Posting some comments here for later under unhide tags.
As Fogel requested, I tried to vote based on two things: how fun the room was, and how well it adhered to the mechanics it was supposed to use based on the scrolls. I usually don't really penalize much for unintended solutions in contests since there isn't much in the way of beta testing, but it was a bit hard in this case. In some rooms the mechanics that were listed on the scrolls weren't enforced at all and as such didn't feel like an integral part of the room. I tried to give the benefit of the doubt to the architect and look for intended solutions when possible, but in some cases a solution that required the use of all listed mechanics wasn't at all evident.
I also tended to give extra points for entries that intertwined the mechanics used in different ways. This is especially the case if I could guess what the central mechanics of the room were before looking at the scroll. One thing I liked is that, with few exceptions, the difficulty level here was not too extreme. For a contest setting like this in which there isn't unlimited time to play though everything it's nice when the architects keep things relatively reasonable, and nothing here felt too crazy.
Just Die Already
I love the name of this one, but unfortunately this room was a bit of a mess. Many of the elements seemed thrown together and had little to do with each other. The main linchpin of getting the roach queen to set off the pressure plate in the southwest after spawning a roach inside the black sister gate was a bit on the fiddly side and would have probably been more fun if it had been slightly more lenient. The execution requirements here were pretty strict for a contest. I wouldn't have minded that as much if the rest of the room had fit together nicely, but the gel baby requirement felt like it was a throwaway, and honestly just added clutter to the room. As did the multiple entrances and other unnecessary bits. That being said, the "
Destroy a serpent by creating a dead end"
and "
Hold a roach queen in place with her own spawn"
mechanics were used together really nicely here and overlapped with each other well in the solution.
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It All Adds Up
This room was one of the more enjoyable ones to play. The setup for blocking briar growth is pretty interesting and you're given more than enough resources to work with so it never feels too tight. There isn't a whole lot of interplay between the two listed mechanics. Though you do need to block the briar with a snake to be able to even use the caber, it feels less like they are intertwined and more like a multi-part room that has distinct parts. I also don't really see the point of the very last set of golems that you just kill with a briar flood. But that's a relatively minor quibble for what was otherwise an above average room.
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Pushing the Envelope
This one was super cool. It was probably the most difficult of the bunch for me, but the execution was painless so it felt fine for a contest. I really like the creative interpretation of the two mechanics used, and the mechanics even interacted with each other nicely (the aumtlich who's beam is blocked by the guards sword is the same monster held in place by a wraithwing). I think the fact that the two listed mechanics used in this room subverted the player's expectations in the same way also helped to tie them together.
This was a really clever room on the whole, and probably my favorite. Between the writing style, difficulty, and out of the ordinary interpretation of the requirements, it felt really blorxy.
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Icicle
This was an okay room. Again, the two mechanics seemed to be connected in a fairly superficial way. It might have felt a bit more interconnected if you had needed to use the puffs to kill the eye or something along those lines. I'm also not the biggest fan of pushing puffs around. I guess it's not too tedious here since you have more than enough puffs for the job, but it still feels a lot more like busy work than difficult manipulation. I did like the evil eye trap though, that was nice widget. The room decorations are also nice.
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Some Assembly Required
One of many entries in which the "
kill rock giant on hot tiles"
mechanic isn't actually enforced in any way. For whatever reason that mechanic seemed to be very difficult to get right in this contest, as most of the entries that used it failed to enforce it. It seems as though that might have been an afterthought though since there are two other mechanics listed on the scroll for this one. Those two mechanics don't actually interact in any way though. The room itself was pretty fun, and I always enjoy rooms in which you need to prevent a soldier from appearing. The execution was also enjoyable, and the difficulty level was nice and forgiving.
EDIT: I noticed only after voting that there might be something much more subtle going on here that I just missed. The contest required architects to use two of the listed mechanics. It looks like to solve this room you either need to "
Get an adder to eat rock golem corpses"
or "
Use hot tiles to turn a rock giant into four live golems"
(in which case you can feed a live golem to the adder instead). It may be possible to avoid both of those, I haven't tried. But if it was indeed the architects intent to make the room such that at least one of those mechanics was required then that's super cool and I wish I had noticed this before voting.
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The Cellar
The two mechanics in this one didn't really interact at all. The seep killing felt like an afterthought and could easily have been replaced with a conquer token. I wish that the seep had somehow played a larger part of the room, perhaps requiring some manipulation into place in a way that mimicked the queen manipulation. The roach queen manipulation here was pretty standard and it feels as though there are a ton of rooms about this out there. They can be fun but I felt like this was one was pretty middle of the road.
