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Caravel Forum : DROD Boards : Architecture : TREFOIL (Weird little hold made over about 2 days)
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Xindaris
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icon TREFOIL (+5)  
So yesterday I had my head in a knot because of thinking about knot theory, and decided to try and make a knot based hold. This is a 1-level, 4-room hold whose map is a square picture of the trefoil knot (3_1 at knot atlas) but you don't really need to know what I'm talking about knot-wise to test this hold.

Basically, I had a very tight constraint for what the map was allowed to look like, and came up with the idea of some "knotted puzzles" where you had to solve each room more than one time, coming in from different entrances. What from one entrance is a puzzle enforcement mechanism becomes from another entrance the puzzle to overcome itself! Or, you know, one room where you work with a mimic to clear tarstuff in both places from both entrances. That sort of thing.

Hoping for some general testing. I'm pretty darn sure I prevented all possible backtracking issues but a second eye on such things never hurts; also, of course, I'm interested in looking out for unintended solutions and things like that, as well as checkpoint placement, and general "was it fun?" commentary. Hoping to just throw this up to HA fairly soon, honestly, given how short it is, but to do that with zero testing is a Bad Idea all around.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 11-03-2017 11:20 PM]
10-22-2017 at 10:24 PM
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Insoluble
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File: T R E F O I L.demo (16.8 KB)
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icon Re: TREFOIL (+2)  
Well, I can definitely get behind the concept of this one. You and I will have to start a club for architects who have published holds focusing on topology and starting with the letter "T".

I tried to find backtracking issues but it looks like you have things covered with one way back-doors or seeding beacons in every room. I didn't test super extensively, but it looks like you can get from the end back to the beginning with the bottom rooms in either state. Since you need the top two cleared to go forward everything seems fine. I suspect at least one or two people will get to the second pass through of 1E without having cleared it the first time and be a bit sore, but observant folks will notice the green door ahead of time and take note.

Not sure how much tinkering you plan to do with this. It's mostly not too bad. 1S is probably the strongest room. Both passes through here were neat. The Entrance is by far the weakest. All three passes through the entrance seem like throwaways. It definitely has the feel of a room that has stuff thrown in it without much thought just so that it won't be empty. The first and last pass are basically just brute force guessing a move sequence from a relatively small set of possibilities. Not too hard, but not really fun either. If you wanted to tinker with anything in the hold, this room should probably be it. Demos are attached in case you want to see how I did stuff.

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10-23-2017 at 07:26 AM
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Someone Else
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icon Re: TREFOIL (+1)  
I think there is one backtracking issue - if you backtrack through 1S, you can never go forward through it again. In particular, if you don't clear 1E on the first pass, you'll get stuck when you reach it the second time.

Other than that, though, pretty solid. I enjoyed it, for sure.
10-23-2017 at 02:20 PM
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Xindaris
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icon Re: TREFOIL (+1)  
Good catch, Someone Else. I've updated to a version with a seeding beacon that will make it possible to unclear 1S from the "first pass" entrances if needed.

I'll have a think about how to "fix" the entrance. I kind of like the first and last parts (I consider the first to be a good application of "strategy: don't run immediately forward" and the end to be an interesting display of Gentryii chain arrow snapping) but I'm not fully satisfied with the middle one (where you actually clear the room). I wanted to put some kind of clever thing where the player needs to set things up so they can hit the orb and have time to turn around without getting eaten by a monster, and I'm not fully happy with how very easy it is to do that at present.

No time to peruse the demos right now but I will when I do have the time, I think.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 10-23-2017 06:45 PM]
10-23-2017 at 06:44 PM
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icon Re: TREFOIL (+1)  
Man, I knew I should've gone with "Tesseract" instead.

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10-23-2017 at 08:59 PM
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mauvebutterfly
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icon Re: TREFOIL (+1)  
T R E F O I L

Here’s a “stream of consciousness” commentary of my playthrough of this hold. It might help you to see if I did anything out of order or broke anything. It all felt pretty solid though.

Click here to view the secret text


I don’t think I found any breaks in any of the rooms. Not sure if 1S1E is supposed to be traversable in both directions while cleared, but it’s not a big deal either way I think. Overall, a very fun little hold.

I actually really liked the 1st and 3rd passes of the Entrance, but agree that the 2nd pass is kind of a throwaway. There was nothing that I found particularly frustrating, although if I had spent too much more time on clearing 1E from the South it might have gotten there. I found 1S1E to be the most interesting room, since the mimics and the tarstuff swap tokens had some interesting interactions. 1S was satisfying on the 1st pass, but the 2nd pass didn’t have much of a puzzle; everything just fell together. I still liked the way the pieces fell into place though.


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10-26-2017 at 12:16 PM
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Xindaris
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icon Re: TREFOIL (0)  
New version:
-Seeding beacons added to the "first pass" section of 1S1E so the player doesn't get "punished" with a trickier pass-through for not realizing they needed to full-clear 1E earlier (thanks for pointing it out mauve).

-NEW VERSION OF ENTRANCE with something resembling an actual puzzle on 2nd pass this time. Hoping for some thoughts on it maybe.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 11-03-2017 11:25 PM]
11-03-2017 at 11:21 PM
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Dying Flutchman
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icon Re: TREFOIL (+1)  
Hi Xindaris,

Love the concept. Nice little puzzles.

But I get badly stuck on the last pass (upper E to left N) of 1S.
When completed earlier, I can't pass the room, but in unfinished state, I have no clue how to get the rock giant far enough N.

So for me, the balance in the level is not working optimally: cruising through almost everything (bit of fiddling to get 1E to work, but not too bad), and then completely stuck on 1S :(

But hey, I may be missing something completely obvious here.

Altogether: nice, should publish didn't find any issues.

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[Last edited by Dying Flutchman at 11-08-2017 08:10 AM]
11-08-2017 at 08:10 AM
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Xindaris
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icon Re: TREFOIL (0)  
I'm glad you liked it. If you want a hint:
Click here to view the secret text


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[Last edited by Xindaris at 11-08-2017 06:05 PM]
11-08-2017 at 06:00 PM
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mauvebutterfly
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icon Re: TREFOIL (0)  
The new puzzle is much better.

Did you change anything with the gentryii in the entrance? I didn't need to use the force arrow to get past it this time.

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11-09-2017 at 09:22 AM
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Xindaris
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The gentryii section is unchanged. It starts out a bit differently depending on which of the 3 entry tiles you actually come in through, so maybe it was that. In principle you could solve it without the arrow, I think (at the very least, you can post-getting the stick).

Going to put this up to HA soon unless someone objects.

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11-11-2017 at 12:12 AM
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Dying Flutchman
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icon Re: TREFOIL (0)  
Xindaris wrote:
I'm glad you liked it. If you want a hint:
Click here to view the secret text

Mutters something about definitely having ruled out the possibility of getting down quickly enough...

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11-11-2017 at 08:25 PM
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Xindaris
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icon Re: TREFOIL (0)  
Hmm. Are you using the
Click here to view the secret text


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11-12-2017 at 12:36 AM
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Dying Flutchman
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Xindaris wrote:
Hmm. Are you using the
Click here to view the secret text
Yes Xindaris, I did, I did. I was just stupid earlier. But did solve it right away after your first hint. I guess I was just stuck with a nonsense assumption.

Upload of hold going according to plan?

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11-20-2017 at 04:37 PM
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Xindaris
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icon Re: TREFOIL (0)  
It's in HA now, waiting a few more yes votes I think.

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11-20-2017 at 08:42 PM
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