Chaco
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File: roach_approach_2025-04-08.hold (8.5 KB)
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This is a small hold I started a few weeks ago, with the goal of making a really small scope project.

Thus, a one-level hold with just roaches and some other features (pressure plates, mimics, force arrows, orthosquares, etc.), and minimal decoration.

Aiming for mild-to-moderate difficulty for this one, so maybe 4 brains for the easier rooms and 6-ish for the harder ones.

More rooms to come in a future version; I'll mark the hold complete when I'm satisfied with the ideas that are in it.

Let me know how this feels to play.

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[Last edited by Chaco at 04-09-2025 12:30 AM]

Someone Else
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Overall fantastic! There are a couple of gems in here - I particularly liked 1E - but there were no rooms that I really disliked. 1N1W was perhaps too easy.

I didn't complete a few rooms - only having spent a little bit on it - but 2N1W and 3N1W were the only ones that seemed obviously impossible.

Nuntar
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File: Roach Approach.demo (6.2 KB)
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All except 3W, 2N2W, 3N1W, 1N1E solved. Seems like the last two required rooms are harder than most of the secrets

2N2W needs checkpoints. 2S4W is the room I liked most but the trapdoor at (6,19) was a bit of a "gotcha" -- felt like it could have a required variant leaving that out, as preparation for the real thing.

Consider moving 1S1W-1S3W to 2S, 2S1W, 1S1W respectively so the walk back from the SW rooms is less, since the player will probably bounce between rooms a fair bit given the difficulty level.

EDIT: Solved 1N1E as well.


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[Last edited by Nuntar at 03-10-2025 06:09 AM]

Red-XIII
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File: RA demos.demo (7.4 KB)
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Overall, fun and both easy and medium difficulty, depending on the section (I did not solve all the rooms yet, so I cannot give an estimate of the brains yet).
I guess the layout and the aesthetics still need refinement, correct? The SW area has low luminosity compared to the other rooms, it felt weird, though I understand it is for the puzzle.

1E: easy and neat. Good checkpoint placement.
2E: easier than it looks. I used only one roach as help.
3E: I liked this room a lot, not too fiddly, and you need to find a good strategy to move the mimic.
1N1E: neat room and not too hard. The setup feels like I need to be in the SE corner.
1N: fun room. What about a checkpoint in the SE corridor?
1S: ah, good old roach manipulation, easy and fun.
1S1W: slightly harder, but still in the easy difficulty. Why not a checkpoint in the trapdoor area?
1S2W: harder for me since I do not like rafts very much, but not too bad. A checkpoint on the water could be useful.
1S3W: I really liked the linchpin here, one of the best room of the hold IMO. Maybe a checkpoint in the kegs area?
1S4W: this is a medium step in difficulty compared to the other rooms. Still, no greater than 6.5 brains for now.
1S5W: I spent over 1 hour here but I managed to solve this by using only 1 orb. I think it is possible to do it without orbs at all, but could not find a proper configuration. Lovely room but tough.
2S4W: another cool room, it was fun figuring out a way to stall enough roaches. Did not use the tunnels.

____________________________
There's not some other world out there where everything's gonna be okay.
There's just this one, just this rock.
-33th Skywatcher

Chaco
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2025-03-10 Changelog

- 1N1E: Added a tunnel to force the player to put Beethro in the SE space - making this obvious isn't really a spoiler IMO so is fine.

- Added new secret room in 2N1E where the tunnel/Beethro goal is in the NE space instead. I tried this out and I do like the solution for it, it's fairly consistent, so I think it's fine to add as a secret. Crediting Nuntar for the idea of course.

- South wing: The old 1S2W and 1S3W are relocated to 2S and 3S respectively, and the westmost rooms were shifted east. This will unfortunately break several old demos but these are all relatively short rooms so it's OK. I agree that making this "tree" a bit more wide-breadth instead of narrow is helpful.

- New 1S2W: Added a door to fix an unintended solution involving using the south exit after stepping on the first plate

- Added checkpoints to various rooms where needed - aimed for checkpoints that are easy to hit but also easy to skip over.

