Welcome to the Holds board! Here you will find finished user-made holds to play. You will find them attached to the first post of the thread, on the left under the post author's name. After downloading it, it can be imported via the Change Location screen in-game. Subscribers to CaravelNet can download them directly from inside the game.
You can also use
the hold downloads page for a more convenient way to find holds published to this board.
You will find a small number of holds on this board that cannot be downloaded. These are Smitemaster Selections, special high-quality user-made holds that have been published by Caravel, the only way to access these is to
buy them.
You may have noticed you can't create new threads in this board directly. Holds can only make it onto this board by being submitted to, and then passing, the Hold Admin review process. Caravel have offered to host our user-made content and integrate it with CaravelNet, but this comes with some rules to make things better for everyone. You'll need to adhere to these rules if you want your hold to end up on this board.
How to submit your hold
Before submitting your work for HA review, you need to get your hold playtested by others (the HA review process is not a free playtest, we only check your hold for certain things). If a hold clearly needs more playtesting, it may be rejected. The
Architecture board is the place to get your hold publically playtested. Alternatively, if you don't want playtesting to be public, CaravelNet subscribers can create private beta boards and invite people to them.
Whichever approach you choose, you'll find a button to submit your hold, either at the top of the page in your Architecture thread, or where you manage your private beta hold in your profile. This will send your hold to the HA queue.
When your hold is in the queue, you will find a new interface in your architecture thread / private beta hold, including a chat channel with the HAs. To pass the review, two HAs need to approve the hold.
IMPORTANT: By submitting your hold to be put on the Holds board, you give Caravel the right to distribute it in this manner in perpetuity. This does not stop you from hosting it yourself elsewhere, but Caravel will be under no obligation to honor any request to delete it from the board if you change your mind later. Once it's on the Holds board, it's staying on the Holds board. If you're not OK with this, please do not submit your hold!
HA Review
The current Hold Admins are:
Blondbeard, Briareos, Chaco, Dischorran, Doom, hyperme, kieranmillar, mauvebutterfly, mrimer, navithmastero, Rabscuttle, RoboBob3000, Schik, skell, Someone Else
Hold Administrators are volunteer members of the community. We don't do this as a job, and have real lives to live. Over the years, user holds have tended to get larger and more difficult, so the time taken to review has gone up considerably. Expect review to potentially take weeks, or if the queue is large, months. You are free to ask how things are going in the chat, but please be understanding.
If you would like to speed up the process, it helps a lot to provide a complete set of demos. To generate demos, play through your entire hold
outside of the editor, demos are automatically saved when you complete a room and challenge. Then you can press F6 to go to the Demos screen, where you can export them all. The HAs can import this demo pack to view your demo and ensure a room is possible. It's also a lot faster to review this way.
Hard Rules
There are a few strict rules that you are absolutely not getting around under any circumstances.
1)
No copyrighted material you have no permission to use. Caravel takes copyright seriously and has no tolerance for being contacted by lawyers with takedown requests. If your hold contains custom media, we will be asking you if you made it yourself, and if not, where it comes from and if you have permission to use it. Attributing everything you use inside your hold will speed this up and is good practice anyway. Note that we consider all authors of user-made holds to have copyright over the holds they produce and the rooms they made, so no stealing from other holds either! The review page automatically produces for us a full list of every custom image, sound file, and all the text, so you're not hiding anything from us. References to other games and media are fine, but directly using assets from other games is not OK.
2)
No content that is obscene, abusive, hateful, would cause internet drama, etc. The behavioral guidelines you need to follow to post on this forum also apply to your holds. We're all playing DROD to enjoy ourselves, so don't make content trying to upset people, don't be *that* person. Holds which might upset some reasonable person you disagree with on any emotionally charged topic are not permitted. If your hold's story needs a villain, DROD's world and lore has some you can use.
3)
No swearing. DROD has its own ways of swearing, like "
Greb"
, "
Gobbing"
and "
Flaming Fegundos!"
. The HAs will recommend you use these in place of actual swear words, including ones partially censored by asterisks.
4)
Your hold must be completable, masterable, and all challenges must be obtainable. CaravelNet tracks hold and room completion of promoted holds, so you'll need to make sure your hold is 100%-able. Note that not every room has to be solvable, there's artistic merit sometimes in having an impossible room, but we want players to trust that the hold won't troll them into never being able to get 100%. All rooms marked as a secret must be reachable and solvable to make your hold masterable. Adding a challenge to any script adds it to the list on the Restore screen, so these too must all be obtainable.
