azb
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Okay, I changed my mind - there won't be tons of accesory swapping between many accesories, but there will be a choice between a VIP card and a lucky greckle, with the introduction of something that costs REP to use (the altar) and tons and tons of greckle gates.

Again, I want the hold to only be about 2 or 3 brains max at hardest to make it absolute beginner friendly, and not the next Break Out of Jail!, with tons and tons of complicated choices everywhere.

azb
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Okay, now all the final levels are added and ready to play!

Note some rooms, like the wall walking level, introduce multiple concepts very quickly in one room, but because they are appropriate to where the level is in the hold in question, I feel that it's okay, but you guys can always feel free to let me know if you think it's presented too quickly or in an unprofessional manner

For example, the last level where I introduce Aumtlich, I also introduce you can use the Really Big Sword to block the beam in the same exact scroll, rather than having them demonstrated in seperate rooms, and make that information needed to progress.

Nuntar
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File: RPG feedback.txt (7.8 KB)
Downloaded 19 times.
License: Public Domain

Feedback attached. Overall I enjoyed the hold and I would say there is nothing that requires urgent fixing, but there are quite a lot of scroll text issues that will look bad if you don't correct them. I've mentioned gameplay issues as well; the most important one is that using the altar ~50 times is pretty tedious and it would be better to tweak the costs and rewards. The long chains of greckle gates are also pretty tedious.

I think the introduction of concepts was pretty well-paced, though I can't speak for how it would come across to a new player.

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50th Skywatcher

azb
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Thank you! Fixing the scroll issues is definitely important if I want it to be presentable and coherent.

The altar thing and greckle gates thing, although it might come across as tedious, I designed intentionally because I didn't want the altar to give you a ridiculous amount of boost and make the game trivial, and similarly I made sure to have exactly as many greckle gates as necessary to ensure that you have to kill most of the monsters in each section - if the chains were shorter you could exit the level without needing to kill (nearly/about, not exactly) all the monsters.

azb
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Okay, I fixed most of the stuff you commented on, again except for the altar stuff and greckle gate stuff, because I wanted that to be intentional.

Some other things I didn't fix besides those things were because I didn't have those problems myself, like having too much greckles at the points you specified.

hyperme
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General game design tip: Making something bad or tedious on purpose does not make it not those things. It's also worse than doing it accidentally, because you knew you were doing something bad.

If the greckle collection is a vital aspect to how the level set is intended to be played, at least consider using scripting to compact the cost into a single iteraction.

Making the altar tedious to use also won't stop players from using it. If you give them the option, players will do whatever is optimal at the expense of a pleasant gameplay experience. Indeed, a key goal of design is making it so the fun and optimal parts overlap.

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Nuntar
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azb wrote: The altar thing and greckle gates thing, although it might come across as tedious, I designed intentionally because I didn't want the altar to give you a ridiculous amount of boost and make the game trivial, and similarly I made sure to have exactly as many greckle gates as necessary to ensure that you have to kill most of the monsters in each section - if the chains were shorter you could exit the level without needing to kill (nearly/about, not exactly) all the monsters.

The fixes for those issues are to increase both the altar cost and payout, and increase the cost of GR gates while reducing their number.

At the end of Mimic Me This you want to take 4450 GR away from the player. (Yes, I did a quick check to get the exact amount.) Since the level multiplier is x5, you could set _ItemGRMult to 8900 and one GR gate will be worth 4450. Then set it back to 100 since there are GR gates in the next level and you want those to be normal.

Alternatively, go to a separate level with a x445 multiplier.

I didn't call this out in my feedback, but on reflection: the fact that you intend players to backtrack at this point to kill leftover enemies, and this means walking back from Level 30 to at least Level 19, is something I tolerated because I wanted to get to the end, but it's also a tedious thing that could be prevented by putting in warp stairs. You could even have a warp hub with stairs to every level (or every second level, or every level that's not single-room) from 15 onwards, with all stairs blocked by a door, and each one has an orb so that if you come from any level, you open the stairs to all earlier ones.

For the altar: I had 182 ATK after picking up the Hook (but players may have less depending on choices earlier). It takes 290 ATK to one-shot fegundos, which is necessary to progress. So the player has to use the altar at least 54 times. The cost starts at 2 and goes up by 1 each time, so the total cost is 1539 REP. Well, 54 is 6 x 9, so you can achieve the same thing in nine uses that cost an average of 171 each, so decide on an increment (call it x) and start the cost at (171 – 4x).

