Hi azb,
I appreciate the effort to make a beginner-oriented hold; we could always do with more of those. However, I feel this hold needs a lot of work before it's suitable for being presented as beginner-friendly. I would like to go through it carefully and make some detailed posts on where I feel it needs improvement -- but before I really start this, I have to ask: are you going to take this feedback seriously and make improvements where necessary?
Anyway, I'll start with the issues I've noted so far, after playing through the first few levels.
Budkin Household
1N: There's too much going on here for the very first combat room. The roaches start out too close, so the player doesn't have time to absorb all the information being thrown at them. A better introduction would have the roaches (or a single roach) away behind some walls or doors so the player can choose when to start combat. (See GatEB : Outer Walls : 1S3E.)
Force arrows are introduced here, even though they are only a structural element and you don't use them in any puzzles on this level. That's too much information for the first room. It would be better to have a separate room for force arrows, and use them as part of the puzzle so the player can clearly see how they affect
both player and monster movement.
1N1W: Also too much for the second room. There is a linchpin here (tidy the roaches up so you only have to defend two adjacent tiles) but imagine a beginner playing this as their second room ever! I get the impression that you're trying to think about what a beginner would need to learn in terms of element behaviour, but forgetting that learning combat tactics also takes a slow start and a gradual build-up.
1W: Somewhat better. At least there is a clear focus (retreat under cover) and the room becomes simple once you do this.
1S1W: Now the lesson is to use tunnels as cover, but because there are so many roaches and movement order is so chaotic, it's not at all clear how to lead them to avoid being attacked from both sides. Also, the tunnels are effectively walls here -- the player isn't going to learn about moving
through tunnels, unless they happen to try it out after clearing the room. If you want to introduce tunnels in the first level, it's worth spending more time on them, showing first a simple room where you have to move through tunnels, then facing the correct direction to kill when moving through a tunnel, then avoiding have two roaches adjacent to an exit, and yes, somewhere in this you could show using tunnels as cover.
1S: The player has to move north so that the roaches thin out into two lines. It would not be easy for a new player to grasp why being north works and being south fails, when you haven't said anything about movement order; and this linchpin has nothing to do with the pressure plate lesson the room is supposedly about!
(Also, the scrolls are wrong for anyone using 3.0 pressure plates.)
1S1E: The linchpin is to let out only a few roaches at a time so you can deal with them before letting out the rest. The fewest it's possible to release at once is
nineteen. That's too many for a complete beginner to handle in open space.
1E: Here, the linchpin is to start with a pressure plate between two vertically aligned groups, because these are further apart so you have more time to deal with them. I'm okay with that. But because of movement order, it doesn't work if the player attacks a north group first -- the room looks symmetrical but isn't, because of hidden information.
Now I should be clear, I am
not suggesting you teach the player all about movement order on the first level! I just think it would be much more beginner-friendly if you changed the puzzles so they don't depend on movement order.
1N1E: No checkpoint.
Budkin Attic
Entrance: So the new player gets here and sees a tooltip about how roach queens move opposite to a roach. There are 12 queens in the room, and none of them are moving! Of course, you and I know they are on force arrows, but you never taught the player that monsters can be on force arrows or how to right-click to see what's on a tile.
In any case, the new player
needs to be introduced to queen movement with a room in which a queen is actually moving.
1E: The player must enter from the west, so that enough queens stay at the north end that the roach swarm doesn't get unmanageable. They must kill as many queens as possible before the first spawn. Then they have to progress south against roughly 20 roaches per spawn cycle until they can reach the south queens and start killing. This is aimed at
beginners?
1N1E: A bit more like it. Kill as many as possible before the first spawn; the room is simple after that. However, it's perfectly possible the player went west first and went round the whole level clockwise, so they would enter this room from the north and have a very bad time.
2N1E: A bit tedious, but at least this is a genuine beginner-friendly room that I could imagine being in GatEB.
2N, 2N1W, 1W: Not too bad.
1N1W: I entered from the north, and that meant I had to time the queen's release so she was blocked on her own spawn, which is much too advanced for a player's first time ever seeing roach queens -- especially when it looks like a horde room and the player has no reason to suspect an advanced trick will be involved.
Entering from the south, the room is much fairer -- but if
both 1N1W and 1N1E expect you to enter from the south, as it appears, then you are expecting the player to play partway through the level and then backtrack, instead of carrying on to new rooms.
Budkinville
Entrance: Pretty easy, but could be very annoying if you mess up and have to start over and watch the cutscene again. Couldn't you have the cutscene in a separate room to the north?
Other rooms: Okay, but there's a lot more you can do with evil eyes other than just using them for more horde rooms. Nothing here was as bad as Attic 1E, but I still wouldn't have liked this to be my first introduction to evil eyes as a new player. 1S1W should have, at least, extra checkpoints at (15,11) and (26,20).
Abominable Arboretum
Backtracking issue: if you clear Entrance and exit south, you can't access the rest of the level.
Rocky Road
1N1E and 1N2E are good rooms. 2N is okay. The other rooms... well, again I feel there are more interesting things you can do with rock golems than put the player in front of a large horde. 2N1E needs checkpoints further north. In 1N, the gaps in the pressure plate aren't strictly necessary but a nice time-saver, so thank you for that.
1N1W: Lit-up floor tiles don't suggest "
scripted exit"
to me, so I was stuck here until I messed around to see if anything happened. Definitely suggest adding a tooltip. The room itself was fine.
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50th Skywatcher
