The voting period for the Sixth Annual People's Choice Awards is finished. A big thanks to all forum members who participated! This year, 25 thoughtful forum members helped me create the ballot by nominating their favorite holds, 46 fine and upstanding forum members voted in the main poll, and 35 conscientious voters came back to vote in the tiebreaker poll.
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Now we have some
BIG WINNERS of the
Sixth Annual People's Choice Awards!
This year's competition was dominated by one huge epic phenomenal masterpiece, Gigantic Jewel Lost! Almost all holds made in 2009 were of very high quality, and a few of those deserving holds managed to win awards as well. Also, another architect has joined the elite ranks of Erik Hermansen Award winners.
Without further ado, here are the big winners of 2009!
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1. Technical Design Excellence in Scripting
Gigantic Jewel Lost by
Zch and Kallor wins!
Towards the end of Gigantic Jewel Lost, Beethro walks into a set of rooms called the Robolab. A set of pressure plates act as a computer keypad. Depressing them causes a series of instructions to appear on a screen. These instructions control a robot that clears the monsters from an isolated portion of the lab room. Even though Beethro is limited to only 3 lines total with a maximum of 11 instructions per line, he can create surprisingly complex programs, as he may define and use two subroutines. A script that allows the player to write a script -- if that's not the ultimate feat in scripting, I don't know what is! Well done, Zch and Kallor!
2. Technical Design Excellence in Layout and Aesthetics
Gigantic Jewel Lost by
Zch and Kallor wins its second award!
Gigantic Jewel Lost is a beautiful balance of art and function. Each level's minimap has a distinctive and aesthetically pleasing pattern, punctuated by the occasional whimsical jellyfish, or bumble bee, or gigantic snake, or... well, you should play it to find out what else! The individual rooms are color coordinated by level; Goblin Woods has a green theme, and two new room styles were created to give Underground Lake its blue theme, and Lava Land its red theme. While the main puzzles in this hold are not determined by the hold art, they fit in with it perfectly. What an amazingly beautiful hold, Zch and Kallor!
3. Technical Design Excellence in Concept
One Step Ahead by
Hartleyhair wins!
53rd Pipe Maintenance Advisor (a swordless stalwart) finds himself in a strange place, with his every step dogged by a silent goblin. Our protagonist must find ways to use his quiet companion to open doors which allow the both of them to progress through seven varied but not too strenuous puzzles. This was a refreshingly fun idea, Hartleyhair!
4. Creative Design Excellence in Storyline
Complex Complex by
Rheb wins!
Sometime after clearing King Dugan's Dungeon, but before starting the Journey to Rooted Hold, Beethro accepts a job from the DAA to stop a renegade evil architect. However, in Rheb's intriguing semi-canon story, Beethro finds that the difference between good and bad is not as clear-cut as he had thought. The main characters are well developed, especially the traitor architect Ombus Thenn, who is one delicious villain. We meet him only briefly in person, but his increasingly eccentric character is well revealed through a series of scrolls, written by Blondbeard, placed throughout the hold. Overall, this is a terrific story that leaves us all wondering what happens next. To think, at one point, this hold was going to be rushed out as a Smitemaster's Selection with no story at all... great save, Rheb! While several people worked together on this story, the award goes to the biggest contributors, Rheb and Blondbeard. Very nice writing, gentlemen!
5. Creative Design Excellence in Difficulty
Gigantic Jewel Lost by
Zch and Kallor wins its third award!
This time, Gigantic Jewel Lost wins for its puzzles. The architects built this hold in the two years following TCB's release. Dozens upon dozens of tricky - yet still fun - puzzles comprise an in-depth exploration of the "
new"
3.0 Elements. I learned new things about how to efficiently shorten adders and how to precisly manipulate stalwarts. Other themes include golems and giants, brains, aumtlich, guards, and slayers, each including a variety of unique puzzle ideas. There's also the amazing scripted Robolab described above. As a break from DROD puzzles, the Underground Lake level includes a number of classic non-DROD puzzles rendered into DROD using pressure plates. And for yet a different type of puzzle, there are interesting rooms that describe the mathematics of DROD, including tarstuff cutting and decoy placement puzzles. No matter what your taste in challenges is, there's something in Gigantic Jewel Lost for you. Excellent work, Zch and Kallor!
6. Creative Design Excellence in Entertainment
One Step Ahead by
Hartleyhair wins its second award!
This bite-sized hold features attractive rooms, cool but not too difficult swordless manipulation puzzles (described above), and a very sweet story! Sometimes good things come in small packages. Thanks so much for this little gem, Hartleyhair!
