The One Room Round Robin 2 [PATCH 3b + SOURCES released]

[Diarmuid]

Let's have some fun statistics!

What's the ORRR2 mostly made of?

Here's the top 15!

755 ceiling removers
706 hidden pressure plates
689 floor removers
492 invisible pits
377 chain railings
296 temple pillars
286 temple secret doors
273 script entities
262 pillar removers
219 small pillars
187 temple wall gratings
162 timers
150 temple alcoves
149 blockers
147 torches

[JohnWordsworth]

Talking about statistics, it would be cool if you've played through and finished the mod if you could post a few statistics about your run. Things such as 'Time Played' and 'Secrets Found' are always particularly interesting to hear!

[Isaac]

*And for anyone wanting to do that, in the game you press the "i" key and [on Windows] then press the 'Prt Scr' key [for Print Screen], and then open Paint or an image editor, and choose 'paste'.

We could have a mod thread of pasted player stats.

[boyflea]

Just to say: well done to everyone - this is an amazing feat and terrific adventure.
Will look at statistics too.
Q: would it help if you had reviews of all the rooms? As in, just personal feedback on how fun, pretty, puzzling etc it was?

Will play thorough a few times and give any feedback. Seems you are already covering the bugs I have found: for build just before this new patch, I did this:
Initial Prison - minor, accidentally threw my key at Ogre in prison when he is standing at base of stairs after killing the other guy. Could not retrieve key and Ogre would not budge. Pretty avoidable though.

[JohnWordsworth]

Glad you're having a good time with the dungeon!

Q: would it help if you had reviews of all the rooms? As in, just personal feedback on how fun, pretty, puzzling etc it was?

I don't know how much the dungeon is likely to change in the future, but I do know that most (all?) of the room designers would love to have feedback regardless. It's always great as a designer to hear what people think of what you've made and it really helps us each individually improve for future dungeons / mods etc that we make. So, if you wouldn't mind providing some per-room feedback, it will be very well received I'm sure!

[aaneton]

Will play thorough a few times and give any feedback. Seems you are already covering the bugs I have found: for build just before this new patch, I did this:
Initial Prison - minor, accidentally threw my key at Ogre in prison when he is standing at base of stairs after killing the other guy. Could not retrieve key and Ogre would not budge. Pretty avoidable though.

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Good find. You don't need the key (any key can be used where it's needed much later in game) but I guess we need to fix this. Maybe put invisible walls around him or invisible item teleport under him (as I don't know if a blocker where monster is standing is possible.) In fact we need to do this for the ogre when he stands below the stairs aswell, because you can break the game if you throw the prisoner release key at him before you release the prisoners

[Dr.Disaster]

Will play thorough a few times and give any feedback. Seems you are already covering the bugs I have found: for build just before this new patch, I did this:
Initial Prison - minor, accidentally threw my key at Ogre in prison when he is standing at base of stairs after killing the other guy. Could not retrieve key and Ogre would not budge. Pretty avoidable though.

SpoilerShow

Good find. You don't need the key (any key can be used where it's needed much later in game) but I guess we need to fix this. Maybe put invisible walls around him or invisible item teleport under him (as I don't know if a blocker where monster is standing is possible.) In fact we need to do this for the ogre when he stands below the stairs aswell, because you can break the game if you throw the prisoner release key at him before you release the prisoners

No problem anymore. Since patch 1 you can get back into the prison via a new secret passage and recover anything you left behind.

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Now if you will need that key is determined by something random. In my first playthru i was lucky i saved it.

btw: just noted in the patch notes that the Arena got a new higher-level achievement. i wonder how many wins this one might take

[SpiderFighter]

Glad you're having a good time with the dungeon!

Q: would it help if you had reviews of all the rooms? As in, just personal feedback on how fun, pretty, puzzling etc it was?

I don't know how much the dungeon is likely to change in the future, but I do know that most (all?) of the room designers would love to have feedback regardless. It's always great as a designer to hear what people think of what you've made and it really helps us each individually improve for future dungeons / mods etc that we make. So, if you wouldn't mind providing some per-room feedback, it will be very well received I'm sure!

I completely second this, along with the idea of posting stats!

[minmay]

Coincidentally, I had just been working on ranking all the rooms in ascending order of how much I liked them! With feedback about each one, of course.
Here you go. Massive spoilers, obviously. Nothing is intended personally, and I apologize for the atrocious formatting:

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Note: I have found all secrets except one (eventually got curious and looked at my save, it's secret_58
and looking at its location I've no idea how to get it), and gotten all achievements except one
(the one for finding all the secrets).

#22. Drakkan's room (Quiz with the teleporting fairy and questionable grammar)
It's just a quiz about video games...no challenge, no puzzles, not even a story
or any interesting visuals. I'll admit being surprised by one of the games
included, though.

