Awesome, thanks for the look-through! Here are some various responses/thoughts:
My overall goal was to play around with the new elements, especially the crates, and to sort of make my own "
tech demo"
for everyone to see the various interactions they have and how they can all be used. Thus a few less "
pure RPG"
puzzles are around, since I think the crate is pretty awesome even as just a pure puzzle element. As with the "
Exponentiate!"
contest entry, the x2's basically add a dimension to optimal play of making dead certain you spend all the greckles you can
before taking that x2, and then getting all the stats you can
after. Beyond having lots of doors they can open, the green key shop is meant to incentivize this kind of "
frugal play"
by giving out more score to a player who can afford to buy more of them.
It never occurred to me while building this originally that skipping the soulless using the crate might be an idea. I think I'll add a way back south to make that choice more reasonable, since the results could be very interesting. However, the yellow door on the east having to be the "
last stop"
for the crate while the west one is recoverable was completely intentional, and I think I'll set it up so that recovering the crate from the north requires the soulless to die, as I think that would be more interesting too.
The "
Got times 2"
scorepoint is a bit special, as it activates with the first x2 you pick up regardless of where it is. I think this might make optimizing it a bit more interesting since that technically means you don't need to kill the mad eye to obtain it.
3N1W
can be cleaned out (health, attack and defense) with just 1 green key. If you want to know how:
Click here to view the secret text
×1. Push the crate to (7, 11).
2. Grab the health.
3. Push the crate to (6, 11).
4. Grab the attack.
5. NOW lock the green door while standing on it.
6. Push the crate where the attack was to get the defense.
But even not considering that, you seemed to forget that you could basically grab attack or hp for free in that room near the end of your run. I guess I could've looked for some earlier place to show the player very blatantly that pickup items actually block crates, but I assume they've always blocked mirrors too?
If people found the 2N1E puzzle especially annoying, I could probably add in a hint scroll with a warning prior to it. The puzzle mostly boils down to
Click here to view the secret text
×jumping SE from (5, 5)
and then the rest falls into place fairly trivially. I wasn't finished building when I put in that room, so I didn't know that there wouldn't be any pits or water in the rest of the level, hence the careful security measure around the grappling hook. I think it's still a good idea to leave that in as it also reassures the
player that he can't use the hook anywhere else.
The "
green key shop"
tells you its price when you
can afford it (in the prompt to choose whether to buy one); for some reason it didn't occur to me to also have it say what the price is when you can't. That's easy enough to add in to its scripting.
The setup in 4N basically gives you a choice of any two stats (among the big attack, small attack and medium defense), but not all three; after making your choice and blowing up the bomb, you then get some health for free. Each option has a different price in terms of what you need to fight to get it. The way you did the room basically locked your choice in as getting the big and small attack (or not getting the latter if you were impatient for the health for some reason).
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109th Skywatcher
Here are some links to Things!
Click here to view the secret text
[Last edited by Xindaris at 06-27-2021 05:27 AM]
