Xindaris
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File: BRAINLORD 2018.hold (4.2 KB)
Downloaded 43 times.
License: Public Domain

This is a 9-room hold about quickly squishing brains using various methods. I made it over about two days shortly after the new year, but was hesitant about posting it for testing for a while. That hesitation is gone even though I didn't make any changes since then.

Have look, if you want. It'd be a good idea to have a hold with a title involving the year actually come out in said year.

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109th Skywatcher

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 02-07-2018 09:10 PM]

navithmastero
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Took a look at this, reminded me a little of some rooms in other holds, and a lot of Troshian Grounds in terms of content. Difficulty was pretty medium, although some rooms I had a few turns to spare while others I didn't - not sure if you were going for perfect solutions with the briar timers or not?

Only room which was a little fiddly was the mimic one but wasn't unreasonable.

Only other thing I'd say is that you could move 1E to the 1N1E spot because it's harder? Then you'd have the three harder rooms in the north of the level.

All in all a nice concept and well executed!

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Xindaris
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Only the Entrance and 1N are intended to be "perfectly timed". Everything else intentionally leaves some spare time to lower the difficulty a bit (and also because I'm not entirely sure what the "true fastest way" to do any of those rooms is anyway). The goal of the time pressure is just to make the player get some sort of "mid-level" tricks for each weapon. I'll think about swapping the caber and spear room locations; it would be architecture-wise pretty easy to do.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 01-21-2018 08:28 PM]

navithmastero
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Yeah, I definitely liked the fact that it's not super magic move in order to get it perfectly optimised - it gave a nice level of leniency which was nice, but the timer wasn't so loose that any of the rooms felt trivial.

Also note that 1N is inaccessible at the moment!

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[Last edited by navithmastero at 01-21-2018 08:34 PM]

Xindaris
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Are you sure? 1N is non-required and past the blue door that's in 2N. It's intended to be done last, and then the hold ends. If you did 2N last you should be able to go west or east and then return to 2N to make the blue door drop.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 01-21-2018 08:44 PM]

navithmastero
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Currently it is set as required! Or at least in the version I've got it is.

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[Last edited by navithmastero at 01-21-2018 08:52 PM]

Xindaris
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The version I had didn't have that problem; I could've sworn I fixed it before uploading rather than after. Well, I've uploaded a new version with more blue door decorations and that fixed to the first post.

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Dying Flutchman
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Hi Xindaris,

Played this through. Wonderful little hold. +1 for the not super-magic-and-realistically-spoken-unattainable-time bounds. Optimization can be done by hi-score hunters, but just for the fun-factor of a small hold like this, it's perfect the way it is.

I'd say: don't mess around too much with it anymore and throw it over to the HAs.

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bomber50
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I agree with Dying Flutchman, this hold has a great theme to it and it's a lot of fun to play.

My one major suggestion would be to add some checkpoints, especially to 1N, which is by far the hardest room. You could also make 2N1W a bit harder if you wish, the solution is slightly trivial.

Hope to see this published in the near future.

Xindaris
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Other things have distracted me from all DROD for the last few weeks or so, not counting Alphabet Streams. So this has been going significantly slower than it has any right to. Ah well.

UPDATE:
-Added more checkpoints to 1N. My reasoning for the placement of checkpoints in all other rooms is that usually a player will "come up with an approach" for the room and try it out wholesale, and the approach basically works or doesn't; the room is so brief that restarting it from the point where the puzzle actually starts shouldn't be that big of a deal. And I don't want people who want to just start back from the start to have to push R several times to just get back there and maybe accidentally jump back to the room entryway. For 1N there's an argument for it being long and multi-part enough to need more checkpoints, so I just scattered them all over the place. The other exception might be 2N but there are a couple more checkpoints in that room already.
-Made the timer in 2N1W strict (at least to my solution). It's not a very hard room so upping the timer requirement a bit makes this another room where you need to get the max possible combo to win.

I am planning to put this up for HA this weekend, barring any objections to these changes or anyone noticing something else horribly wrong. So please get any further comments in soon.

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