Room of the Month - June 2015

[Vismund Cygnus]

Room of the Month is all about showing off your level design for any upcoming hack you may be working on, or perhaps you just wanted to create some fancy room just for the competition, who knows? This is one of the ways to show off anything WIP to the community and get constructive feedback, and maybe just maybe create the Room of the Year.

Rules - Archives

RT-55J won May's competition with some sweet M2-Edits.
[spoiler][/spoiler]



Once again, the Dragonborn has left us to clean up his messes. And so, here are the two entries for this month:
[spoiler=Retroknuckles][/spoiler]
[spoiler=Vismund Cygnus][/spoiler]

Now, get to voting, and more importantly get submitting to Our Dragon Overlord. If there's only two entries again next month you'll all have hell to pay!

[Quietus]

Retro for me. It's the sort of room that makes you want to run through it. :^_^:

[Vismund Cygnus]

The Maridia master is here to criticize!
[spoiler]
Retro, your room has a really nice flow to it, but it's rather vanilla aside from the pipes, which add flair but don't really fit in to the room design itself.

My main criticism, however, is that you used the wrong vanilla slopes. Maridia has two triangular slopes by default; one looks better going into other slopes and walls, the other is better for running onto flat surfaces. The problem is you've used only the first kind of slope which creates some nasty looking transitions. Here's what I mean:
[spoiler][/spoiler]
Here's what I mean, in context with the room (green slopes are correctly used, red slopes incorrectly):
[spoiler][/spoiler]

See what I mean? It looks off in my opinion. Hopefully next time you're using the set you'll take this into consideration.  :^_^:
[/spoiler]

(ps I'm not trying to be mean, just helping the easiest way)

[Retroo]

Thanks  Vismund that helps!  :^_^:

Btw im suprised that only 2 people each month have been submitting pictures  last 3 months.

[Grimlock]

Btw im suprised that only 2 people each month have been submitting pictures  last 3 months.

Well, as someone who has participated in ROTW in the past I can say that by limiting the contest to a once a month event a lot of energy has been lost.  Also, not being able to see what has been submitted until the voting begins really takes a lot of interest away from the contest.  If potential participants see others submit something it brings attention to the contest during the submittal phase.  It also invites comments and drives interaction between forum members.

I have to say I'm pretty disappointed in how ROTM has turned out as the replacement for ROTW.  ROTW has it's shortcomings but it did manage to bring consistent community interaction from all the various game editing interests/groups, SM, M1, MF, and such.  It was a fun thing to check in a few times during the week to see who had submitted a room and read the various reactions.  Now with ROTM there is no interaction during the submittal phase, no reason to even consider it three out of four weeks a month.  Also to complicate it further we now have replaced a simple process of posting a screenshot to enter with a process that involves a middleman.  I'm sure it isn't complicated to submit a room but it does result in replacing some of what I suppose you could call "spontaneous fun" with a sense of "controlled seriousness".

Anyway, that's my personal take on it, ROTM just seems much more lifeless and dry than ROTW ever did.   :cry:  Not to say it couldn't get better, unfortunately at it's current trajectory I don't see much changing in the immediate future.

[Vismund Cygnus]

Also, not being able to see what has been submitted until the voting begins really takes a lot of interest away from the contest.  If potential participants see others submit something it brings attention to the contest during the submittal phase...

...It was a fun thing to check in a few times during the week to see who had submitted a room and read the various reactions.  Now with ROTM there is no interaction during the submittal phase, no reason to even consider it three out of four weeks a month.  Also to complicate it further we now have replaced a simple process of posting a screenshot to enter with a process that involves a middleman...

[spoiler]Apparently one of the main problems we received about RotW in its previous state was that people would look and see a room that was submitted, and think "oh f***, there's no way I can beat that" so the week would roll over to the point where a second person would submit a room just to keep the competition going. In some respects that made it drier than it is currently. Unfortunately if we were to bring back the old system of submitting then we'd have that problem once again. If there was a way to do it that kept some attention on the submitting part of the contest during the course of the month, then I'd be all for it. If you or anyone have any suggestions for that, I'd be open to discussion and probably implementing it. This Room/Asset of the Month is still in sort of a "trial" phase, and as such until we have a solid system in place, I think all of the contest moderators would be happy to have some kind of user input.[/spoiler]

[Kte]

If one could like posts on here, I would like yours, Grimlock, without even thinking!  Quite frankly, ROTM just isn't any fun.  I don't find myself looking forward to anything with it.  I don't get excited to see the submissions and to vote like I used to.  There's so much downtime during the month, and very few people seem to find submitting anything worth it.  Almost all of the fun interaction that we had going on with ROTW has disappeared with ROTM.  The constant competitiveness and interaction amongst forum members was just fun.  There were so many reviews and opinions flying around, and it was even fun to talk to people about their rooms in IRC.  I personally miss ROTW a lot; it was my favorite thing to read and participate in here.  It brought a lot of fun and conversation to this forum and people could use it to gain feedback about their designs.  Most important was that it was frequent.  People were motivated to meet the weekly deadlines rather than losing interest in the very long period of a month.  I agree with Grimlock that the future of ROTM looks dismal, and I think that it adds practically nothing to the forum.

[RealRed]

Not gonna lie, ROTM seems a lot more forgettable than ROTW so far. I'm not even aware that this topic is here unless there's the off chance I see a post in this thread from irc.

It's pretty barren here. Maybe let room submissions build over time, and every 4-6 rooms will be posted so the contests are more geared towards whether or not people have content to show and less towards what day/month it is?

[Quietus]

I too agree that this competition feels all but dead nowadays. Room of the week felt like it always had momentum, and apart from one or two people constantly trying to discuss voting, everybody else seemed to enjoy it.

[Jordan5]

Maybe let room submissions build over time

All adding time has done is decrease submissions. With even more time people would forget about the topic altogether. If by some chance after several months there were enough submissions, the initial entrants would likely have forgotten about their room and no longer be happy with it, no longer wanting it submitted or wanting to change their entry.

Room of the week felt like it always had momentum, and apart from one or two people constantly trying to discuss voting, everybody else seemed to enjoy it.

I think this has shown that ROTW, despite its flaws, is the better way of doing this.