Double posting here mostly because Delta 2N1E got me thinking hard about rooms with 6 or more time clones. Some of my all time favorite rooms have had this many time clones and I've been trying to think about why I enjoyed those rooms but this one left me feeling somewhat agitated. I really want to like this room since juggling multiple time clones can be a lot of fun. And I do like the room in theory. But in practice I didn't have a good time with it and I'd like to try to vocalize why. Feel free to do whatever you want with that information, and I'll totally understand if you decide to just keep this room as it is.
So here are two rooms I loved with 7 or more time clones.
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What is it about those rooms that makes having 6 or more time clones running around tolerable and even fun? I think it's a couple of things. The first thing is that both those rooms are very minimalist in design. By that I mean the actual puzzle is super focused on one key insight. The entire room focuses on that one insight and you can basically sum it up in a few brief words. 2N1E on the other hand relies on multiple different tricks to get all the plates down. The reason this is somewhat problematic is that if you happen to understand the first part of the room, you can spend a bunch of time figuring it out but then have to re-start everything from scratch when the shoe drops and you realize there were actually multiple puzzles involved and you only planned for the first one.
The second factor is that in both rooms there is somehow a ton of space to play around with and the rooms are structured in such a way that time clones aren't likely to stab each-other or otherwise interfere with each other unless you really want them to. Blocking or interfering with other timelines is strictly optional in both the rooms posted above. And while I ultimately chose to do so in order to optimize, somehow the fact that it was my choice, and thus my fault, made it more tolerable when timeline interference ended up getting me stabbed. In 2N1E on the other hand, you need to block time clones and offset their timelines as part of the solution. Moreover, the way the yellow gate blocks them they also have a tendency to all collect around it and will happily stab each other there if you don't plan around that.
So here are two suggestions I would humbly make for this room. First, try to minimize the places where timelines are altered so that there's less of a likelihood that the player gets the solution but has to rerecord several times due to time clones accidentally killing each other. One option would be to space out the pink pressure plates that the clones have to set off a but more and just provide a bit more space in that entry area in general. Another possibility would be to take that yellow door at (2,6) - (2,8) and just make it a whole lot bigger so that clones don't have to gang up on each other there.
A bigger and harder suggestion is to take this room and split it into two rooms. It kind of wants to be two rooms, one for each of the two general ways that you hold down the plates. I know this may be infeasible given the structure of the hold, and is probably more of a reflection on my personal preference for minimalist puzzles. But I think minimalism really is a good approach to take when you're juggling this many timelines for the reasons I mentioned above.
Again, please feel free to completely ignore this. Partially I'm posting it for myself to justify why I had an unpleasant time with this room when I claim to love time clone puzzles that involve manipulating loads of clones at once.
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Links to neat forum tools that I always have trouble finding:
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