The Pirate Invasion is out!

[ryos]

Well, more like two. I did have to start over once because I used my normal keys on the multicolored doors (I probably could have kept going and been fine, but I didn't feel like I had played the first section very well and wanted to start over anyway). 8-)

[brell]

ryos wrote: Just finished The Pirate Invasion! It took me 90 minutes, and I only got 58% secrets. And, I missed most of the cabins. :'(

About half of the cabins, I presume

ryos wrote: This mansion is huge, unique, creative, delightful, and frustrating all in one. It had entirely too many hidden (and essential) keys for my taste. I also am not a fan of the signs warning the player against certain courses of action, as I feel it's bad design; you should be able to design your mansion such that not only are such signs unnecessary, but that, no matter what the player does, the mansion never becomes unfinishable. There were also at least two secret keys that were completely unreachable; I say that having fixed them for myself so I could get on with my life.

As far as I know the mansion never becomes unfinishable. Please give me an example if I am wrong.
I have seen worse design than anything in TPI without any warnings at all - but of course this is a matter of taste.
Can you please give me an example of completely unreachable secret keys?

ryos wrote: I also was looking forward to seeing everyone's cabin, but unfortunately for me, more than half of them were completely hidden, and I missed them. I wasn't in the mood to play the mansion over and over, never being guaranteed that I would ever find all the cabins. So...you fill in the rest.  :-?

Overall, and notwithstanding the criticisms above, I really enjoyed TPI. Thanks to Brell for a good time!

As I said above you propably missed around half of the cabins. In the readme file you are advised to pay attention to the sound. Did you listen to all different sounds in my cabin?

[brell]

aquaMat wrote: Wow ryos....


BTW, I also found a couple of

issues

, brell. More of that later.....

AND: the BBB problem never happened again. During my last couple of plays I always could read all BBBs properly !

I'd surely like to know about all possible issues. Regarding the BBB's, as I said I don't know why you and at least Rose had this issue.

[ryos]

brell wrote:
As far as I know the mansion never becomes unfinishable.  Please give me an example if I am wrong.

The only one I could potentially think of is if you use your regular keys on the multicolored doors, then use your multicolored keys on the wrong color door in the future so that you have too much of one color key and not enough of another. You might think that only an idiot would do this in light of the warning on the sign, which I read, heeded, then came back and ignored because I hadn't found the hidden exit to that portion of the level and thought that, maybe, I could get through the multicolored doors with my normal keys.

I have seen worse design than anything in TPI without any warnings at all - but of course this is a matter of taste.

I wasn't trying to compare TPI to anything else. I was just saying that I don't think you should ever need to put warnings on signs as an essential aid to the player, and that to do so is like putting a band-aid on a design flaw and calling it good. A possible exception is (more rot13 here) gur uvagf nf gb juvpu pbybe bs pbva gb sbyybj va gur znmr - gung jnf irel urycshy.

You're right, this is a matter of taste. It's one man's opinion, and should be taken as such.

Can you please give me an example of completely unreachable secret keys?

Lryybj xrl va 30290. I could have sworn there was another, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is.

ryos wrote: I also was looking forward to seeing everyone's cabin, but unfortunately for me, more than half of them were completely hidden, and I missed them. I wasn't in the mood to play the mansion over and over, never being guaranteed that I would ever find all the cabins. So...you fill in the rest.  :-?

Overall, and notwithstanding the criticisms above, I really enjoyed TPI. Thanks to Brell for a good time!

As I said above you propably missed around half of the cabins.  In the readme file you are advised to pay attention to the sound.  Did you listen to all different sounds in my cabin?

I didn't actually read the readme. :-[ I also didn't hear anything extraordinary, but then, I have MM's sound effects turned down a bit so they aren't so loud compared to iTunes, and sometimes I miss things like torch sounds etc. This is probably stupid since I'm a big fan of auditory hints, but, what can I say? I like my background music.

Honestly, I left that room as soon as possible because hidden spiders freak me out.  

[Freddy]

Hey! It feels o so good that we have new mansions again to discuss.

Few things.

1° I may be stupid. But is there anyone who can tell me what that

rot13

is? And how I can translate it into proper English,

2° The use BBBs by brell in TPI is logical. Just like my MMaM this new mansion is a kind of tutorial where a lot of BBBs are there to help less experienced players. And the other BBBs are sometimes very funny. Like passenger Wingy who did invite Ted & Co in his cabin. I even don't know if it is breaking the playing rhythm, because there are so many BBBs that they decide the rhythm!

3° During the beta-testing I didn't encounter any problems with different use of keys. But to be sure I will check it again. Concerning hidden keys, I can recall only one and brell is already aware of it and looking for a nice hint. And if he doesn't find one, I advise a BBB ... 8-) ;D :

[ryos]

Freddy wrote: 1° I may be stupid. But is there anyone who can tell me what that

rot13

is? And how I can translate it into proper English,

Rot13 is the most basic of cryptographic cyphers. To Rot13-encode something, take every letter and offset (

rotate

) it by 13 positions in the alphabet. Thus

I

becomes

V

, because V is 13 letters after I in the alphabet. Since the alphabet contains 26 letters, you can simply apply the rotation repeatedly to either encode or decode a piece of text.

Paste things into rot13.com to en/decode them.

I've taken to using Rot13 to obfuscate spoilers because I bought TextMate, which has a built-in Rot13 function, and which also lets you use it to edit the contents of any Cocoa text field in any application (including the text boxes in Safari). That's just one of many things that make it an amazing piece of software.

I also like Rot13 better than yellow text, so there.

[Freddy]

Thx, ryos! I keep it secret. :-X ;D

[Semi-Native]

ryos wrote: There were also at least two secret keys that were completely unreachable

I also found these 2 keys unreachable. There's the yellow key in 30290 and a red key in 31904. Jack found the way to get right next to them but was unable to pick them up, even by bending down backwards and forwards. If there is another way to get them, Jack was unable to figure it out.

Any hints? Are they in fact reachable?

This is a very creative and large mansion, and Jack is enjoying exploring this huge ship. But those keys are bothering him.

8-)

[brell]

Ryos, all keys in 30290 are totally reachable.

[rose]

Bending down backwards?? How does your Jack do that, Semi-Native?? :o