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The Frozen Abyss
I enjoyed this room and think that what I assume the intended solution is was a lot of fun. Based on the scrolls it looks like I'm supposed to use the babies to create thin ice patches for the roach to traverse. This was an interesting task and did a great job combining the two mechanics of the room. I feel like the two mechanics mentioned by the scrolls were really intertwined very well here. Which is why it's a bit of a shame that the mechanic of creating thin ice wasn't well enforced. As other have mentioned, you can circumvent the intended solution by just using the bottom exit. That's a fairly easy fix and not really worth mentioning. There's at least one more way of doing this room that gets around the thin ice mechanic that's a bit harder to fix though. You can lure one of the babies down to set off the pressure plate at (28,18) and just use a puff to kill the roach without making any thin ice at all. Still, I ended up ranking this one rather well due to the fact that what seems to be the intended solution did a good job meshing the two mechanics together and the fact that it was pretty fun to play.
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The Sewer
This is another entry that pretty much failed to enforce the "
use hot tiles to turn rock giant into four rock golems"
mechanic. Sure it's possible to do that, but it's in no way necessary or even really all that tempting to try. It seems like there was something missing here like another set of toggle yellow doors that would make keeping the golems alive a requirement, but I can't see what. The two mechanics listed on the scroll didn't really interact at all either. On the plus side, I thought the room was pretty fun to play. The rock golem manipulation was involved enough to be interesting but not super fiddly, so I thought the difficulty level was nicely pitched for a contest.
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A Helpful Serpent
Yet
another one that didn't enforce the "
use hot tiles to turn rock giant into four rock golems"
mechanic, but it's slightly more forgivable since I can kind of see how the room tries to point you to that solution. The intended solution appears to be to use a combo of live rock golems and corpses on the right half of the room, and the room does try to strongly hint at this. But it's easy enough to just toggle the plates with the serpent. I can see how there could be some synergy with the second mechanic "
Destroy a serpent by creating a dead end"
if you had to use the golem corpses to kill the serpent, but again, there are already places in the room that will serve perfectly well for snake killing. The difficulty level was pretty good though, and the room was enjoyable. What I suspect is the intended solution wasn't too difficult to figure out, and the manipulation here isn't too tedious as you have a lot of places to get rock golems hung up on.
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Time Gunk
Nice time clone room. This one actually used both the mechanics it said it would and made them very central to the room. The difficulty level was pretty forgiving with things like shallow water to let you wait and time things properly and plenty of room for per-recording your time clone. The two mechanics used didn't overlap that much, but disrupting the timeline did effect when the mother would be tar or gel, so there was some interesting synergy there. All in all, this was one of my favorites. One request: for the contest compilation can we please add checkpoints underneath the time tokens. That's standard practice for good reason, even those of us who use U.U. like to be able to quickly jump back to the previous time split to fix mistakes. I didn't deduct points for that obviously, just mostly making a note of it so that I remember.
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Half-Built Room)
This room was interesting. Clearly a lot of thought went into the design and it has some nice touches to it. The fact that the serpent's default path is highlighted for example is really nice, as is the room's symmetry and sister red doors which hints at, I suspect, the intended solution. But it looks like the architect got serious tunnel vision here and was so focused on what they
wanted the player to do that they didn't stop to think about what an actual player was likely to do.
Now that I've read the scrolls, I
suspect that the intended way to do this is to get the gel babies to make little walls so that the roaches get diverted and kill the snake. I went back and did the room that way after clearing it the easy way, and it does seem to work. Unfortunately, I don't see why anyone would bother to do it that way when you can just use the gel babies to kill the snake directly in fewer turns. I think players tend to look for the simplest way to accomplish their goals in a room, so if you provide them with a lot of tools, make sure to think though all the obvious things you can do with those tools. Hard to do in a contest setting with no beta testing though.
That being said, the idea behind this room is pretty neat and the little details like highlighting the snake path were nice so I voted this one fairly high.
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The Floor is Spikes
This was another fun one. Brain path-mapping can be fun to play with, but it can also get super finicky at times. Thankfully this room was very forgiving and open ended so it never wandered into that territory. The setup for this one was pretty fun and the only thing that was maybe a bit much in terms of execution was making sure to time things and create a setup that made sure the snakes path would direct it to the dead end. Even that wasn't terribly, tough it was a bit on the fiddly side. There was definitely some synergy between the two listed mechanics for this one. Even though their connection was indirect, I still think they played nicely together. On the whole the mechanics were used in a way that made a very cohesive room that felt like it had a consistent theme to it.
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Statuary
This was an okay room on the whole, but like some other rooms it felt a bit all over the place. The mechanics used did have some interplay, but it felt a bit forced. It definitely felt a bit like two or three different tasks that weren't really interrelated. That being said, the room was pretty straightforward so it was enjoyable to play through at least.
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[Last edited by Insoluble at 09-08-2017 02:30 PM]
