Explore Castle

by Shuvack
created Jul 7, 2015
Leaderboards
461 views | 777 downloads

Rating
/ 8 votes

Difficulty
/ 3 votes


map notes
Ok, so here is my first dustforce map, as such - it is probably very lacking in some aspects, but I am willing to improve it over time with careful polish.

  So basically this map has low amounts of hazards and a big open space, the point of this weird design was to make the player explore the level and find his optimal route where he doesn't break his combo by cutting off dusted parts by the one already cleaned, it takes several minutes to clean the whole level without making too many mistakes, while I designed it bearing in mind possibility of players choosing unusual routes, some may be more rewarding than others, and some might be improved to make other interesting approach viable. I don't expect to turn this into a trend, but I wanted to make something interesting, something I would try playing myself.


Notes:
  Caves might be kind of a weak part, they are rather straight forward and don't really support right-to-left approach.
  I didn't put in a music track, as such a long level made me want to have an actual playlist running, even though I like the ost.
  It's recommended to ignore chains and timer in first several playthroughs, just run around, explore and practice, even though it's a hard habit to break from all the others dustforce levels.
  I'm open to fix'n'tweaks suggestions, I don't want my work to be broken on top of being weird.
  I hope you still enjoy it, even if you don't, I know I do. Peace and love all.

15 comments

lightningy
said Jul 7, 2015
Way too big, way too much dust. There's dust in places that should be, and too many "rooms" of dust and not much else. Doesn't feel like I'm playing dustforce when I'm playing this map.
lightningy
said Jul 7, 2015
That dust above zero is just plain bad. There's also some difficult in differentiating between bg and foreground. http://i.imgur.com/Ev3vUwm.png
Shuvack
said Jul 7, 2015
Thank you really much for the comments.

I thought giving dust in those holes would piss some off, I'd remove it as now I don't see why I had put it there in the first place.

With the backgrounds I can fix up pretty much the whole castle part, making walls bright concrete, in the dungeons it would be hard to find a gritty dark bg, I could change the platforms though.
Caves will need major tweaks overall, I still try to figure out how to make them fluent and not straight boring.

Way too big, way too much dust. I know it's big, that's kind of why I put there "exploration", "experimental" tag, might as well add "huge". It's not really in my plans to change the whole map as I WANTED it to play different than dustforce as written in the description.
The dust overload was supposed to leave people room for experiments, by the rule better too much than too few, if there are places when even in the long runs feet don't like to meet the ground to collect that pesky dust, that's where I want to get rid of it, so that there are still good deals of it to run around without breaking the combo, but not where it would have been better without it.


I am grateful for the feedback lightningy, and while it's not up to your taste, I don't know how more obvious my description of this map playing different could have been though. I am taking notes of your words and will trying to collect other opinions to make a bigger polish instead of constant rushing updates.
edited Jul 7, 2015
Morelia
said Jul 7, 2015
I understand the premise that went into the making of this map, but the end result doesn't feel very engaging to me. Figuring out the route in such a long and confusing map just seems more tedious than challenging.
TheDarksideofSnow
said Jul 7, 2015
The map is nicely decorated and very large. It's lacking flow though and the contrast between fore- and background isn't great enough to make out the apparent shape of the map most of the time. Another problem are the parts that are impossible or nearly impossible to climb up with Dustman. I had to resort to using awkward ledge jumps and supering just for an air charge. Rest assured, your map isn't shit; at least for your first map.

Now if you tell me where I missed dust in my replay, I'll give you 5 hearts ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
indapop
said Jul 7, 2015
I watched but I couldn't spot it. Then again its possible that you missed an entire room.
Hunfinho
said Jul 7, 2015
1:50
Antinumeric
said Jul 7, 2015
Hunfinho your run is amazing and slightly tragic
Tinker
said Jul 7, 2015
Pretty and fun to amble around, but you really need to use a fog trigger to differentiate the background. It would spruce it up really well and show off how much effort you put into making that, too.
Antinumeric
said Jul 7, 2015
TimelessGun is that you?
ratingus
said Jul 7, 2015
I found it enjoyable to put some music and just go around the map, but at the end of the day its just mindless dusting, not much to it. As people have mentioned, its hard to differentiate between background and foreground, which can be quite annyoing.

Here are some other exploration type maps if you feel like making another map similar to this one.
http://atlas.dustforce.com/4864/dustless-realm
http://atlas.dustforce.com/4255/exploration
Meiya
said Jul 7, 2015
The ride never ends. Also missed dust http://i.imgur.com/VbB2UYY.jpg
Jvcpro
said Jul 8, 2015
I thought it was really cool, but wayyyy too long. With a map this long players lose the sense of precision in a map attempting to perfect every bit of it because there is just no way to go 8 minutes without mistakes. If you're going to make a map this long it should be super linear or atleast familiar because players aren't going to want to spend the effort not only routing it but perfecting it. A map this long should be one or the other. You could check out Ted's "The Forest" or doicms "The City" for examples of really good long maps. There is a clear path so that players can worry about the countless mistakes they will make instead of figuring out where to go as well as the familiarity. Shorten this up to maybe 3 minutes tops and it would be spectacular and fun to play though!

The other important thing would be to make sure you make rooms easy to find, because not being able to find what you're missing is just obnoxious.
Shuvack
said Jul 18, 2015
Ok, I was out for some time and I think I'm ready to finally fix the map.

I plan to dump the whole cave system as a whole as it's just a linear, boring and useless part that makes it unnecessary long. I will also change the brick platforms at the dungeon part to make it more clear. Too bad that the lighting systems won't grant me the planned results, but messing around and obviously getting carried away while making the map distracted me from focusing on gameplay. I will throw away the dust from rather silly places and let it be where you can gather it smoothly. I will also look at some of the longer replays to see which places were the most unreasonable to complete. I'd replace the existing version with a new one but that would be rather not nice for those who were trying to perfect it.

As for dustman being hard to operate- honestly I only tested the map using him, so I'm surprised that he's the one causing problems, there is only one tricky part where you have to climb the tower in the middle- in that case [SPOILER] There is a wall on the right that you can jump on, climb, dash from it and proceed to jump mid air to reach the spot on the left[SPOILER END], if it's too weird to figure out I can make it just ordinary climb.

Thanks to everyone commenting and playing, and sorry for the late action. I'll do the things mention and reupload it, cheers everyone.
Shuvack
said Jul 18, 2015
After a few hours of meddling with it- I announce that new version is on.
http://atlas.dustforce.com/5177/explore-castle2

This version will remain either intact or have a fog applied if I figure out how to retrieve it on editor.
Reason being some players having actually SS'ed it in a beautiful showcase of skill, that I can't bring my self to remove.

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