vote. This was by far the most difficult entry of the lot. I tried not to let that impact my vote too much and vote mostly based on the potential of the element though.
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Fire Fire Fire!
I chuckled at the entry room in spite of myself. Not sure if that sound clip will be able to make it into the compilation due to copyright issues, but that was a fun little bit of nostalgia. I like that everything was clearly explained in the first room again. The element itself is nice and straightforward. No weird edge cases to worry about really. But there is a lot of powerful puzzle potential in that simplicity.
I liked the difficulty curve in this one for the most part. First few rooms were super straightforward just to show off some basic ideas for working the element. Rooms got harder as you progressed. Though some of the rooms were a bit on the fiddly side (looking at 2S1E in particular), I can't really penalize the entry for that. It had a good mix. Rooms like 2S and 3S were a lot of fun and interesting to work out, and I respect that the architect tried to show off a wide variety of different kinds of rooms and difficulty.
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Horticulturalist's Headache
I'm not sure what to think about this element. It's an interesting idea in theory in that it is so completely different from any other weapon the player has aver had. So I definitely give it points for creativity. I also liked the simplicity and restraint here. The element is simple to understand and cleanly explained up front. The major drawback is that it is prohibitively complicated to predict more than a few turns out, especially when you have a couple of nearby roots placed. This made it feel a bit like the potential is somewhat limited to "
guess and check"
kinds of rooms. That being said, I did definitely enjoy some of the rooms here, 1N2E for example. In that room I felt like at the very least my guesses were strongly influenced by logical deductions about where the briar would do most good. I only solved about half the rooms in this one though, so it may be that the rooms I didn't solve required more logical deduction.
This didn't impact my voting at all, but it seems the number of challenges was a bit excessive. I just didn't bother with most of them.
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Koopa Bros' Fortress
So this was a joint entry by Nuntar and Me. I don't have as much to say about it as I normally might since Nuntar did most of the work here. He did all the scripting, element art, and made the two intro rooms. I think the element is pretty neat. Some of the behaviors, like the fact that it hibernates in shallow water and won't bomb the tile it is currently on, were a bit unintuitive, so I tried to make sure those things were explicitly stated in the level. For those of you who find text explanations and scrolls viscerally offensive I tried to demonstrate the behavior too.
I'm not super familiar with the character it references; something from one of the later Mario games apparently. But I really like the artwork and scripting that Nuntar did for it.
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Net Benefits
There's a lot to like about this entry. The custom element is really neat and has a ton of potential. There were also a few weird edge casey things that I wasn't so thrilled with. The fact that elements placed over a pit or water just hover there is arguably a bit weird, and the fact that you can "
net"
mimics easily without penalty, but "
netting"
a clone kills you is an unfortunate consequence of the scripting I guess. I really enjoyed the puzzles in this level for the most part though. As was pointed out in chat, 2N1E relies on the weird pit/water behavior without really demonstrating it previously though. It's such a constrained room that it's not hard to just guess that's what you're supposed to do, but again, I'd really rather solve puzzles based on complete information about the rules rather than blindly experiment. There's also a case to be made that the element is interesting enough on it's own to not have to make puzzles based on strange edge cases.
That being said, it's hard to not rate this one highly based on how neat the concept is and how fun most of the puzzles showcasing it were. I really enjoyed rooms like 2N, 2S1E, that showed off how this element can be used in really intriguing ways in complex linchpin rooms.
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Pixie Desert
Really enjoyed this one. This is another case of a really simple element that you could easily describe in a sentence. The behavior is made pretty clear by the first room, and there's really only one sentence of explanation for those of you who hate reading. It works since the element is pretty much as simple and streamlined as it could possibly be.
I also have to mention that I absolutely loved the puzzles on this level. I know that wasn't supposed to impact my rating, but if I'm honest with myself it probably did. Rooms like 4N1E and 2N1E make really good use of the element (Though I hear there is a fiddly alternate solution to 4N1E that relies on movement order somehow, the solution I found was really neat). Seeing interesting linchpin puzzles like these (as well as, for example, efficiency rooms) really shows off the cool potential this element has. This was probably my second favorite of all the entries.
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Pulse Cannon Testing Track
I thought this was a super cool element. The behavior is pretty easy to understand and fairly well demonstrated. Again, the simplicity of what it does is nice. There don't seem to be too many weird edge cases to worry about, or at least if there are, the architect wisely chose not to build puzzles around them. There is a good variety of room types too. Some standard horde rooms (though 1S I could do without) mixed in with more linchpin puzzle type rooms and manipulation rooms (really liked 1S1W). It clearly shows how versatile the element is. The player role rooms at the end were just icing on the cake.
