So, last night I had a mild fit of insanity and came up with a completely arbitrary pricing of basically every element. Maybe I missed one or two.
It's very roughly written because I was just throwing ideas into a text file as quick as I could, but this is what I came up with:
Click here to view the secret text
×Wall-like and Floor-like objects (wall, hard wall, obstacle, any floor type): FREE
Checkpoints: FREE
Decorative stuff (lighting, darking, etc.): FREE
Scrolls: FREE unless intentionally used in a brain-based puzzle or whatever, in which case 10 Gre/Tile
Stairs: FREE unless intentionally used in a puzzle somehow, in which case 20 Gre/Staircase regardless of its size.
Level entrance: The main one is FREE; each additional one is 10 Gre/Entrance
Universal Condition Doors (blue/green/red/black): 10 Gre/Tile
Cracked/Broken Walls: 5 Gre/Tile
Bridges: 5 Gre/Tile
Platforms: 30 Gre for the first tile + 5 Gre for each additional tile on the same platform
Triggerable doors/firetraps: 20 Gre for 1 tile, + 5 Gre/adjacent tile with IDENTICAL connections (for doors this is just each connected tiles; this specification is more for firetraps).
Stuff player can't walk on (pits/water): 10 Gre/tile (UNLESS it's decorative and doesn't matter to the puzzle in any way, in which case it's considered "wall-like" and so is FREE)
Stuff what hurts based on timing (hot tile/spikes): 15 Gre/tile
Droppable things (ice/trapdoor): 20 Gre/Tile
Disarming tiles (shallows/oremites): 20 Gre/Tile
Tunnels: 25 Gre/Tile
Force Arrows/Orthosquares: 20 Gre/Tile
Orbs: 30 Gre/Tile, -5 if Cracked, -10 if Broken
Pressure Plates: 30 Gre for 1 tile, +5 Gre/additional Tile OF SAME PLATE
Potions+Horns: 25 Gre/Tile
Bombs/Kegs/Mirrors: 10 Gre/Tile
Non-Root Briar: 15 Gre/Tile
Briar Root: 40 Gre/Tile
Tokens: 30 Gre/Tile (but Vision Tokens are FREE)
Beacon: 30 Gre/Tile
Tarstuff/StableFluff: 25 Gre/Tile
Citizen Relay: 15 Gre/Tile (BUT if there are never any citizens in the room, it's wall-like and thus FREE)
Simple Monsters (roach, eye, non-gel babies): 10 Gre/Tile
Wraithwing/Skipper/Seep/Fluff: 15 Gre/Tile
Less-Simple Monsters (goblin, golem, wubba, gel baby): 20 Gre/Tile
Rock Giant: 4 Rock Golems + 10 Gre to join them into one
Fegundo/Decoy/Mimic: 25 Gre/Tile
Snake-types: 10 Gre/"T" (remember, smallest possible snake is "2T")
Stalwart: 35 Gre/Tile
Construct: 35 Gre/Tile
Aumtlich/Guard: 40 Gre/Tile
Gentryii: 30 Gre/Head; Chain is +5 Gre/Tile
Spawners (Roach queen/Fluff Vent/Mothers/Nest): 50 Gre/Tile
Brain: 100 Gre for the first, +10 Gre for each additional.
Citizen: 15 Gre/Tile
Engineer: 30 Gre/Tile
Halph (either): 50 Gre
Slayer (any): 50 Gre/placement (placing "one slayer at all room borders" counts as a single placement, putting a slayer in the room AND a slayer at an entrance would count as 2 placements)
SCRIPTING:
10 Gre per character
+1 Gre per line of code
+the price of any entity or item that's spawned * the number of times it's spawned
(if a thing could in theory be spawned infinitely many times, take (sum of prices of infinitely-spawnable things (counting once for each "generate entity" command even if it's the same entity being generated in different parts of the code) + the lines-of-code cost)*5 and add that to whatever the total was before)
BUT a character or section of code whose ONLY purpose is to place build markers is FREE, since citizens/engineers are boring without that.
Edit: Yeah, even looking back at it now I see some potential tweaks. For example, probably tarstuff mothers should be a "
[large amount] for first, [smaller amount] for each additional of same type"
deal since a single tar mother eye spawns all the tar in the room.
And then, to test the prices, I had random.org roll up a couple of budgets for me, one fairly small and one fairly big, and tried to build a room for each. Attached to this post is the result, during the building of which I made a few minor tweaks to the pricing.
To be clear, while building I had the mindset that I was pretending to be a room designer for the empire; the empire gave me that much money to work with, told me not to go over, and said they'd give my department less money if I had a surplus. And my rooms were going to be judged by 256th Room Critic or something, so I couldn't just waste money on unnecessary elements that don't add to the puzzle. Ideally, this is the attitude anyone hoping to make something of this whole budget architect idea should have.
This was a really interesting exercise, and I highly recommend it. Having a low price to shoot for requires the builder to be a bit minimalistic and use few elements as efficiently as possible; having a high budget and trying to make yourself use
all of it (in a
meaningful way, not as random junk that doesn't actually contribute to the puzzle) can allow one to take a fairly simple idea to start with and complexify it into a more interesting puzzle if you're careful not to just bloat things.
As is mentioned on the scrolls in the hold itself, the first room was built with the smaller budget, 630 greckles. I managed to use
exactly that much. The room originally had 4 more roaches on the pressure plate, but I realized there was no way to get back to the north end after clearing the room and returning from the south entrance, so I had to sacrifice 1 roach per green gate to make it navigible.
The second room got a weird budget of 2789. It turns out, thanks to the way I priced things, the
only way to get a number not divisible by 5 is with a character, so I made a character who teleports the player onto a potion. It was kind of interesting
having to come up with something meaningful for a fairly simple character to do in a specific number of lines, but I could completely understand an application of this idea just forbidding scripting and rounding to the nearest multiple of 5 or 10 instead. Things didn't really click until I was desperately trying to spend the last 600 or so greckles, at which point I came up with the side rooms containing seeding beacons. The room is now all about the player seeing into the future and making their job easier in the future by doing certain things in the present.
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×(Specifically, opening the arrows next to the brain sooner than it seems like they're "supposed" to, and opening both when it initially seems like just one will suffice).
I still had a surplus and when I tried to spend that up with a nice long serpent chasing the player in their little square room I couldn't solve it. I tried cluttering the north end of the room with some pre-spawned roaches too, and just wasn't feeling it, so I decided to just put up with the surplus.
____________________________
109th Skywatcher
Here are some links to Things!
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[Last edited by Xindaris at 04-16-2016 02:34 AM]