7. Graphics Design Excellence in a Modification
InFlamesRock style by
Zch wins!
InFlamesRock is one of the two custom room styles Zch made for Gigantic Jewel Lost. He describes it as "
a red, grim, hot place."
My favorite features of this style are the interesting stone floor textures, and the rock obstacles, which have hard gray surfaces with cracks to reveal their red molten centers. This is a very classy style, Zch!
8. 2009 DROD Hold of the Year
Gigantic Jewel Lost by
Zch and Kallor wins its fourth award!
Gigantic Jewel Lost almost swept the entire 2009 People's Choice Awards. It was the winner in the scripting, aesthetics, and difficult puzzles categories, and was two votes away from winning in the concept and storyline categories too. It's no surprise that this 370-room epic masterpiece, where Beethro helps the famed Dupont brothers recover Professor Gouda's missing Rainbow Jewel, is the 2009 DROD Hold of the Year! I know it's been said before, but I'll say it again: "
You should play this hold."
Gigantic congratulations to Zch and Kallor! This hold is awesome!
9. 2009 DROD RPG Level Set of the Year
The Test of Mind by
Jeff_Ray... wins!
DROD RPG is still a relatively new game, and many of us are still beginners. Jeff_Ray... has a particular talent at creating holds that are accessible to beginners but still fun and interesting for everyone. The Test of Mind is no exception. The protagonist is Gobardo, a trainee stalwart who must journey through challenges within his own mind in his quest to untimately defeat the evil and heartless Spookswielder. The levels are large, well decorated, complicated enough to be interesting, but not too complicated. There are ample, well-placed autosave points, as well as plenty of health, ATK, DEF, and keys. Thus, lots of replaying is not necessary, unless you're an optimizer. There's even a fun little "
rat race"
to collect accessories, as in the first part of Tendry's Tale. I truly enjoyed playing this level set. Kudos to you, Jeff_Ray...!
10. 2009 Novice Architect Award
Penwielder wins!
Penwielder showed up on the forum in late 2009, when he posted his AE hold,
Penwielder's Palace in Architecture. This hold shows Penwielder's growth from fledgling builder to devious architect. It starts with some easy, not too impressive roach rooms. But then we progress to interesting mimic puzzles, tar horde management problems, and goblin manipulation challenges. It ends with clever and fairly challenging brain path puzzles - very impressive. Penwielder's Palace is now on the Holds board, and it was just two votes away from winning this year's award in the entertainment category. What a great start! You've got a natural talent for this, Penwielder!. Hope to see more from you!
11. 2009 Erik Hermansen Award for Lifetime Architectural Achievement
BoyBlue wins!
BoyBlue arrived on the scene in 2006, and produced a steady stream of consistently high quality holds. Through the end of 2009, he has given us
Spare Rooms,
Blue Rooms,
Twenty-Three Rooms,
Edge of the World,
Madness in the Spring,
El Dorado, and
Random Obsessive. In 2010, beyond the scope of this award, he kept right on building and created
Cycles. BoyBlue is probably best known as a master of minimalistic lynchpin puzzles... which are all clearly impossible (
right?), yet incredibly addictive! Every great architect can build more than one type of room, and BoyBlue is no exception. In BoyBlue's holds, you can also expect to find mazes. Most of BoyBlue's mazes don't look like mazes, but they still require the solver to find that one correct path through the cleverly placed elements in the room. In addition, you'll find some looser puzzles that, at first glance, look like random scatterings of monsters (and maybe that's what some of them are). But the scatterings you'll find in any given BoyBlue hold have been carefully selected such that each requires a different thought-provoking strategy to solve it. BoyBlue can even make great DROD adaptations of other puzzles; for example, if you hunt through his holds (I'll not say which one), you'll find a hidden Sokoban room. No matter what you find in a BoyBlue hold, it's sure to be a fun challenge! 2009 is BoyBlue's year to join the elite group of Erik Hermansen Award winners. You're brilliant, BoyBlue! We love you!
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Let's have a big round of applause for all the winners!
Congratulation once again to Zch and Kallor, to Hartleyhair, to Rheb and Blondbeard, to Jeff_Ray..., to Penwielder, and to BoyBlue! Traditionally, the biggest prize here is to be able to say you won in the Sixth Annual People's Choice Awards. But I also happen to have some mod points for the winners... please post here to receive them! Posts to congratulate the winners are also welcome.
Well, it actually feels kind of strange winning this award after being pretty much inactive for more than a year. But thanks to everyone who voted, Complex Complex sure was an amazing project to work on.