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50th Skywatcher

azb
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Well, I wanted to avoid scripting that didn't exist in the official DROD RPG hold, and having greckle gates that act differently than the level multiplier states would be just bizarre to someone with no RPG experience,

and I wasn't intentionally making it bad or tedious, I was just pointing out that the sheer amount of greckle gates is intentional, if I want to avoid using scripting that wasn't in the original Tendry's Tale hold.

azb
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But yes, I can add warp stairs to take you between levels to reduce tedium when trekking between levels.

Someone Else
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I would like to recommend that you remove the majority (if not all) of the scorepoints before the first meaningful choices. They don't add anything to the hold - there is no reason to have them.

azb
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I thought the convention was to have a scorepoint on the end of every level, regardless of whether it is good for high scores or not - so that way you can restore easily and it's just HA rules on top of that from reading the old posts (A Friendly Note from your HA's)

Chaco
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*pokes head in*

The game allows you to restore to auto-saves, but by default it doesn't let you restore to a score checkpoint. Architects usually make an auto-save when a score checkpoint occurs, though.

Score checkpoints are there to score the player's work after they've done a meaningful, noteworthy, "unit" of progress (typically defeating a boss or opening an important bottleneck door etc.) that is a clear separator of before-and-after. Levels are just another way to divide up a hold into meaningful units of progress, so while it's often a convention for there to be 1 level = 1 boss = 1 score checkpoint, it's not a mandatory rule.

I haven't gotten around to playing the hold yet, but it sounds like Someone Else is indicating that the "meaningful unit of progress" for those very early levels spans multiple levels - i.e. "completed all of the no-choice instructional content, and finished the first unit where there were choices that would distinguish scores from one another".

*pokes head out*

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kieranmillar
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The HA rule is that there must be at least one score checkpoint. That's in total across the whole hold, not per level.

azb
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That makes more sense. I will suppose then if it's not really important/eventful, like the accesory levels where you simply have to lose the accessory at the end anyway like level 23, or the level where it's literally zero important choices like level 1, I can just omit the score points.

kieranmillar
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I'm posting here instead of HA chat because I get to type longer sentences here.

Your warp rooms are broken, and also bizarrely constructed. Everyone expected the warp zone would be its own single level, not one room repeated in every level. This means the door unlocking mechanism for progression doesn't really work, for full travel you have to unlock the doors in every single level's copy of the warp zone.

But also once you get the pickaxe you can just break into the warp zone, then steal the door walking to jump straight to the final level. This lets you dodge scorepoints for later, making "skippable" scorepoints that you would score all at the end after cleaning out the rest of the hold.

You have also accidentally made the altar even more exploitable, as you still only scale the cost by one REP each use, so now it's like you're getting a massive discount on successive uses compared to how it was before.

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[Last edited by kieranmillar at 04-30-2024 10:46 PM]

kieranmillar
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Actually I think the backtrackability just makes the hold way worse. It's a massive distraction from what you clearly want the hold to be. It opens up lots of optimising potential, especially due to the altar and all the equipment, but it does so in a way that involves quite a lot of back and forth and isn't very fun. But leaderboards are leaderboards, so people will do it anyway.

While the warp zone was a nod at trying to improve this, I think it would be better and simpler to just throw all that out and remove backtracking completely.

I wasn't going to say anything because it was cute and let me extract the tiniest amount of fun out of this, but the hold has some door walking exploits you can take advantage of for minor optimisations. The two I can remember are saving a skeleton key on the bridge level and skipping the first Slayer. It's up to you if you care about these.

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[Last edited by kieranmillar at 04-30-2024 11:03 PM]

Nuntar
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Sorry for the warp zone suggestion, then. I stand by my statement that having to walk back 12 levels just before the end is not fun, and could be improved by having one warp staircase (which was actually the main suggestion, and the "warp zone" was just bouncing on the idea a little bit).

Either that or, as Kieran suggested, remove backtracking, but then you also have to remove the 4450 GR requirement.

And similarly, if you want to keep backtracking but don't want to use _ItemGRMult, then my other suggestion of putting the 4450 GR cost in a separate level is still valid. It could be a x445 level with one door, or if you don't want it to be breakable with a skeleton key, a x89 level with five.

As for the altar: the current costs (165 initial, +1 increment) do allow it to be used nine times, as I suggested. The problem is that each use gives +100 ATK, way more than before. (Each use is now, on average, equivalent to six uses before, so it should be +12 ATK per use, and somewhere around +20 to +24 DEF.)

