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File: Gigantic Jewel Lost.hold (667.5 KB)
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Sequel to our previous hold Doctor E. Will's Megacomplex. Big hold. Enjoy

CuriousShyRabbit
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Hear ye, hear ye!

After two years, here is Zch and Kallor's epic sequel to their excellent debut hold Dr. E Will's Mega Complex.

Gigantic Jewel Lost is a very large work of art, featuring generous helpings of everything. Puzzles that explore the possibilities of selected game elements are laid out in vast levels of beautiful hold art. There are lots and lots of secret areas to find. Accessing those areas is not always so simple as finding a crumbly wall - sometimes access is granted if you solve a room in a more challenging way. And you never know what you'll find - art, an unexpected plot twist, a mathematical interlude, or something else entirely! My one criticism of this hold is the difficulty progression: some of the easiest rooms in the hold can only be accessed towards the end.

Two of the levels use custom styles, designed specifically for this hold. Be sure to download and install BlueBricks and InFlamesRock for the full artistic effect.

Overall, this is an excellent, and rather difficult hold. Well worth the time to play.

Dischorran
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You should play this hold.

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Tahnan
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Yeah seriously play this hold. It is hard, but it's approachable, and I think the first level is the hardest. The design, however, is phenomenal, and they've done a very good job of making it fit the story.

Chaco
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The first level isn't the hardest; I think some of the harder levels go later, but they're all fairly difficult.

You, the reader, should probably play this hold if you appreciate difficult lynchpin-type situations combined with monster manipulation and horde management rooms. It has a decent plot and a lot of optional stuff that you can seek out and find. The hold as a whole is very rewarding.

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Rheb
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You should pl... Aww, too late!

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Voligner is my very own DROD-like game. Please check it out!

Zch
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Registered: 05-15-2007
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It's finally published. This thing has taken so long that it feels kinda weird now that it is ready... Happy but a bit weird

Anyway, to everyone interested: please try this hold and enjoy And please also download the custom-room-styles, some rooms will look very bad if you don't...

Edit:
Oh, and Gigantic thanks to all the people who playtested for all the feedback, comments and finding all the unintended solutions and othe bugs, we couldn't have done it without you.

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[Last edited by Zch at 07-06-2009 03:01 PM]

BoyBlue
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I guess there's an outside chance that this is intentional, but

CuriousShyRabbit
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Yikes! No, you're not supposed to do that.

Zch
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BoyBlue wrote:
I guess there's an outside chance that this is intentional, but

Click here to view the secret text

×I'm afraid it looks more like it could break the whole level. Taking the stairs in Goblin Woods 4N is quite possible, and unless you drop the blue doors first, is a one-way path to the next level. Since the hold is nonlinear, I can't easily tell what the implications of this are. If it's a long dead end, players should be warned.

Tahnan
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Zch wrote:
And you can't return to Goblin Woods, so you can't master the hold...

[...]

But I guess it is too late now that this hold has been published.

Sorry to take it out of secret tags, but I figured nothing in there was actually giving anything away. I just wanted to note that, on the one hand, there is at least another route back to Goblin Woods, if you have the foresight to open it before exploiting BlueBoy's bug. And also: since this may count as a genuine backtracking problem, the HAs may allow it to be fixed; I'm not sure.

mxvladi
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Conquered!

This hold is exellent! There was a lot of enjoyable puzzles here, most of them use ideas which have never been used before(that means that... more than 100 rooms use new ideas! ). Lynchpin-puzzles were evil, and effeciency puzzles also seemed new - they weren't based on just blank effeciency - they were based on a particular effeciency trick which was very fun to find.

It's also nice that architects have come with ideas of many good stalwart puzzles. While because of stalwarts' stupidness those puzzles were a little annoying sometimes(*points at Underground Lake: 1N 2E*), the architects have done a very good job making most of puzzles based on clear parts of stalwart behaviour(the only room where I was seriously annoyed was that Underground Lake 1N 2E, where stalwart spoiled my solutions a lot of times by hitting the cracked orb for some reason ). And a lot of stalwart rooms were very fun to optimize!(particulary Underground Lake: 2W).

The decoy slider puzzles is also neat idea, although one in Lava Land took me a loong while to figure out.

There were some rooms that were just too evil to be very fun(for example, the Indoors: Pool rooms which I didn't enjoy very much, unfortunately ), but most of rooms were just a little evil, so they still were very fun. Slayer rooms are a good example of challenging and evil, but fun rooms.

