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mustang

Guest

EX Crew Room/Challenge Design Advice

I decided to make this a different thread to focus solely on making rooms and challenges, and not on making overall maps, art, and themes.

To describe the process, I will take you step by step through an example so that you can learn how to properly design a room/challenge and not reuse old ideas and cheap tactics. Let's start with the room:

Here is how I designed the room.

Step 1 - Develop a unique concept for the room before you create a single block.

The is such a critical step, you must have an idea of what you want to accomplish before you just start placing blocks all over the place. Have a concept in mind that sounds at least semi-original.

For the example room, I had in mind a room where jumping from certain blocks would pull you into the arrows and back to the beginning. Thus the players could only jump off some blocks, and not others. This was my basic concept.

Step 2 - Begin to build the basic setup to achieve your concept.

Now that you have an idea in mind, begin to toy with some ideas to watch your concept come to life. Don't design the entire room just yet, focus on making the basic idea work before you finish the entire room.

For the example room, I started by making the arrows on the top and bottom. Then I began to experiment with block placements until I found the correct height for blocks you can jump off and ones you can't. My basic concept was now working.

Step 3- Evaluate your original concept and decide to either: start over, modify it, or finish the room.

As you experiment with your concept, you will soon discover if it's working or not. If everything works fine, then proceed to the next step. If not, you need to either start all over with a fresh idea, or maybe you can modify your concept into something different that works better.

For my example room, everything was working fine so I continued with the original idea. In many others rooms I made that wasn't the case, and so I modified my concept as I went along until I had a concept that actually worked.

Step 4 - Finish the entire room.

Now that your concept is working, you need to finish making the entire room including the start and finish.

For my example, it was a matter of finishing all of the block placements until I had a start and finish.

Step 5- Play test, edit, play test, edit, over and over again!

When you finish your room it's not really done, you now need to play test it to make sure it's not only beatable, but that there are no ways to "exploit" the room. Exploiting the room means there is another way to get to the finish that was not intended, and you need to play test a room many many times to make sure that there is only the path you intended, and that your path is fair and not excessively cheap. This takes time, so please take your time to properly test and edit a room until it is balanced and perfect.

For my room, I play tested it until I discovered there was an exploit. A player could just keep running and jumping and make it through the room without stopping, which violated my path. I had to test, edit, and test and edit over and over until my edits made sure that players had to stop on the third to last block, and jump and slide to the end.

I hope this has been enlightening, and I will answer any other questions that are posted in this thread.

Snackfast

Guest

Re: EX Crew Room/Challenge Design Advice

This is really good and well thought out.

This will help me in the future thanks.

Also, took me forever to get past that part

Zap

Guest

Re: EX Crew Room/Challenge Design Advice

Very good advice! This will help greatly to people who bother to read it!

Snackfast

Guest

Re: EX Crew Room/Challenge Design Advice

I read the whole thing. My eyes still burn

Zap

Guest

Re: EX Crew Room/Challenge Design Advice

I read the whole thing. My eyes still burn

lolwut??

musketgamer

Guest

Re: EX Crew Room/Challenge Design Advice

thanks mustang, the advice is sure to be helpful towards many.

MFL

Member

Joined: 2015-04-02

Posts: 68

Re: EX Crew Room/Challenge Design Advice

After making ten maps of my **** Levels (MF Levels) series, a slurry of rooms all over the EX projects, and a lot of unreleased, ridiculously cruel rooms with my EX cohorts, I can vouch for mustang's evaluation of room creation and add a few summary points of my own conclusions.

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed"

A room maker is an inventor. He must understand, to a rigorous precision, the nature of both his landscape and his tools. A deep understanding of game physics is critical to innovation, for example:

-He must know that "blanks" are, in essence, "down arrows", and abandon all conception of top-down construction in favour of using all four directions when necessitated.
-He must know that the block in which the "center" of the smiley is located, is the block which will determine the smiley's gravitational affectation.
-He must know how much run up space is necessary in order to break through an opposing arrow or arrows, and to account for lag (desync discrepancy) which would make certain arrows impossible to break, or easily broken where unintended.

These are just some of the most basic intricacies of which the room maker should be aware.

A good room is an invention. An invention is the culminating application of a man's ability to imagine the conclusions that can be drawn from the premises given, his tools and the laws of nature: that a tree does make a sound if it falls, that a smiley can move smoothly along a diagonal chain of dots.

Has this conclusion been drawn before? Has someone else applied this concept? The inventor continues to experiment.

You have a smiley with X acceleration, X top speed, a 5 block jumping height and a ~0.95 block diameter. You have 198x198 blocks with which to design a level. You have gravity blocks in all four directions and a nullgrav block.

The rooms you make, the inventions, will be themselves conclusions drawn from these core premises integrated by a thinking mind.

I present this small assorted pack of room JPGs, some rooms used, some unused, all interesting:

Enjoy!

(DISCLAIMER: Half of these rooms are pre-physics updates, so they may be malfunctioning. If that is the case, take them for the concepts they are expressing.)

Last edited by MFL (Aug 18 2010 11:47:19 pm)

Zap

Guest

Re: EX Crew Room/Challenge Design Advice

Damn, this game is way too complicated sometimes. :/

Sykodeus

Guest

Re: EX Crew Room/Challenge Design Advice

I noticed most of these things x)

Anyway, thank you very much. That's a useful piece of information.

RPGMaster2000

Guest

Re: EX Crew Room/Challenge Design Advice

Great tips here!

Interrobang Team

Guest

Re: EX Crew Room/Challenge Design Advice

Well, More like 4.5 jumping height

Different55

Forum Admin

Joined: 2015-02-07

Posts: 16,575

Re: EX Crew Room/Challenge Design Advice

Great guide, thanks.

---

"Sometimes failing a leap of faith is better than inching forward"
- ShinsukeIto

bliske

Member

Joined: 2015-04-05

Posts: 411

Re: EX Crew Room/Challenge Design Advice

it's good for people that need to learn the concept of building, it's not all about just making it and testing path by path, the whole map could have shortcuts making it easier then what it is.
nice tips btw