Daisai
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Just completed 4, twice east in first try.. Was kinda looking forward to finding out what was on the scroll.. Bit disapointed, since I found the way I did it faster, easier and more effective than what the scroll hints at. Is slow and cumbersome considered good style?

Anyways, first post on these forums, yay. Started playing yesterday evening, which means I'm just a few rooms short of finishing lvl 4, and not so few hours short of sleep

Lovely to see a game with passionate people like you lot behind it, and easily accesible too

[Edited by Daisai on 07-02-2003 at 03:04 AM]

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Malarame
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I agree completely. When I read that scroll I was surprised that people would do the room in such an inefficient manner.

Good luck with the rest of the game. Hopefully, you're name will be up on the List soon.

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zex20913
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Whoo! When I saw this topic, I thought a scroll had offended you by an "ist" or "ism" comment.

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Daisai
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zex20913 wrote:
Whoo! When I saw this topic, I thought a scroll had offended you by an "ist" or "ism" comment.

Heh, at least you didn't think this was a post meant for the feature request forum about using scrolls as a weapon to inflict deadly papercuts.. of death

[Edited by Daisai on 07-02-2003 at 04:02 AM GMT: Err, feature request forum, not suggestions forum]

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Zmann
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Daisai wrote:

Heh, at least you didn't think this was a post meant for the feature request forum about using scrolls as a weapon to inflict deadly papercuts.. of death

Doh! That's what I thought

Scott
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Don't forget to pour lemon juice on it.

Daisai
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Hm, gotten to the "master intellect" scroll in 7, 2N1W now.. And that one's bugging me for the opposite reason the "good style" scroll was..

< ponders >

Can't wait to play with tar

[Edited by Daisai on 07-03-2003 at 03:23 AM GMT: Why do I always spot a single typo as soon as I press "post"? ]

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Mattcrampy
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No, I did this one with the 9 mimics beside of me, all in a row.

Then I killed them.

It wasn't stylish, but it kept me safe, that's all I can say.

I needed some help for the master intellect one, but you'll probably be right, so long as you keep count.

Matt

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Daisai
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< slaps head >

So obvious really..

Weeh, tar is fun

Besides from a few hard rooms on lvl 4, I really like the learning curve of this game.. During lvl 5 and 6 I was thinking "wonder if this will be a hard room or an easy room" every time I entered a new one. Now it's more like "I wonder just HOW hard this one will be"

That papercut idea seems better and better the more I think about it.. Anything to give me an edge (no pun intended)

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mrimer
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Is that scroll really that bad? Okay, doing the room as it recommends, I can kill all the monsters by move 61 and have the mimics placed in their alcove by move 68. Who can kill the monsters faster than that? (Right-click on the room to see stats up to the current turn.)

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billbuckner
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Mattcrampy wrote:
No, I did this one with the 9 mimics beside of me, all in a row.

Then I killed them.

It wasn't stylish, but it kept me safe, that's all I can say.

I needed some help for the master intellect one, but you'll probably be right, so long as you keep count.

Matt

Heh... I used all of ONE mimic, using the potions as walls. Quite un-stylish.

eytanz
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Yeah - I have the same experience as mike - using all 9 mimics in a row is by far the fastest way to complete the room; how can you compare with 9 roaches killed per turn?

I'm very curious as to what more efficient manner Daisai found to solve the room.


[Edited by eytanz on 07-03-2003 at 03:37 PM]

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Daisai
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Imo, placing mimics is a bother. walk to potions, screen greys out and you've in effect < gasp > stopped playing < gasp > until you've moved the cursor to the correct square. Using fewer mimics might take more moves, but I just find it less of a hastle.

Erm. Not sure I should say what I'm thinking out in the open.. How do you do the white on white thing please?

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bdcribbs
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{secret}hidden text{/secret}

eytanz
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I agree that the mimic interface makes things a bit more cumbersome, but I just don't consider interface being included in "style" - style, for me, is more about how cool the solution would look in a demo, where the interface isn't shown.

Guess it's a matter of personal taste.

I did try to time myself doing the room both ways (9 mimics in a row, 1 mimic and hide in the hole). While there's a margin of error (I don't have a real stopwatch), it took me about 25 seconds to do it with 9 mimics, and 20 seconds with 1. If I don't use any mimics (created one somewhere useless), it took me about 25 seconds. Approximately half the time I spent in the 9 mimics version was on the mimic interface.

[Edited by eytanz on 07-04-2003 at 02:52 AM GMT: "hole" is such a difficult word to spell, isn't it?]

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Daisai
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I guess my gripe is that the placing of so many mimics feels like an interruption to the gameplay for me. Maybe I'm just odd that way (too)

Oh, and thank you bdcribbs

[Edited by Daisai on 07-04-2003 at 01:51 AM GMT: Nevermind the secret text hehe. Was too busy defending myself to see that it'd already been said in plain sight ]

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Daisai
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eytanz wrote:
Approximately half the time I spent in the 9 mimics version was on the mimic interface.

