A fun room, for me, gives you "
hints"
on how to solve it, and as you go about solving it, you encounter small challenges that were unexpected, but they aren't too hard to figure out. Plus, you can mess up each sub-challenge, but if you get by it, the rest of the room is still solvable.
The hints I'm talking about are visual hints... conspicuous placements or locations... not written hints on scrolls per se but sometimes those are needed.
Really hard rooms have:
- initial challenges that are difficult to perceive -- the "
I don't know what to do"
problem. Tar, Mud, Snakes, Wubbas, and inscrutable Gate/Orb placement usually cause these challenges.
- something you need to get right in the beginning, but you only find out about at the end when you've painstakingly gone through the rest of the room. If Beethro was scripted to complain, I wouldn't feel so bad about situations like that
- Both of the above, which can take the eagerness to play right out of ya!
- A Time Limit of some sorts.
If you are making a hard room, my advice is to only make it hard in one way for the early levels. If you make a room hard in more than one way, please take away repetitive action like monster swarms and tar cleaning requirements. They just stretch out the time and make the sense of success foggy and uncertain. My type of preferred fun cannot exist in the cloud of utter confusion, though I am sure there are people that appreciate time-limit rooms with obscured solutions and an army of Wubbas in Tar covering trapdoors in the middle of it!
