Discotheque of Doom -Release Notes-

[aquaMat]

ryos wrote: Well, I finally finished DoD! Phew! What a relief! [smiley=birthdays.gif] [smiley=bath.gif]

And...well, I still didn't play it with my debugging goggles on, so I don't have any notes to offer an intelligent critique. I'll go for high-level then.

I enjoyed many of the puzzles and challenges, and as I said before, though I initially was put off by always having to search for the way forward, after a while it became the most enjoyable part of the mansion.

I still think many of the traps are unfair. Sadly, I don't think you can make them fair and have them retain their trap-ness. Traps are supposed to be unfair, that's part of the definition of a trap! So, I guess I just don't like it when traps are used in MM. I get annoyed when the mansion kills me, especially since lives are often quite dear in this mansion. This is just one of those points where aquaMat and I have agreed to disagree.

I didn't have any problems with keys after the update. I don't know what magic you worked, but I most certainly arrived in 21104 with five keys this time around!

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I had three spare keys when I finished. One was no doubt the spare yellow key. Another is a green key from a green door that I intentionally ignored because I knew darn well that opening it would do nothing (sometimes extra rewards are given for such frugality). The third--a rainbow key--is the one that has me wondering what I missed (besides, you know, 22% of the secrets ). Especially since I found it very near to the end.

(I cannot comment on all your remarks... as I'm on a very tight schedule today... but here are the most important ones

Congratulations, ryos, for making it 'til the end !! And I'm happy to see you've come to enjoy it a bit more...

And know what.... even though you might be reluctant about it: Go and play it again !!!  I promise you, you'll enjoy it more and more.... besides, there is quite a huge number of things you must have missed !
You gotta keep in mind that DoD contains quite a huge number of secrets.... so when you ended with 78 % secrets this effectively means you missed ca. 11 secrets (!!) as DoD has about 50 secrets !

Also the fact that you ended with several spare keys indicates that you must have missed one or more hidden areas, I guess.
'Cause you should end with only the one yellow reserve key !

ryos wrote:
There was a room with two blue doors and a green door, and you absolutely had to open one of those doors first or the level would become unfinishable. I consider this a serious flaw, as it must be learned by trial and error which door comes first and why.

Unfortunately I don't know what room you're talking about at the moment.... I'd have to go checking in the editor and try to find it. However, I'm surprised as I can't think of ANY room that would fit this description....    :o

ryos wrote:
Oh, and I was a little disappointed by the Discotheque when I finally arrived. Somehow with all the buildup I was expecting something...I don't know...grander? It just felt like the rest of the mansion. Not sure if it's possible to satisfy the hype built up by all those signs, though.

I suppose it is host to the hardest room in the mansion. Evil zapper beam room!  >  

I have the exact SAME feeling about the central dancefloor... and I can tell you how this came about:
When I built the Discotheque I had much grander plans for the central dancefloor...(you should see my folders with custom graphics for that area...it is huge)... unfortunately many of those things I couldn't get finished...for several reasons: some were just too hard or impossible to do, on others I lost patience or wasn't good enough at graphic desgining etc .

I had started so many things.... like e.g. the

rising skeletons

I had started to change into

collapsed ravers

who came to life when you passed them by...  I worked weeks at that one... but in the end it didn't look good enough.. It's much harder than changing them into mummys, for example, as I had to draw pants, t-shirts, faces, hair... you get it....

Other ideas were abandoned too, like the DJ and DJ booth or the sound-triggered events ..... and the lightshow is almost impossible to pull off, beyond thos bits I have done with the candles and neon.

It all went over my head.... it wasn't without reason that the release of DoD got delayed 2 months. In the end, I must confess, I got fed-up a little bit... and finished the central dancefloors

early

in order to finally release the mansion.

So for me it feels exactly the same.... the dancefloor(s) doesn't quite fulfill the expectations....  but maybe in a future major update, DoD will return....  (

God beware

I hear you say)  

But -as you say-  there's still the mean

hardest room

plus... (I hope) the visuals are quite cute to look at...!

And I came to think of it in Buddhist terms: the WAY is more important than the DESTINATION.....

But please - trust me on this - play again and you'll like it more, as you master it more....and there's enough left to explore... just as I had planned it, remember ??