Here are my comments:
The Hostile Hotel - 10
The absolute standout entry of the contest in my mind by a significant margin, The Hostile Hotel is just a pure, solid, traditional RPG entry that manages to feel like a full-size standalone hold, with a full altar mechanic, squeezed into just 15 rooms! The restocking shop helps save on the space and is a brilliant concept. The altar and ability to trade your keys for either ATK or DEF means you can choose to go super-heavy on one or the other and both strategies work really well and feel very different. A heavy DEF run is just so satisfying too. The feeling of saving up keys for better tradeoffs on the next floor is great fun. If this were released as a standalone hold it would seriously be in my list of top holds, which is more than I could have asked from any entry in this contest, well done Nuntar.
Exponentiate! - 8
This was actually my second favourite entry. A simple concept and not much to it, but the sheer speed that your stat gains escalate and the absurd numbers you can reach so quickly is a lot of fun. I think it was about as long as the concept needed it to be, and to be honest you'd have struggled to support anything further. I don't think with the multiplier scaling this fast you could use this as a concept in its own standalone hold, but it worked very well for the short, experimental nature that the Year of RPG contests tend to be.
Crystalline Flow - 5
I gave this a 5 because it felt so perfectly average to me. The basic framework of a traditional RPG hold is there but it has a lot of very linear parts and feels like a series of almost independent mini-decisions in each room, rather than the all-encompassing adventure that RPG wants to be. This felt a lot like Xindaris's standalone release "
Throw"
and I imagine it was built similarly.
The Heist - 10
So of course this was my entry, so this will be more developer's commentary. One of my favourite RPG holds, Castle Repton, finally went ahead and let players use accessories freely instead of using them for some dumb "
exchange chain"
that means you can't actually use them for much else. Then in my own speed-architecture hold Goblin King's Fortress, I decided to also just throw in two accessories with no plan of how they would work out, and it turned out pretty well. So I had it in my head that I wanted to explore more with accessories, give people tons of freedom with accessories and see how things turned out, but first there had to be a decent interface for it. One of the issues with traditional inventories is the way they force you to leave the room, so some fun combos can become impossible, particularly with the potions. Eventually I had the idea to cycle between them with special command, and then we were off.
Anyway, it turns out that giving the player multiple copies of each accessory is pretty nuts, you can basically skip pretty much any barrier with some combination, so the traditional ideas of progression had to be thrown out of the window. How do you make a satisfying and balanced boss when there are so many ways to either jump past it, or trivialise the combat? And if using accessories is the gimmick of the hold, then disabling accessories for the boss is just lame. So the whole "
final boss"
structure had to go. This gave rise to the idea of the hold being a score attack, where you just achieved the most stuff that you could and then leave at any time. I think the idea works well, but am worried that some people that don't like to optimise will find the lack of a defined goal off-putting. We'll see how that goes.
Designing the rooms for this entry was hard. How do you balance decisions when some accessories or accessory combos will let you clean out the entire room? In the end in order to ensure the focus remained on the accessories there was no option other than to make the regular resources really scarce. This is why monsters are tough, there is only a single health potion in the entire hold, and there are so many doors. I wanted hand bombs to be something you wanted to use on regular enemies, therefore they had to be hard. I think only being able to take on 4-5 monsters until you are pretty much out of health will be a shock to many on their first playthrough, but there are lots of ways to deal with this if you get creative with your accessories, and the enemy stats are designed specifically around the gems you have, the marble golem starts of super hard to encourage you to bomb him, but is free once you collect all of the attack, and likewise the guard man becomes free when you have all of the defense. The Security drone specifically is largely immune to attack and gets down to two-hit range fairly fast to make the speed or invisibility potions very rewarding on them while always being a bit of a roadblock regardless of stats. And so on. In the end some rooms were designed with specific accessory gimmicks in mind, I'm not sure if I'm happy with that or not, this entry gets a lot easier when you figure out certain obscure accessory tricks that you never have to use in any other hold, but that's just how it is. A fun design problem: I wanted to give the player one blue key and have it be used to either skip one of the treasure guardians, or cash it in for a load of cash, but given you get multiple portable orbs, I struggled for a while to make it work out. In the end the solution was that you can't raise doors with the portable orb, so you can raise a blue door to cut a fuse to blow up the treasure guardian. Probably not all that amazing given how many other ways you can skip them, but I thought this was cool.