The fact that some of the easiest rooms can only be accessed near the end of the hold didn't bother me much; it was a nice break from those mind-breaking lynchpins.

So, overall, this was a very fun hold, which has come with a bunch of new puzzle ideas... and two new room styles

10 for fun.

Oh, and this hold was fairly challenging - some rooms took a lot of time to complete(the Slayer rooms and some of other rooms where a lot of planning is required), some had mind-breaking lynchpins; I had to search for hints in Architecture thread of this hold for some of most evil rooms. I could complete most of rooms by myself though, so the hold wasn't too difficult to be frustrating.

8 for brains.

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[Last edited by mxvladi at 07-12-2009 10:09 PM]

CuriousShyRabbit
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EDIT: Secreted because this problem has been dealt with. Thanks a whole lot, Schik.

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[Last edited by CuriousShyRabbit at 07-13-2009 06:05 AM]

Jatopian
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I did a double take just now. That's the highest SD I've ever seen.

____________________________
DROD has some really great music.
Make your pressure plates 3.0 style!
DROD architecture idea generator

Zch
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Congratulations mxvladi Glad to hear you enjoyed our hold Funny that you would select UL1N2W as the annoying room. We thought that it would be quite easy when compared to some other rooms in Underground Lake like 2N2W, 2N1W and especially 2S...

About the 1 ratings, that's weird I wonder if someone has something against us

Jatopian wrote:
I did a double take just now. That's the highest SD I've ever seen.

umm... sorry I don't understand. What does SD mean?

Dex Stewart
Level: Smiter
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SD means standard deviation and is an indication of how dispersed the votes are around the mean and is the value you see just under the hold rating, next to that weird greek letten.

mxvladi
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Zch wrote:
Funny that you would select UL1N2W as the annoying room.

Not 1N 2W. 1N 2E. I probably edited that part of post after you read it. I enjoyed 1N 2W as well as most of those stalwart rooms.

We thought that it would be quite easy when compared to some other rooms in Underground Lake like 2N2W, 2N1W and especially 2S...

2S seemed tedious first time, but then it was fun to optimize, and after playing it a few times, it was pretty clear how to do that room.

For some reason 2N 2W seemed surprisely easy for me I guess I did this unintended way...(one of two probably-unintended solutions I found in this hold)

As for 2N 1W, I did this room with sword. It was more effecient and less tedious. I might do it without sword someday though...

Zch
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mxvladi wrote:

Not 1N 2W. 1N 2E. I probably edited that part of post after you read it. I enjoyed 1N 2W as well as most of those stalwart rooms.

Oh, that was a typo by me, I meant the 1N2E too. The one with cracked orbs...

2S seemed tedious first time, but then it was fun to optimize, and after playing it a few times, it was pretty clear how to do that room.

For some reason 2N 2W seemed surprisely easy for me I guess I did this unintended way...(one of two probably-unintended solutions I found in this hold)

Well, we did remove a few bombs from this room... It was quite evil and random before that, but now it is quite easy I guess.

As for 2N 1W, I did this room with sword. It was more effecient and less tedious. I might do it without sword someday though...

Heh... I guess that not too many people will solve this without sword. As you said it is less tedious and more efficient with sword... But at least it's a nice optional challenge

jbluestein
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I've been inactive in DROD for over a year now, but I still poke my head back every now and again...and lo and behold, I see that Zch and Kallor have posted a new hold. Well, I've dusted off my skills and am taking a shot at it. Nowhere near ready to rate it, but I am enjoying things, as I'd expect from the creators of one of my favorite holds of all time.

Josh

____________________________
"Rings and knots of joy and grief, all interlaced and locking." --William Buck

blorx1
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Just one thing if you manipulate the gel right you can get down the stairs in goblin woods quarce north is this intended

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CuriousShyRabbit
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No, not intended. See BoyBlue's post above, and replies. I don't recommend you do that.

Blondbeard
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Alright Maybe time to say something. This is an awesome hold, for sure. If there was voice acting it might as well have been a stand alone sequel to TCB. In fact it seems even more polished than the main games in some regards (like level-layout). It also takes some of the "failed" elements of TCB (those that I didn't like within TCB) and makes some extrordinary puzzles out of them, like Stalwarts and Gel. Apart from that there is a treat for every inner nerd manefesting in programming a robot within a DROD hold! This is both surprisingly easy and surprisingly tricky. And as if all this wasn't enough there is also the wonderfully artistic new styles enhancing the already stunning level-layout.

