It was supposed to go in a dedicated thread but
SOMEONE decided to be frist
Two years ago Caravel forum was invaded by Empire on April Fools and everyone was given an ambitious job like 128th Adder Fodder or 714th
Firetrap Fire Trap Firetrap Bomb Polisher.
A year ago the joke was that there was no joke.
This year it's DROD: Online, a multiplayer version of DROD. As you may imagine from the name, it's an online version of DROD and you can play with other people. Specifically one other person at the same time.
Now you may remember me saying on 29th "
There won't be no joke this year sorry
"
. You probably think I am a liar, how could I say tere will be nothing when I clearly knew I'll make online DROD? Well I am bragging here a bit but actually I didn't yet, but about 5 minutes later I came up with an idea to make an idle DROD, and 5 minutes after that I started working on what you can see right now. Three evening later the first version was released with help from Schik, who did the integration with the forum and navithmastero who did the first batch of rooms.
Let's talk about the important stuff.
What exactly is DROD: Online?
It's a DROD experience where you can play with another person online at the same time. You'll be playing carefully crafted rooms just for the game, together, using standard DROD ruleset. It's fun and really unique experience so give it a try, and if you have problems catching another player just leave it open in the background and when someone connects with you you'll hear a beep.
So is this the next big thing?
It is not. It's just a clever thing I made in spare time to impress people and see if I can pull it off. What's more, there is no long-term support planned, the server with the game is going to be online for the next 2 months or so and whatever will happen with it next is a big unknown. I'll keep updating it with new features from time to time and if you want something added just tell me about it and I'll see if I have time to implement it. If you want to make levels check out one of the sections below.
Whether this will serve as a springboard for something else I can't say but it's unlikely, due to dev team still being in scraps with no one having much free time to work on DROD, and without Mike to coordinate things...
Can I make my own rooms?
Sure. Attached to this post is a template hold file with information how to prepare rooms:
1. Import the hold file.
2. Change hold's description to be your name (Or however you want to be displayed as the author).
3. Check the entrance for information about how to work with it and which elements to use.
4. Put puzzles in the other rooms.
5. When you think you are ready remove all of the empty rooms and the help-file room, export the hold and
send it to me privately.
6. Really. It's no fun if you give others a chance to spoil the rooms for themselves. Also it'll be more fun if 20 different people will send me 5 rooms each and no one will know anyone else made a room so suddenly there will be an update with gazillion new rooms.
7. If you send me rooms and they get released and you want to add more rooms please have those new rooms in a separate hold file. This will make it easier to ensure the rooms are not changed accidentally.
And how to test those rooms before you send them to me?
- You should try to solve the room in your head first. Rooms which are impossible to reason about in your head are not the greatest fit for DROD: Online due to players not being able to communicate most of the time. But solving it in your head is imperfect, so:
- Some slow paced rooms can be tested using clones.
- Action packed rooms can be tested a little with a stalwart - if you can do it with a stalwart you can do it with another player.
- Use a temporal clone.
- Often you can test sections of the room separately, sometimes it makes them harder but if they are still possible it's a good sign.
- Ultimately I try to test all of the rooms on my or with someone before the release.
Do you like bullet points?
- Yes I do.
- Source code will be made available at a later date.
- Yes, it was made in three days.
- Big thanks to kieranmillar who also made a lot of new levels in update 2 and 3, helped me with testing and was generally cool even though I had to go take care of my kid every about 7.31 second.
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[Last edited by skell at 04-08-2018 10:14 AM]