Exactly. About the "how fun it is to do" vs "how cool it looks in a demo", I think new players will favour the first one, while people who've run through the game several times will definately lean towards the second one.

And since I'm stuck on lvl 8, I'm surely in the first catagory

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eytanz
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I don't think you're strange - now that I understand what you meant, I can fully see why you feel that way. I think it's mainly that since I have played through the entire game in a row at least 3 times by now, and through my favorite sections of the later levels, including some very mimic-intensive rooms, dozens of times, that I'm already very much used to the mimic interface and tend to be blind to it (I just don't think about it when thinking about my actions in a room).

Heh, I noticed you posted a similar conclusion while I was typing this. I do think that most of the "style" scrolls are aimed at people replaying rather than first-timers (it took me a long time before I was able to complete the First Slightly Hard Room without using the alcove, and even longer before I could reach the scroll in level 3 twice north without first exiting the room).

[Edited by eytanz on 07-04-2003 at 02:58 AM]

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Daisai
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< was about to go to bed, but am now forced by evil DROD rays from his computer screen to try out the First Slightly Hard Room without alcove use >

Yay, did it

[Edited by Daisai on 07-04-2003 at 02:10 AM]

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Mattcrampy
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The scroll on level 3 took me sooooo long! Got it recently, to the point where I can do it flawlessly every time.

Freak.

Matt

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Atch
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The scroll in Level 4 Twice East is hardly offensive but it is inaccurate. If your Beethro stands so that the mimics are to his right there are not 9 mimics lined up nor the expected singleton but, curiously, 5.

zex20913
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I think the scroll says "your right". I thought it referred to the player's right, so I always assumed it was correct.

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agaricus5
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Atch wrote:
The scroll in Level 4 Twice East is hardly offensive but it is inaccurate. If your Beethro stands so that the mimics are to his right there are not 9 mimics lined up nor the expected singleton but, curiously, 5.

It's a sort of cascade - The mimic on the end which has no sword going to be put in him survives, but kills the next one, which is therefore not able to stab the next one, so mimic 3 survives, and it then stabs 4, which can't stab 5, and so on...

Well...that's what I think anyway.

I do believe that in the Webfoot DROD, at some point, only one mimic survives - all the others die.

*Going to check Build 5 alpha...*

Yup - they all die.

Interestingly, the trapdoor colours are all different - All are actually brown coloured, rather than red, with the exception of levels 4 and 8, which have lilac coloured ones, and level 7 which has red ones like in the editor now.

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NoahT
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agaricus5 wrote:
Interestingly, the trapdoor colours are all different - All are actually brown coloured, rather than red, with the exception of levels 4 and 8, which have lilac coloured ones, and level 7 which has red ones like in the editor now.

Yeah, I remember that Webfoot trapdoors were different colors. It would be nice if they hadn't been changed to the same colors in Caravel DROD, but it was probably for technical reasons.

Anyway, I believe that in Webfoot DROD, this was the arrangement of trapdoor colors for each tileset:

Cavern: Brown
Cliffs: Brown
Slime: Brown
Voids: Light Ginger
Ice: Brown
Lava: Light Periwinkle
Palace: Light Periwinkle
Catacombs: Red
Sanctum: Brown

-Noah

[Edited by NoahT on 10-05-2003 at 10:34 PM GMT: Extra Letter]

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Mattcrampy
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Hurrah! It's Matt!

It appears to have been a technical issue, but interestingly, in AE the ability to have different colours for your trapdoors is back.

So why the change?

The answer may be a design isue rather than a technical issue, after all. As Noah noted, the colours were all different, but the red doors stayed the same. How confusing would that be?

So the decision was made to change all the trapdoors to red, and hence make a logical link with the trapdoor doors. Similarly, orbs are yellow and doors are yellow. Blue is after green on the 'rainbow', so many people will associate blue as being one step after green with a minimum of effort.

Probably why there's going to be so much difficulty with adding new doors, as you have to think very carefully about the colour. Such is the life of a game designer...

Matt

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ErikH2000
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Mattcrampy wrote:
So why the change?

It was a design issue, like you say. We just wanted the trapdoors to stand out over the different pit backgrounds.

Probably why there's going to be so much difficulty with adding new doors, as you have to think very carefully about the colour. Such is the life of a game designer...

If I were redrawing the graphics from scratch, I'd make different door types look different in other ways besides color. Rooms look better when many shades of the same color are used with only some attention points where color is a lot different. But I was in a hurry, and the easiest way to make new graphics for an element is to copy it and change its colors.

-Erik

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Mattcrampy
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Yeah, I can guess. Interesting that it was a graphical design issue rather than gameplay, though.

Matt

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