In terms of dificulty the hold reminds me of Beetrho's Teacher. Not that it is that dificult, but it's often very hard to experiment, and try out new ideas. Sometimes it feels as if a single room could have been made into one hord managment room, one lynchpin-room, and perhaps another lynchpin-room as well. This can sometimes make it hard to find the lyncpins, and hard to solve the room, even though you know what to do. That's it for now. I'll probably write some more once I've completed the hold (if I'll ever manage to do that).

disoriented
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Sorry for the newb question, but is there supposed to be music on the Underground Lake and Lava Land levels? Maybe I just don't know how to install it.

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34th Skywatcher

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CuriousShyRabbit
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You don't have to install any music for those levels; they use the regular music from the game.

disoriented
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CuriousShyRabbit wrote:
You don't have to install any music for those levels; they use the regular music from the game.

Hmm... I'm using TCB 3.2.0, and I get no music after entering one of those levels. Or if I load a game from the title screen, the title screen music continues to play in the level.

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34th Skywatcher

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

Chaco
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disoriented wrote:

CuriousShyRabbit wrote:
You don't have to install any music for those levels; they use the regular music from the game.

Hmm... I'm using TCB 3.2.0, and I get no music after entering one of those levels. Or if I load a game from the title screen, the title screen music continues to play in the level.

That's because there's no option in the drod.ini file detailing the .ogg files that should play when the styles are loaded. The current behavior is to continue using whatever the previously-playing music was whenever entering a room without any music preferences.

I'd prefer it if the game could use the equivalent City music in this case, but in any case the workaround is to manually assign music to each custom style installed.

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disoriented
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Chaco wrote:

disoriented wrote:
Hmm... I'm using TCB 3.2.0, and I get no music after entering one of those levels. Or if I load a game from the title screen, the title screen music continues to play in the level.

That's because there's no option in the drod.ini file detailing the .ogg files that should play when the styles are loaded. The current behavior is to continue using whatever the previously-playing music was whenever entering a room without any music preferences.

I'd prefer it if the game could use the equivalent City music in this case, but in any case the workaround is to manually assign music to each custom style installed.

Cool. For others looking how to do this, I got music on these two levels by adding these lines to the [Songs] section of drod.ini (located in the ~/Library/Application Support/Caravel/drod-3_0/ directory on Mac):

InFlamesRockAmbient=waiting.ogg
InFlamesRockAttack=underway.ogg
InFlamesRockAttack=fortune.ogg
InFlamesRockPuzzle=settledown.ogg
InFlamesRockPuzzle=simple.ogg
BlueBricksAmbient=nightwlk.ogg
BlueBricksAttack=delusions.ogg
BlueBricksAttack=nextthingsnext.ogg
BlueBricksPuzzle=thespaces.ogg
BlueBricksPuzzle=gladyoucame.ogg

I had to add the ogg files into the Contents/Resources/Data/Music/ subdirectory inside the app's package (click the TCB app and select Show Package Contents on Mac).

So is there a limit of one ambient song, 2 attack songs, 1 exit song, and 2 puzzle songs per theme? Maybe this discussion should continue in another forum section.

____________________________
34th Skywatcher

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

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[Last edited by disoriented at 08-15-2009 07:52 PM]

Chaco
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disoriented wrote:

So is there a limit of one ambient song, 2 attack songs, 1 exit song, and 2 puzzle songs per theme? Maybe this discussion should continue in another forum section.

Actually, as far as I know, there's no such limit. You can either continue as you've been doing before, or create a list of songs seperating the filenames by semicolons, like so:

InFlamesRockAttack=underway.ogg;fortune.ogg;SomeOtherFile.ogg

I imagine exit music would work the same way it does in the game's title screen - picks one from a list to start (starting with the first one, then the second one, and so on) and then cycles through all the songs.

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jbluestein
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OK, I'm not done with this one yet...but I do feel that I have to comment on the awesomeness of this hold.

So far, I've observed three enormous levels (I'm currently on Lava Land) as well as a bunch of smaller side levels, and I'm deeply impressed with the quality and difficulty of the puzzles.

I loved Zch & Kallor's first hold and am currently loving this one as well.

I will, however, share a US that I found...at least I assume it's a US.



____________________________
"Rings and knots of joy and grief, all interlaced and locking." --William Buck

Blondbeard
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I just found a really interesting unintended solution to Underground Lake 3S.