Guidelines
The HA review process started off as very permissive but over the years certain things have come up that we've decided we don't need to experience again. You may find some old holds that violate these guidelines, usually these are the culprits that caused these guidelines to be created in the first place. The HA review process isn't trying to be general quality control, but sometimes a hold has a significant structural or playability issue that should be examined in further detail.
Hold design is a creative process and it's not always beneficial to put hard rules on the creative process, which is why these are not hard rules. Each submitted hold will be judged on it's own merits: if your hold is really good, we're willing to be flexible on the grounds of artistic merit.
We care more about the spirit of the law than the letter, and tedious attempts to use technicalities to work around a request to change something won't be appreciated. Ultimately it's a judgement call by the Hold Admins, and if they ask you to make a change, please make the change or back out of promoting your hold to the Holds board. Nobody wants to get involved in big arguments.
1)
Backtracking Issues. It's possible to create situations where the player gets stuck in-between rooms and can't continue any more. For example, if you clear a room but cut a tarstuff blob to spawn more babies on the way out, the room will revert to being uncleared when you leave it. This can cause the room to become impossible to clear again because you're now on the wrong side of a locked green door. If the player doesn't notice immediately, they can end up solving many rooms before realizing they need to Restore back to an earlier state and replay a whole bunch of rooms. Having to replay lots of rooms isn't fun, and so we try to be on the look out for these situations. It's acceptable to need to restore to earlier states to access secret rooms, but in general we're trying to avoid pointless replaying of content.
2)
Duplicate rooms that aren't different enough. There's lots of valid reasons why a hold might have rooms that are similar to others or those from another hold, such as a harder variant as a secret room, or post-mastery alternates, etc. These usually have different solutions. However sometimes people try to submit what is basically the same content a second time, and we only need to play a particular room once. If you want to make a second version of a hold in a different language, or targeting a different version of DROD, etc., you are welcome to attach it as a reply to your published hold's thread, see for example the alternative download for
King Nareik's Dungeon that works in the Architect's Edition engine. This ensures that only a single copy of the hold is considered for tracking progress and completion on CaravelNet.
3)
Trolling, pranks or serious playability issues. If your hold does something considered especially unplayable or we believe it to be made in bad faith, we might ask you to remove or change it. For example, your hold is a screamer, or has a super tedious room because you want to break a record for the world's longest room, etc. Don't lose sight of the fact we only play videogames to have fun. If we think your hold will simply generate too much bad feeling or misery, it may be rejected.
4)
Scripting issues. You can cause all sorts of issues with scripting. Implementing challenges requires scripting and so we spend extra focus looking at scripts that award challenges. Common issues include awarding the challenge again every turn on a loop, re-awarding the challenge when you re-enter the solved room, and scripts being permanently terminated so if you leave the room early you can't earn it when you return later.
5)
Some new problem we couldn't predict. This is a human process designed by humans for humans and needs to be able to adapt to new situations. We can't realistically make a rule for every possible issue that hasn't even been thought up yet, so we reserve the right to reject your hold or ask for changes for any reason.
Updating your hold after promotion
The Holds board is for
finished holds, not works in progress! Do not submit your hold unless there is a realistic expectation that you will never want to update it again. If you really want to update a hold, get in touch with an HA (don't resubmit the hold). We try to be reasonable, but there's no guarantee an update will be approved, especially if it's a gameplay change. Expect that you won't be allowed to update it, then you won't be disappointed.
Note that players finding unintended solutions is not grounds to make an update to fix it! Players do not care what is intended, we solve the rooms as presented to us. Making a change to rooms will invalidate the work put in by players to set high scores and may invalidate their progress tracking, so we want to keep changes to a minimum. If you really want to fix a room, my advice is to revisit the concept in a room in a future hold.
During the review process, an HA may notice a room has what they think is an overlooked unintended solution. They may wish to tell you about this if they think you'd like to fix it, but they are under no obligation to do so, and it won't block accepting the hold if you don't fix it.
Very occasionally, game updates can break existing rooms and render them impossible. The engine tries to be backwards compatible, but it happens. We're willing to work with you to fix broken rooms in this case, but the hold admins reserve the right to make bare-minimum edits to your hold to ensure they are still completable, even if this means marking a room as unrequired and adding a scroll explaining what happened.
[Last edited by kieranmillar at 12-08-2024 10:58 PM]
