Malarame wrote:
I was thinking about something earlier as I was tinkering with the level editor. When you created the levels for the original DROD, how did you go about it? What I mean is, what process did you use to make each individual room?
I would start out with a simple idea and see if I could make a room out of it. Vague ideas are often good for this. For example, I had the notion "
a goblin is your friend. you can't kill him because you need him for something."
. When I set about trying to create something that would satisfy the concept, I ended up making rooms where you move the goblin around to put him in front of a serpent.
There is also one room on level 21 that is loosely based on Night of the Living Dead. You walk into a chamber in the middle of the room, and it has doors you can open and close. The "
zombies"
are all outside the house, trying to get in.
Sometimes you don't quite achieve the goal, but the ideas you come up with along the way end up being unique. Forcing yourself to satisfy a general concept is good fuel for complexity. One of the levels that Lucas Swineford made was his attempt to recreate the classic bottles-of-water puzzles with DROD elements. He didn't get it to work exactly like the puzzles, but I still think the resulting rooms were interesting.
Also, how did you know if a room wasn't beatable? Some of the rooms are so hard that they may seem unbeatable at first, but they all can be defeated. Obviously, it's possible to create a room that cannot be solved. How could you know for certain that a room is unsolvable?
You just play the room all the way through. Architect's Edition protects against this with some warnings if you haven't played through all your rooms at time of export.
Most rooms I made ended up being too hard, and then I went back and made them easier.
-Erik
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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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