azb started a conversation in HA chat but it's not great for long form posts, so I'm posting a response here instead. Before we begin, we really need to clear something up.
There seems to be this strawman in both this thread and the last that I want you to change your content to be like other holds. In this case you refer to Fetch the Pie based on an example I mentioned in my video but also Break out of Jail for some reason? I searched the forum for mentions of Break out of Jail and I can't see any mention of anyone recommending it in over a decade so I'm not sure where this has come from? (I wrote a review in its hold thread if you want to know what I think about the hold and why I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.)
Youtube gives me access to the automatic captions it makes for my videos so here's a direct, unedited quote.
I think it's honestly the best RPG work you've produced so far I think you might benefit from taking a look at other people's stuff and seeing what they do and playing a bit of that you know stuff like fetch the P for example like have you played that yet give it a go it's really good um you know just sort of get a feel of like what other people are doing and maybe you might pick up on some things but like so far yeah I mean substantial improvement over what there is before so that's really cool
Thanks Youtube! Alright the captioning isn't very good lol. But I think it's clear here that this is just an example off the top of my head of just saying that you should look at some other RPG content. The reason I said this is because it comes across that you have absolutely no idea what you are doing in RPG. It comes across in your work that you haven't played it before and only have a cursory understanding of what things do but not how it plays, fundamentally. This might not be true, but that's the feeling you get when you play it.
I also don't really understand why you think I, of all people, want people to make the RPG content similar to each other, I ran the two Year of RPG contests that produced the most variety and unusual RPG content out there of all the published holds. I love it when people come up with fresh stuff. The irony is not lost on me that one of those contests had someone create a complete copy of Tower of the Sorcerer's first 10 floors with a rejigged but otherwise practically identical layout, the opposite of fresh RPG content, and that person was you.
OK, glad we got that out of the way.
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You are upset that I called your hold low-effort slop at the end of the second video. I stand by this statement. You say that your content is the way it is because you want it to be simple and elegant in its design. You don't want any other niceties like decoration or story to get in the way of its elegant simplicity.
Earlier in one of the videos I said it felt like speed architecture. I say this because, literally, it looks like speed architecture. The published hold Goblin Hollow is speed architecture, go take a look, here's a video if you want to see what it looks like without downloading it:
https://youtu.be/MJuaCDDNEp4
Notice that the hold is made up of just checkerboard floor and walls, no obstacles or anything like that, just keys, stats, monsters, health, very little other parts. All the passageways are one tile wide. This is very similar to your hold! I would go so far as to say the style is basically identical. It's the most basic thing you can create in RPG.
Goblin Hollow gets away with it because it's speed architecture. The whole gimmick is it was made quickly so it had no time to do anything else, that's its excuse. It also gets away with it because bomber50 understands RPG gameplay and the hold is very fun to play. I would seriously recommend a beginner play Goblin Hollow way before I would ever suggest they play any of your RPG holds, because the gameplay is easy and simple and fun, while yours is basically a mess, and many of the decisions make absolutely no sense, or are really boring non-decisions.
For a hold that isn't supposed to be speed architecture, there's really no excuse for this design. It's lazy. Beginners don't actually have issues playing holds that look nice or have story or that sort of thing, it doesn't distract them, this is not how people's brains work. Your work is low-effort slop, literally, that's what it is. This is not "
elegant"
design. It's ugly, it looks bad, and it gives off the impression that you simply don't care, that the person who downloaded it was an idiot for trusting you to provide them with something worth playing.
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At first I was complementary that your hold seemed a lot better, but as I got deeper into the hold, it was clear that this was basically an accident. At the start of the hold the player is very resource constrained so the tough decisions naturally stem from this. This falls apart as the hold progresses and the design of your hold falls back on the same style as A Test of Intelligence. It even has the complained-about long chains of greckle doors because you still haven't worked out that the default monster greckle gains vastly outpace the scaling of the greckle doors, so you have to wander through really long chains of doors while having thousands of spare greckles, the silliest and most low-effort way of trying to deal with this. Of course there's no payoff for hoarding greckles or anything, the altar doesn't even use greckles, so it descends into farce.
There are decisions in the hold that are so obviously nonsensical that the only response, honestly, is to laugh. What's up with the brains locked behind two yellow doors that only cause the enemy to deal 10 damage anyway? It's just easy spare keys that contributes to the resource glut. I notice you never addressed the issue of hiding HP potions under the brains (although they don't really matter in this case anyway, this option is still terrible)
Why does the altar have its options be 40 ATK, 30 DEF or 200 HP? In your own playtesting, did you pick the HP option ever, and did it feel like a good idea? I assume you playtested right? You played through and tried various options to see how it felt and if the options didn't make you immediately feel like an idiot for choosing it. Why 200 HP? Of course, the answer is obvious, you didn't test these and/or you have no idea what you're doing.
What's your response to the problem of skippable scorepoints on the equipment? Do you even understand why these are an issue?
Why a blue door to skip past the one hot tile? What made you feel like this was an appropriate cost? How many times in your own playtesting did you cross over this hot tile, and what sort of damage were you taking?
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And to make matters worse, it's not even that it's low-effort. It's also repetitive and predictable. At least if the hold was short it would be bearable, but it just goes on and on, and every level feels the same.
There are bosses that strike up conversations, but the conversations are basically identical. "
I'll defeat you Stalwart"
"
Not if I can help it"
or words to those effects. Every time. Also, wasn't this supposed to be too much of a distraction or something?
Each level is the entrance room with a yellow key behind monsters and a yellow door with a large health potion, a room with a stupid chain of 15 greckle gates, a room with that level's single instance of its gimmick, and a boss room with the exit. Some stats and / or equipment is sprinkled in there. Basically every time.
In the video I started being able to predict what would happen. "
There's going to be an aumtlich soon"
(next level had an aumtlich). "
I'm probably going to get a VIP card next"
(literally the next room had a VIP card).
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The impression that I get is that you are so adamant in trying to make content for newer beginner players because you find RPG too difficult for you, and you want to like it, but you actually have no idea how to play it, or understand why people play it, and that is actually why it's difficult for you.
The holds you make are pumped out in time comparable to speed architecture for its length with the bare minimum effort and no attempt to balance things, and then you want other people to playtest it for you and expect that people are going to produce a small list of individual points to make for some minor tweaks, and can't handle it when the feedback is just that it's overall really bad. Which it is.
I've been doing level design as a hobby for various games for almost 3 decades now, putting it out there and getting feedback, and a consistent takeaway is that the absolute worst type of content you can produce for creative media is when it is both mass-produced and low-effort. Nobody is impressed by holds being large if the quality is not there. I said in one of your other threads you should focus more on quality instead of quantity. I really do mean it. Stop producing low-effort slop and slow down. If your holds took the same time to make but were a fifth of the size and you focussed more on making it good instead of trying to fulfill these epically long and boring lists of ideas your content would be so much better for it.
[Last edited by kieranmillar at 07-02-2024 12:31 AM]