Overall I'm really happy with how this turned out. you never get to play around with accessories like this and they are a ton of fun. I really enjoyed trying to break my own rooms and see what you can do. If I make another full hold I'll definitely be looking at making something that uses accessories more, but certainly not quite to this extent. Maybe the backpack can come along for the ride...
Suprematism of Health - 4
Sounds cool on paper but honestly there's just not really much going on here. It was pretty easy to solve, but bonus points for all the commentary at the end, it was fun to read. Not a terribly exciting entry.
In Your Atmosphere - 7
I didn't play this for ages because it felt so intimidating, but when I finally took the plunge it was pretty straightforward. The rooms could have done with being pre-revealed. This looked and felt super-tough at first, but in the end getting all of the free stats and keys by heading the long way round to the boss then going back ended up being really strong, there aren't enough keys on the West side, and the trades are better when you go the long way round too, not just free stats but you get e.g. 2 stats for killing a Roach or Wraithwing instead of one, so I think it all checks out. Washed Ashore has a scorepoint based entirely on turncount, but the implementation of 1 HP per move and not having to worry about turning your sword works out so much better as it has a cool impact on the regular gameplay. As always, the really strong and cool sci-fi theming that Lucky Luc is really good at is wonderful. I think this entry could be better balanced, but in some ways I was thankful it wasn't too well balanced because it's pretty tough to get over the initial worry of how you're going to keep your health up.
Too Many Scorepoints - 2
Obvious troll entry with the sort of "
ZOMG!!!111one XD"
theming that makes me roll my eyes but the concept did make me laugh, so it gets an extra score. This will do funny things to the player standings on the leaderboards, but nobody cares about them anyway
Amplified Arena - 8
A great entry that also happens to mess around with the multiplier, but with an interesting twist. This entry was balanced well, and the gimmick fit in well with a more traditional gameplay style that I enjoy. It encouraged the sort of gameplay you get with an altar but to a lesser extent, and I think it fit in well with the small entry limitations that this contest encouraged. You always want to try and encourage people to make fighting harder for better payoff later, and this entry just implements that idea in the most direct way possible, and it works. Between this, Exponentiate! and Perfect Cherry Blossom from the previous Year of RPG contest, there is a lot of mileage you can get out of playing around with the multiplier. Bonus points for RPGs first custom tarstuff mother.
Doppelganger - 6
Another very conceptual entry from skell, but this one was a lot more fun. Like the mimic blade from Washed Ashore, inheriting the stats of other enemies is a cool gimmick that encourages a unique playstyle. While I appreciated the small and focused nature of this entry, I think this is something that could do with being expanded into a more traditional choice and progression structure, rather than a simple math puzzle.
Castle Repton Annex - 6
I sung the praises of the original Castle Repton standalone release in the comments of my own entry, so I was very excited to play this and was sadly disappointed. While I think Nuntar has done well with the layout gimmick he uses for this and Castle Repton, the particular progression and gameplay of this entry was just wierd and I didn't enjoy it as much. I had almost written it off as having some sort of mistake at the beginning because of the insane gauntlet that makes up most of the first level where you can't do much in the way of stats and everything is pain. The fact that you are one attack gem off of making a bunch of enemies free at the end, with the last 4 or 5 attack gems doing absolutely nothing against any monster is quite sad, sure they are worth points, but it left me a bit unsatisfied towards the end. I still enjoyed my time here and it kept me occupied, but it just didn't feel right. Too many pirate swords rather than more interesting fighting decisions.
NotRPG: Unbottled Cellar - 3
Regular DROD puzzles in RPG is my pet peeve so things were never going to go well for this entry. It's just so much worse to try and play these sorts of puzzles in RPG. The way it feels you can permanently mess up the mimic puzzles just by walking through the rooms to get to another entry really blows. This was the only entry I never bothered to beat.
[Last edited by kieranmillar at 10-25-2018 05:53 AM]
