Hey, thanks for taking a look and giving some comments. I've written kind of a rambling reply here...
First of all, Decrepit Manor is intended to serve a few purposes, namely:
-Gentle puzzles to help the player get used to the strange controls
-Demonstrations for players/potential architects of things Hopthro can do that Beethro can't (the gel room is one of these, showing that Hopthro can survive being "
surrounded"
by gel because of his quick movement)
-Demonstrations for potential architects of what can/should/shouldn't be done (e.g. the platform room is me saying in big bold letters "
please don't do platform puzzles with hopthro!"
)
Because of that, I'm okay if some of the rooms are overly easy or even if a room is slightly painful, but not too much (like the platform room). With respect to that, it was my initial impression that Hopthro is really really bad for horde rooms, and 2N1W was partially a demonstration of that. It's barely even a horde room at all, but I still had to do a lot of tweaking to make it relatively easy.
I've come around on horde rooms for Hopthro since then, but they need to be very carefully controlled. He's no good at wide-open, surrounded-by-roaches kind of hordes like Beethro can handle, so the architecture needs to be fundamentally different for a horde room to be challenging yet fun.
That brings me to the second level, Royal Catacombs. I want to point out that, from my perspective as an architect, there aren't actually any horde rooms in this level. The two rooms you're seeing as irritating horde rooms, 1S1E and 2S1W, are honestly supposed to be impossible to play like horde rooms. The goal is to instead keep tight control over the situation so you minimize the spawns as much as possible. My 'intended solution, not optimized' demo for 2S1W is less than 100 moves, and 1S1E is a bit longer, but all I'm doing after turn 90 or so is waiting around. But I suspect maybe I could communicate that better if they just come out looking like horde rooms anyway? Some suggestions might be appreciated.
(To be more specific, what's needed in 2S1W is to line up the queens so they're mostly against a single wall when they spawn, and then mop them up before they can spawn a second time. In 1S1E you don't need to kill a lot of skippers to win, your goal is really to get past them and open the doors so the briar can clean everything up after. I guess I would characterize both rooms as being about using Hopthro's fast movement effectively, as far as which of the character's mechanics are important in them.)
The third/final level
does have horde rooms though, because I felt like I finally understood the character well enough to see how to build horde rooms that work with him. And that level is supposed to be the 'gloves-off, challenging' part of the hold, so I was okay with making things tougher/tighter throughout it.
I say all this with a concept in my own head of what "
horde room"
means. My own thought is that it means you need to spend several cycles dealing with spawned or otherwise large-numbered enemies, tactically moving around to take them out and achieve your goals, as opposed to a "
puzzle room"
where you can generally be expected to have full control over the situation and just need to put the pieces together the right way. The mere existence of spawning-type monsters, or large numbers, isn't enough for me to feel like it qualifies. But it's not really a binary dichotomy either, kind of a sliding scale.
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[Last edited by Xindaris at 05-09-2022 06:33 PM]
