So, over the past couple of weeks of doing the Alphabet Stream, I spent the majority of the time looking at all of the entries of the
Unfortunate Architect Compilation. Since the stream is about trying each hold, I think I used to not make an effort to try every entry of a contest hold, but lately I've more or less been thinking "
well, each entry is
kinda like a small hold in its own right, so I really should"
. But..I didn't have a very good time, and I complained some about it. At the same time, I think I had a tough time articulating my problem. A lot of it was me saying that certain rooms felt like tedious slogs or looked like they were going to be so unpleasant that I just didn't want to play them. Here's an example of a room I skipped out on as soon as I saw it:
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Just
look at this
mess. I've got to run around pretty much the entire room space, pushing TWELVE orbs while dealing with basically a continual wall of roaches, just so I can walk down a ridiculously long hallway to push a 13th orb, and then slowly chug my way through all the roaches that inevitably will spawn and
then maybe kill the queens if I'm lucky. Doesn't look fun to me.
But, Entrropic (who I think is mxvladi?? I'm sorry, I genuinely can't remember) in chat disagreed with me, and thinks this room is good. Nuntar was there too, and the general thrust of their argument seemed to be that modern DROD players don't enjoy rooms that involve a lot of tactics and running around, only "
small, clean"
rooms. I would go so far as to say the former basically characterizes good horde rooms.
And I thought: That can't be right. I
must like horde rooms, because I keep building them! Bearing in mind that my way of building rooms is to protoype them, test them, tweak them, test them again...so if I built a room, then I played it several times, and if I kept something I played several times then I must have
liked it!
I mean, just look at this room from tv dinner:
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Or how about these rooms in Beethro's Awakening, which were built quite a while ago, but I still think I
like them:
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Actually, my internal devil's advocate wants to know how that second one is
not just like the one I refused to try above?
So, I don't think "
horde room"
or "
tactics"
is actually the problem. I think the problem I have with a lot of "
old DROD design"
that used to be considered good back then is just that there's this tendency to put
too much. Here's a non-horde example from the same entry as above:
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I actually thought I liked this room when I thought I was finished with it. It's a neat thing that requires you to figure out a clever way to kill the goblins while your movement is restricted by the eyes. But what you might not see at first in that screenshot (and what
I certainly didn't!) is that
THERE IS A WRAITHWING NORTH OF THE WALL.
Why? The room had a neat puzzle, and now that I'm done with it, why do I have to fuss with painstakingly tugging this wraithwing around and manipulating it into place where I can kill it with a very limited floor space? That is the content of a
completely separate, different room that has been stuffed into this one that was already good enough.
Or just look at this mess (same entry):
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Again, I think there's a good puzzle, but it's buried in so much junk that in my opinion just doesn't need to be a part of the same room. The good puzzle (to me) is needing to carefully care a path from west to east through the cracked walls to hit the orb, and then walk back out to the west to kill the eyes and finish the room.
But oh no, that wasn't enough for this room! We had to
also have those 8 queens there, which require me to carefully time the orb press and then figure out how to get west as efficiently as possible and
then the precise movements necessary to survive a miniature roach horde where I can't move east/west thanks to those eyes to kill the queens. And that's
still not enough, because if I'm not careful about which walls I break on the way back to the west, it's still possible for the north eyes to see me while I'm killing the south ones, or vise-versa, because at no point does the room close a door that blocks the eyes from seeing each other. As one final kick in the face, the north eyes are
really close to a room edge and some running back and forth is needed to finish off the eyes, and if you accidentally press north in the wrong place your progress in the room will be
reset.
So let's go back to that horde room I refused to try, vs. the one in Beethro's Awakening. I would say that the main difference here is also a matter of "
too much"
: The difference between 12 orbs, running down a really long hallway, and slogging back out again, and killing just 5 brains before immediately being able to just go kill the queens, is huge. The wraithwings and orthosquares also provide a bit of variety to the experience, but (in my opinion) without going overboard.
As for the other horde rooms of mine that I showed above, each of them has something that keeps them from taking forever--a timer, a limited number of roaches instead of endlessly-spawning queens, etc.
I think that for me personally, the problem is all about putting too much into a
single room. Because if I spend a long time chopping roaches in the middle of a room, and then have to go back to before I did that because I messed something up earlier and then I have to do it all over again, that's just no fun. Or, if I feel like I solved the central puzzle of a room, I really don't appreciate the "
credit"
for doing so being locked behind another thing that, even if it isn't hard (like that wraithwing), is fussy and takes a while to do.
Oh and, do you know which entries I
liked in that compilation? Even though I didn't solve very many rooms in them, I liked Rabscuttle's and Doom's entries just fine. I get the impression right away that, if I sat down to play through those entries seriously and try to solve all the rooms, I would generally have a good time. I did not get that impression from most other entries, including apparently the winning one. The rooms weren't necessarily even that much shorter, but I got an actual sense of
focus from them and not "
let's throw in this extra wraithwing to ruin the player's day"
.
I'm sure that thinking like this is part of the push for "
clean"
rooms. But I don't think that "
cleanness"
is even what I, personally, want in every single room. I just want a limit on how much I'm going to have to redo if I screw something up early on, because I know that I will.
Anyway, I posted this rant in some hope to get the opinions of more people than myself, as well as to hopefully articulate my frustration with certain architectural quirks of the "
good"
holds of the JtRH/AE era. I don't have a solid, single question to ask about this, but I guess I wonder if other people feel the same about some rooms having "
too much"
or if there's other reasons to gravitate away from "
messy"
room design and toward "
clean"
.
____________________________
109th Skywatcher
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[Last edited by Xindaris at 01-24-2021 07:40 PM]