Discotheque of Doom -Release Notes-

[brell]

Update 2.0 is downloadable now

[aquaMat]

Thanks, brell !

[ryos]

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.

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.

Visually the mansion is all over the place, wild and unpredictable. There were quite a few rooms where faces or other shapes emerged from the mess, and those were entirely delightful. The look and wacky design combine to give the feeling of a roughly drawn pencil sketch of a Rube Goldberg machine, animated by an evil genius to torment those who seek the Discotheque.

A consequence of the unconventional design is that there were many many places where jumping against a room boundary resulted in a fall to your death. Luckily I never survived one of these incidents, as doing so would set me pretty far back. I know aquaMat warned of this in the description and so I'm betting it's intentional, but it feels like a mistake nonetheless.

The music is really well done. It fits the rest of the mansion in that it's way out there. I was reminded of the goofy off-beat tunes in Gooball, and also in Earthbound, with shades of the Beastie Boys (I bet aquaMat won't appreciate that last comparison. I say: tough. ;D). I find the weirdness sticks in my head, and I find myself drumming the beats for hours after playing.

Nevertheless, the music is extremely repetitive, as is all dance music, so thankfully it is very sparingly used. I think that if I play again, I'll turn it off and leave iTunes running in the background, like I usually do. (I'm not suggesting there's much you can do about this if you want to have dance music; it's just part of the genre and it's a genre I don't much care to listen to. Great for dancing, not for listening.)

The custom graphics are generally well done (except for the odd pixelated cardboard cutouts found later in the mansion--why do those look like something out of a Super Nintendo game?). They really contribute to the unique look.

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!  >

Ok...that's a lot of words. But is it fun? I answer: sort of. A lot of the puzzles are great fun, the visuals are a continual delight. The atmosphere is unique and enjoyable. But what I felt through most of it was annoyance. I was annoyed at the mansion for killing me so much, which didn't leave any room for my own errors (they're inevitable, and every time I made one my annoyance at myself grew). I was annoyed when the apparent way forward is actually a death trap, but designed in such a way as to make me think I just needed to hit it right, thus wasting three or so lives.

There were moments of joy and triumph that kept me playing, and I think the mansion is worth finishing at least once just for that. But in the general, big-picture sense, the annoyance wins out over the joy.

And so, when I finally finished, I felt a mixture of triumph and relief. Triumph that I had conquered the beast, but relief that I was finally, at long last, through with this mansion.

Here's my stats.  8-) Has anyone else beaten this?

[Wingy]

Wow this page contains some of the most LONGEST posts in all the history of mansion-kind!

[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 ??