One thing to note (though it's probably been brought to the architect's attention by others) is that there are quite a few broken rooms here. Notably the two northern tar rooms 1N1W and 1N2W. I also didn't feel like I needed to be green gated for three rooms in a row before being able to get to the rest of the level. None of that had an impact on my voting though, since it wouldn't be fair to punish a (presumably) single person entry for lack of play testing and feedback when the collab entries had that advantage.
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Smite-Blasting 101
This was an interesting take on the ranged weapon. I'm still not sure what to think about the fact that Beethro doesn't automatically face the direction he moves in. I guess it's pretty clear from the start, but it took some time to get used to.
The element itself was a lot of fun to play with for the most part. Like darts and other ranged weapons, this element lends itself to some really interesting linchpin puzzles. 1N1E did a good job showing off how a fairly straightforward and easy to understand element can be used in different ways to make for a nice linchpin. I also really enjoyed the manipulation involved in pushing rockets around. I think the attempts to show off how rockets work in horde rooms (2N and to some extent 1W) really just demonstrated that ranged weapons like this don't really lend themselves to that kind of room. Still, there was enough versatility in the element for me to rate it fairly high.
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Swampy Basement
This one grew on me as time went by. My initial first impression wasn't great. I didn't really figure out what the conditions were for waking up the leeches in the rooms I was supposed to (presumably the green gated ones). But once I figured things out in the main part of the hold, I thought the concept was pretty neat. There's a lot of potential in an element that is dormant at first and get woken up, just look at evil eyes as an example. I also thought the fact that these guys can traverse water, shallow water, and floor was pretty neat. The way they behaved when stunned (in 1N3W for instance) was a little weird, but I guess it makes sense. I definitely enjoyed some of the rooms on this level and think there's a lot of interesting potential here.
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That Familiar Feeling
This one is based on video game I've never played, but since I don't live under a rock I picked up the reference I guess. It definitely had a bit of a "
guess the scripting"
feel which may be mostly because I've never played the video game in question. I also didn't really get much of a feel for the potential this element has based on the one or two puzzle rooms in this entry. It's an interesting idea for sure and it's hard to deny that there could be some interesting puzzled you could make with this sort of thing.
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Two Headed Serpents
I really wanted to like this one. I really did. I think the element is, for the most part, really simple and elegant. One minor tweak (okay, two if you count the brain thing) to a common element can make for something with a vastly different feel. It seems like there could be a ton of potential for this. I say it seems because it's hard to tell for sure based on the entry. There are only a couple of interesting linchpin rooms in an otherwise linchpin free level. And after a while I got tired of just pushing these things around at random until I stumbled on the sequence that happened to work.
There were some neat rooms (2N1W and 3N come to mind as rooms I really enjoyed), but on the whole most of the rooms just involved finding the right manipulation and weren't really all that engaging. I also found it questionable to lock a bunch of rooms behind a green door in 3N1E (which was super fiddly. Sorry no, dancing around until you find a way to get two roaches following you in just the right spot was not fun.) I didn't take that kind of level design decision into consideration when voting though, since this contest was about the elements first and foremost. I ended up rating this one higher my gut instinct mostly based on the fact that I like the simplicity of design. Even though I didn't care for most of these rooms, I found the minimalist approach to custom elements here really appealing and I suspect that this element has a lot of interesting potential.
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Mass Production
This was another one that I really wanted to like. I think the idea of conveyor belts is one that's come up before, and it's a neat idea for sure. But there were soooo many weird quirks to the way these things behaved. The first 4 rooms or so just seemed to pile on one bizarre edge case after another. It could be that this is just an unfortunate consequence of the limitations of DROD-script, but there really wasn't a need to build rooms around these things. Just the basic element of things moving on their own for a turn on the conveyor belt should be enough to make some interesting puzzles (which some of the later rooms do indeed do).
Again, I ended up rating this one higher than my gut reaction to it mostly because really loved the idea of the element (though the implementation leaves a bit to be desired). There were some good rooms deeper in, though for some strange reason they were locked off behind green doors in other rooms. 1N1E for example was a really nice room, it was very clean and did a great job showing off interesting puzzles you can make without any weirdness. Some of the other rooms (like 2N1E and 3N1E) were okay too once you cut through the visual clutter. And that brings up one last point. This didn't impact my vote at all, but perhaps in the future the architect could opt for a somewhat less garish and fussy level design. Especially with the Mosaic Frost style, the assorted pits and bridges and such scattered about everywhere, in addition to causing some eye pain, made it somewhat more difficult than it needed to be to parse the rooms.
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[Last edited by Insoluble at 02-24-2017 06:35 AM]
.
Other architects are welcome to use her as well.
As with anything I script, feel free to use and modify stuff as much as you want. 