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[Last edited by Chaco at 03-11-2025 01:30 AM]

Schik
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I played through, and got through all the required rooms and one of the secrets:

https://youtu.be/hvgr2TIWKPc


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--Mahatma Gandhi

Red-XIII
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File: RA Roaches demos.demo (5.1 KB)
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I continued to play a bit more, here's some comments:

3W: challenge, kill 3 roaches immediately (guess it's an US though).

1N2W: managed to solve this without using the trapdoors, I used the broken walls as an obstacle.

2N2W: I can kill the northern roach using the 2 trapdoors (gaining one move) but I see no way to kill the southern roach.

1W: harder than I thought, but overall neat room. Are the checkpoints placement intended? I did not use them since I always moved diagonally to reach the tunnels.

1N1W: not trivial as it seems, fun room.

2N1W: challenge, clear the room starting from the northern entrance. It took me over 20 minutes to find the manipulation trick here, I thought I had to use the broken walls, but clearly I was wrong.

3N1W: I have no idea how to tackle this room.

Demos attached.

____________________________
There's not some other world out there where everything's gonna be okay.
There's just this one, just this rock.
-33th Skywatcher

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[Last edited by Red-XIII at 03-21-2025 09:30 PM]

Dragon Fogel
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File: Roach Approach demos - Fogel.demo (29.7 KB)
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Ran through a few rooms, which were most of the south ones (except one secret).

They were interesting, but a few felt like variations on the same trick and it was a little strange that I could run into a harder version before an easier one. I'll have specifics on this later, "pull up the hold to refresh my memory" takes a bit more energy than I have right at the moment. So for the moment, I'm just noting this was an impression that stuck; but I'm pretty sure it only happened once or twice.

Here are demos for the rooms I did. I also poked my head into the other southern secret and 1W, but didn't solve either.

Dragon Fogel
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File: RA Roaches - More Fogel demos.demo (28.9 KB)
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Okay, so looking over it again: 1S1W and 2S both felt like the same basic idea, but 1S1W felt easier because I had more control over the shape. That was a little odd to me.

In 1S3W, the lighting on the plate at (20,18) makes it look a lot like a toggle if you click the door at (10,7).

Did a few more rooms, so here are demos. 1N1E gave me some trouble but I got it in the end. Currently stuck on 2N1E, 1S3W, and 1W.

Dragon Fogel
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File: RA Roaches 2N1E and 1N.demo (28.5 KB)
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License: Public Domain

Poked at 2N1E some more and got it, then I looked at 1N and that was simple enough. I had a look around the whole level afterwards, but I think I'm done with testing this for the day.

Chaco
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Red-XIII wrote:
2N2W: I can kill the northern roach using the 2 trapdoors (gaining one move) but I see no way to kill the southern roach.

Of course, since this is a secret room, there is a sneaky trick involved here. There's a reason why there are two "goal roaches" in the same room, rather than this being split up into two separate rooms.

Nested hints here:

1W: harder than I thought, but overall neat room. Are the checkpoints placement intended? I did not use them since I always moved diagonally to reach the tunnels.

They're intended. It's so that you don't step on the checkpoints multiple times as you move diagonally past them. This does mean that they're only accessible if the roach is in a stable spot, but the room is short enough that I don't think this is a big problem.

3N1W: I have no idea how to tackle this room.

This is a pretty unusual room of the type I don't think I've seen much of anywhere else, so you might need to come up with tactics from scratch.

A general rule of thumb for all the rooms in this series, which don't matter too much for the other two but matters a lot for this one, is that if there are two roaches in one column, then e.g. you can move all the roaches in the entire puzzle to the right, by letting one roach out of that column and letting everything move over a little.

A few non-nested tips in no particular order:









Let me know if you want a demo for this, a moving picture might be worth a thousand words here.

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[Last edited by Chaco at 03-28-2025 02:01 PM]

Chaco
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Dragon Fogel wrote:
Okay, so looking over it again: 1S1W and 2S both felt like the same basic idea, but 1S1W felt easier because I had more control over the shape. That was a little odd to me.