#21½. Elizabeth Greystalk's room (The Snail King)
This room seems to exist solely to use germanny's keys and Leki's modified snail model...

#21 TsotP's room (The feeding pit and the ogre)
There is very little to this room as far as I can tell...you just kill an ogre and take a torch off the
wall, and you're done.

#20. Billick's room (The one with the ogre you collapse the ceilings on)
It's a cute concept but the novelty wears off after the first or second charge...not really
any challenge either. Would have been great as a part of a larger boss fight, but doesn't
stand too well on its own in my opinion.
Also, the secret didn't open when I made the ogre charge at it, but did open
when the ogre walked in front of it...

#19. Ciccipicci's room (The one where you go into the tiny crypt and take the crookhorn longbow and a ghost attacks you)
Not much to say about this one. It's very short, the idea of a room that mirrors itself is cool but
basically only used once, and I have no bloody idea what the poem means, if it means anything at all.
It does give some nice atmosphere though.

#18. Ryeath Greystalk's room (The sliding dragon statues)
I've seen this puzzle almost verbatim in the author's prior mod, and slider puzzles aren't exactly
the height of originality in the first place. Still, it's cleanly implemented, doesn't drag-on too
long (see what I did there) and tracking your moves is a nice improvement (note: there does not
appear to be any sort of reward for performing the optimal solution).

#17. Mahric's room (The one with the marbles and the room where you control the scavenger)
The marbles' hiding places were all good. The room where you control the scavenger is cool
and something that I haven't seen in Grimrock before, but at the same time, it's not actually
very interesting; I wish it had more depth to it. Or, failing that, I wish the monsters moved
faster (then again I wish everything in this game moved faster). The final puzzle is too much of a
"stock" puzzle that I've solved too many times, although that also meant that it was very, very fast
to solve again.

#16. Neikun's room (Neikun's (The archmage's) home)
The "I'm not a door" bit is way too easy to walk into by accident, not that it would be hard to solve
on purpose either. "Don't fear the lightning, fear the chain" was great, however. Other than that
this room was honestly pretty dull, it felt like a matter of "find button/chain/lever/whatever, then
press/pull whatever until you find all the secrets." Exception: the secret at the beginning was
mean!

#15. Kuningas' room (The obvious trap with the note saying it's an obvious trap)
The "lean against the wall" puzzle was brilliant, but the rest of the room was just dull.

#14. msyblade's room, "Temporal Fugue" (The one that tells you it's not for the faint of heart, and has the
teleporting ghost lady that was tortured by ogres)
The "behind you" part was executed very nicely, but the scare factor is greatly offset by the model looking
more like an avant-garde sculpture than a tortured spirit. I like the location of that first key, nothing
else in the room really stands out though.

#13. The Cube's room ("The heads are on your side," the torches you can't take, the secrets hidden in darkness)
The method of guiding the blob to the receptor was good. However, there's already a puzzle in the
original game where you have to be in darkness, so the rest of this puzzle barely qualifies as a
puzzle. And I will never enjoy a teleporter maze. The downstairs portion is pretty dull too after
you find it, though the "patient man" puzzle is okay.

#12. aaneton's room (The courthouse)
I liked both of the puzzles here ("never turn your back to justice" and the ogre). The teleport back
to the prison - and using the same angry ogre you met at the beginning - was a great touch. Actually,
this room has great attention to detail in general, I especially liked the note in the evidence room.

#11. (d) boyflea's room, "Cult of Drogna" (the Adventure Puzzle with all the plates that teleport you if you have males in the party)
After solving this room it took me way too long to actually NOTICE the damn key...you can barely see it
with that gladiator statue overlapping it. As for the puzzle itself, while I appreciate the source material,
the plates' conditions seemed either very obvious or completely obtuse (I still haven't the slightest idea
what the actual conditions for "Buzz off" or "Dis-Enchanted" are). Still, you get some credit for just
how off-the-wall this room is compared to the rest of the mod.

#10. aaneton's other room (The prison)
A very fitting start to the mod, does a good job of showing off the monster scripting. No puzzles or
challenges so there's not much else to say about this room.

#9. Leki's room (The village, the huge dragon)
Probably the most cinematically impressive room. I wasn't blown away by Leki's animating abilities in
the past (the ghoul's walk looks terribly awkward) but he's clearly improved a lot since then, and the
skeletons and dragon are nearly as well-animated as anything in the original game.
However, there is very little here in the way of actual gameplay...and much of the content seems to be
half-finished, judging by the heavy usage of the temple wall texture.

#8. SpiderFighter's room ("Death, Elemental" (The one where you put the potion on the dead guy))
All the puzzles here are great, if not very difficult. It was a bit jarring that the important rocks
didn't have their own inventory sprites, though I suppose that was the point. The whispers were well
placed, although they sound too human in my opinion. My only real complaint about this room is that
it was rather annoying waiting for those gates to open and close.