If you wanted the altar to be exactly like the old one but with every six uses lumped into one, x in my formula should be 36, so initial cost 27, increment +36, and still +12 ATK / +20 or +24 DEF. (Should have been clearer about this earlier, so apologies for that.)

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[Last edited by Nuntar at 04-30-2024 11:37 PM]

azb
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I will keep the greckle gate requirement as I want it to require you to kill almost all the badguys to progress, and the warp zone I tested in each level and it works as intended - does anyone know what the heck else I am doing wrong with it?

I will definitely tone down the amount of ATK from the altar.

I want to make the warp room intentionally in every level and not just its own level, so that way A: it saves on the levels in the hold and B: the rooms in the hold too, it's technically one extra room but not really necessary - it's faster for the player to just see the warp in the level directly rather than it being in its own level for no reason.

I can definitely do the greckle gates in a seperate level with a bigger multiplier, so that way you aren't tediously trudging through door after door.

azb
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Okay, now the altar is fixed (or altared, ba dum tisssss!) to not give a ridiculous amount of ATK, and the greckle gate chain at the end of Mimic Me This is now just a seperate level with one gate that costs as much using the 445 times multiplier.

kieranmillar
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azb wrote:
I want to make the warp room intentionally in every level and not just its own level, so that way A: it saves on the levels in the hold and B: the rooms in the hold too, it's technically one extra room but not really necessary - it's faster for the player to just see the warp in the level directly rather than it being in its own level for no reason.

I mean if you wanted to save on levels in the hold, why did you construct this hold in the way that you did? You didn't need every accessory tutorial to be it's own level, for example. But whatever. You were already 30+ levels deep, I don't see how an extra one somehow makes all the difference.

The problem is the separate warp zone on every level maximizes the amount of work needed to unlock each one, and makes navigating it a one-way hazard if you don't. Once you are able to reach the last level, you need to always go back to the last level before going to where you want to go so you spawn in the correct location to open the doors, otherwise you may find yourself unable to return back to where you were because you spawn on the wrong side of the doors.

How does adding a room to most levels in the hold save on rooms?

Why does the warp zone refer to each destination by a level number when the level numbers are not displayed on each level anywhere in the hold. It tells me this staircase will send me to "level 28". How am I supposed to remember which level that is? Do you think we are keeping count?

It's disorienting that the staircases to each level move around in each copy of the warp room to accommodate for not having the current floor's entrance. The same staircase in each position doesn't consistently send you to the same floor on each level's warp room. Another reason why making a separate copy of the warp room in each level is overly complicated.

The whole backtracking premise is a major mistake that detracts massively from what is clearly meant to be a simple linear tutorial and the latter half of the hold quickly descends into a complex farce. It used to be boring and tedious, now it's boring, even more tedious, complex to navigate and breakable.

hyperme
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azb wrote:
I want to make the warp room intentionally in every level and not just its own level, so that way A: it saves on the levels in the hold and B: the rooms in the hold too, it's technically one extra room but not really necessary - it's faster for the player to just see the warp in the level directly rather than it being in its own level for no reason.

If for some bizarre reason you are trying to minimize the amount of space your hold takes, adding a bunch copies of a room takes up a lot more than adding an extra level. Levels are cheap compared to rooms.

If you aren't trying to reduce storage space I have no idea what you mean by "saving on levels".

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azb
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Okay, so I was mistaken on what saves space in RPG's algorithm. However, I believe that having the warp room as one room rather than it being a seperate level makes more sense, because it doesn't look good aesthetics wise, and I meant that there will be one extra room in total because each room that was there before will still have to exist with a stair leading up to the warp level, and again the warp room is easy to understand if you actually read the scrolls because all you have to do is keep track of what level number you are currently on rather than read the level's title, and the warp will never take you to the same exact level because that wouldn't make sense.

It was brought to my attention that you can still use the portable orb to cheat the warp by going up the stairs after you take it, so I will fix that the same way I fixed the other problems.

azb
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It is intentional the warp is locked except for three specific levels, because I didn't want you to be able to easily move between levels until you actually needed to (for example, where you are required to spend a ton of greckles; other levels you can walk back and forth between the manual way easily with nothing eventful happening).

However, I did fix the ability to skip the warp stairs with the portable orb, so now it should not be broken in any way, it just requires reading a lot.