Yeah, this is unfortunately the downside of taking what used to be several rooms in a linear corridor and splaying them apart. It's a bit awkward because 1S1W teaches the concept of that's important for 2S and to a lesser extent in the other rooms, but it's also a clear marker that the west wing is the trapdoor wing and 2S and 3S are the "not-trapdoors" wing. May need to think some more about this problem.

In 1S3W, the lighting on the plate at (20,18) makes it look a lot like a toggle if you click the door at (10,7).

I tried this myself and I agree that that's what that looks like - unfortunate interaction between green ceiling lighting and red highlighting combining to make yellow. That might be a good feature request for the DROD engine in general, "ignore/don't include ceiling lighting when highlighting a pressure plate".

In the meantime, I can experiment a bit with changing plate colors or adding a scroll that tells the player "roaches should hit the red plate, then the green plate, then the blue plate", since decyphering that isn't meant to be a puzzle, just working with the mechanism.

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[Last edited by Chaco at 03-28-2025 02:01 PM]

Chaco
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2025-03-23 Changelog

* New room at 2W

* New room at 1N3W

* New room at 1S1E. (1S2E is currently empty, might add one or two more rooms there if I get ideas for them, but I don't expect this hold to grow much larger than that.)

* 3W: Added a trapdoor so you can only visit the SW section once. This should hopefully help cut down on particularly complicated red herrings.

* 1S3W: Added a couple of scrolls explaining what the plates do, and extended the colored highlighting to be 3x3 squares centered on the 1x1 plates. Still keeping red-green-blue highlighting, those are classic colors for a reason.

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[Last edited by Chaco at 03-24-2025 01:35 AM]

Dragon Fogel
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File: RA Roaches Fogel demos 3.demo (28.3 KB)
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License: Public Domain

Tried getting back to this and it's pretty tough at this point. I've only managed two more rooms so far, demos attached. I'll probably start asking for hints soon.

No particular feedback on these rooms, except for one point in 1N2W:



I got stuck in 2N2W. Progress in that:

Chaco
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Dragon Fogel wrote:
No particular feedback on these rooms, except for one point in 1N2W:

Click here to view the secret text

×if the trapdoors are supposed to be used for something, they currently are not needed. If they're not supposed to be used for something, they're serving as a very confusing red herring.

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Dragon Fogel
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File: Roach Approach Fogel demos 4.demo (29 KB)
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Three more rooms solved. I have also made attempts at 1W and am completely baffled there.



Aside from that, I haven't made serious attempts at 2N1W or 3N1W yet. I'm stumped on 2N2W, but perhaps I will be less stumped if I can figure out the "proper" way to do 2N1W. I was stumped on 1S3W the last time I tried it, but that was a while ago so maybe my next attempt at it will be a breakthrough.

I've been pretty consistently stumped on 1W for a while now, though, so a hint there would be appreciated. I may ask for hints on the others after further attempts.

Nuntar
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Successive hints for 1W:


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Chaco
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Nested hints for 1W:

EDIT: Looks like Nuntar already got this, but I'll post this anyway in case it helps with deriving stuff



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Dragon Fogel
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Okay, I got 1W with the hints and I'm pretty upset.

Chaco
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You know, that's a totally fair assessment and I want to encourage that kind of feedback. It's also doubly-insidious that there's a false lead of that type in what's possibly the first room a player could walk into as soon as they leave the entrance to the west.

I'll see if I can edit that room in a way that makes sense; removing that force arrow and replacing that tile with pit might be a good start but I'll try multiple ideas and see what the overall effect is.

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Dragon Fogel
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File: Roach Approach Fogel Demos 5.demo (28.3 KB)
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Did 2N1W and that felt a lot better. I found it a lot simpler than 1N1W, but maybe I just stumbled into the right approach early.

Here are my demos of that room and 1W. Just secrets left, plus doing 1N2W as intended, and looking over any revisions of course. I poked around in 3N1W for a bit, but I'm not seeing a lot of options for creating spacing yet. I guess tomorrow I'll stare at all the secrets some more and then ask for hints.