#7. John Wordsworth's room, "Tomb of Xanalin Moonbane" (The one with the surprisingly polite necromancer ghost)
Very smoothly designed, has an almost professional feel. The gems are neat. The reprisal damage on the
spiders is unexpected but quickly becomes more of an annoyance than anything else. However, the final
"fight" was excellent.

#6. jKos' room (The flesh eating ogre)
Everything this room has on level 5 is awesome; the scroll of telekinesis is brilliant, as is the puzzle
for poisoning the ogre. I liked the exploding cave-ins. I don't really get the point of the area under the
pits though. The teleporter patterns are a new idea but I can't say I actually enjoyed memorizing them.

#5. Skuggasveinn's room (The one where you build a bridge and pull the key out of a tree with a face)
The bridge with the fountains and the rays of light shining from the windows is beautiful, and it took
me embarrassingly long to figure out that I just needed to look inside the tree. Bridging the first pit
was very smoothly executed, although I found myself clicking very low to the ground as I was afraid
of accidentally throwing the planks down the pit instead.

#4. Ancylus' room, "Hall of Inversion"
Definitely the first time I have seen negative light used well in this game. The level of detail here is
amazing - the torches, the ice lizard, and of course the location of the key. I fully admit to carrying
around the inversion key and the flask for the rest of the game. Despite having basically no puzzles or other
challenges this is one of the most memorable rooms in the ensemble.

#3. Isaac's room, "The Foundry" (You ought to remember this one without any more prompting)
Certainly one of the biggest and most memorable rooms with the sheer number of puzzles, secrets and
props. The effect on the catwalks was neat, and the way you dealt with the healing crystal issue was
perfect. Getting the wardens into position was annoying, and it took forever to figure out I could
actually pick up the beholder eye, but the rest of the puzzles were great.
The huge boiler thingy would have looked really good if it were fully textured. However, the temple wall
texture looks awful on it. But the rest of the environment is superb, the moving parts everywhere are great
(especially the giant bellows) and the noises are good too. The auto-smith modeling and animation isn't too
bad either, and the ghosts are cool (although the "boss fight" to cleanse the foundry is terribly anticlimactic).

#2. Diarmuid's room, "One with Nothing" (Portal)
A fundamental law of video game nature states that if a game exists, someone will eventually come along and
implement Portal's portals in it. In this case, however, the mechanic is used so ridiculously well that I
have to give this room a very high place.

#1. Xanathar's room, "Margonon's Fall" (The glasses with coloured lenses, Violet, the torn diary entries, hallucinogenic mushrooms, the nonograms...)
Figuring out the first nonogram (or rather, the fact that it is a nonogram) was the hardest thing in this whole
mod for me, but at the same time it's pretty fair - in fact I guessed the correct interpretation of the numbers
after a few minutes, but made a stupid mistake implementing it (and didn't notice what I was drawing), and
promptly decided it must have been an incorrect interpretation, leading to trying a bunch of increasingly
ridiculous interpretations before finally trying the right one again. Still one of the best puzzles in my opinion.
The music puzzle is my favourite in the entire game, I particularly appreciated the
concealment of the white key. My only complaint is that you didn't use something more interesting than C major.
The story is also by far the most skillfully done in my opinion (though I would have appreciated better grammar),
and the hallucinogenic mushrooms and wild magic effects are quite amusing.
I also only realized the significance of the name after completing the mod. Twice. D'OH.

edit: I think I should emphasize not to take it as an affront if I ranked your room really low. No matter which order I rank them in, one room HAS to be #22, and one room HAS to be #21. I could've only picked my 10 most favourite or something, of course; this way was just more fun.

[Diarmuid]

Hey thanks for the feedback minmay, glad you appreciated my room so high, but I myself really like many others you ranked a bit low for various reasons, but of course it's a personal opinion.

Just one or two comments:
- we had to pack the whole thing in 100Mb for steam for 22 rooms, so everyone had a limit of 3Mb approx for textures and models. Obviously, some people using less allowed modders like Isaac or Leki to push up their things more, but everyone had to work a lot with stock textures and be creative.
- Elizabeth Greystalk's about 8 (maybe 9 now) years old, so what she did with her father's help is already great!


As for stats, let's start!

In my playthrough (original release, non-patched) I ended up with the following party:
- Level 15 Minautor Axe Fighter
- Level 14 Human Sword Fighter
- Level 14 Lizardman Missile Rogue
- Level 14 Human Fire + Spellcraft Mage
Play time 7h32 (I know the solutions to everything and all secrets placement, but that's still the raw time to complete everything - I just stopped at the 30 arena wins point).
Screenshots of achievements and monster table:

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