Dragon Fogel
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File: Roach Approach Fogel Demos 6.demo (28.7 KB)
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Solved 3N1W and 1S3W. That just leaves 1N2W without using the crumbly walls as roach obstacles, and 2N2W. I find myself stumped on both and at this point, I'm willing to take hints.

Nuntar
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1N2W: See DKH : Winding Passage 2N8E. Why is the technique different for the vertical stretch and the horizontal stretch? How do the arrows come into play?


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Dragon Fogel
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File: Roach Approach Fogel Demos 7.demo (28.4 KB)
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Got 1N2W with the above hint; I was trying something similar in nature, but it wasn't actually helpful.



Then I somehow stumbled into a victory in 2N2W. I'm not entirely clear on what I did differently.

Overall, it was very fun, and outside of my issues with 1W, the rooms were generally satisfying to work out. Looking forward to seeing it in a finished state.

Chaco
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2025-04-06 Changelog

* New reworked room at 1N2W. This should make the movement trick more obvious to the player (making it less of a "knowledge barrier" room), but make sure that they know how to tactically apply said trick. Of course if you already did the old 1N2W this probably won't be very hard but it should at least feel smoother.

* New room at 1S2E

* New secret room at 1S3E

I'm pretty satisfied with the hold size at this point and don't anticipate extending it anymore. Let me know how you feel about the new rooms, or if anything else could use more polish.

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[Last edited by Chaco at 04-07-2025 04:27 AM]

Red-XIII
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File: 3 demos.zip (12.1 KB)
Downloaded 2 times.
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1N3W: lovely concept and fun room, which I found of medium difficulty.

1S1E: for some reasons, this room was very hard for me, but I think it's one of the best room of the level, with an amazing concept and lots of linchpins.
It took me 30 minutes to figure everything out and realizing all the roaches are connected somehow. Really well done, and nice that it only uses AE elements.

1S3E: huge break on this room.

1N2W: lovely manipulation, I like this better than the original version. The first chamber is quite easy though.

____________________________
There's not some other world out there where everything's gonna be okay.
There's just this one, just this rock.
-33th Skywatcher

disoriented
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I'd like to see an easier room come before 1S1E, with the same idea, to introduce the concept to the player.

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Best to PM me, since I might miss your message on CaravelNet chat.

Schik
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I played through the latest version. I went ahead and played all the required rooms because I wasn't 100% sure what changed.

https://youtu.be/8GxRi9boL7I

Fast forward past any rooms that didn't change, as I don't think I found anything new or broken in them.

I'll have to get back to the secret rooms sometime.

____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

Chaco
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Thanks for the playthrough Schik! Thanks also for pointing out that in 1S2E I messed up the movement order of those four east roaches; they were supposed to just come out in single-file-no-gaps without needing any manipulation but I must have messed them up while moving parts of the room around.

It's actually pretty funny that the room is still solvable under those conditions, but I'll be fixing that since it wasn't meant to be a movement-order room.

Yeah, I agree that 1S1E is a good room but it is pretty hard, I will most likely promote that to a secret room and make an easier required version.

Red XIII definitely broke 1S3E, I'll have to see what to do to fix that without making the room even more complicated than it already is.

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Chaco
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2025-04-08 Changelog

* 1N2W: Added a force arrow rotator token and a small roach trap, to ensure in the first chamber that Beethro takes the tunnel path and the roach takes the rotator token path, this is a little more demonstrative of The Trick.

* Old 1S1E is moved to 2S1E and is now a secret room.

* New easier variant in 1S1E. This should show off some of the tricks used in 2S1E without being as demanding. But, this room isn't free!

- (fixed some movement order quirks with the east caged roaches in 1S1E and 2S1E)

* Movement order of East roaches fixed in 1S2E, they should naturally form a 1-2-3-4 line now

* 1S3E: Edited the fuse and added arrow rotator tokens to the plates (and a corresponding roach trap) so Beethro can't step on them himself. Tokens on 1x1 pressure plates is a bit of a readability issue I don't like much myself, so I've embedded some pressure plates in the south wall to emphasize that one of the plates is an on-off and the other two are one-use.

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