Random Placement Mine (what if an Emerald Mine levelset is only made with the random placement tool?) - 80 levels!

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RAP
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Joined: Sat Jun 19, 2004 6:44 pm

Random Placement Mine (what if an Emerald Mine levelset is only made with the random placement tool?) - 80 levels!

Post by RAP »

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Self-explanatory on what the title is about, 80 levels that are made just using the random placement tool from the Rocks'n'Diamonds level editor.

There's only two exceptions of randomization, the player and the exit, which the former is always located at the top-left section of the level, and the latter is at the bottom-right section of the level.

Why in the Emerald Mine engine? I've been more specialized and solidified in playing levels made in Emerald Mine, learning the quirks and oddities that are more predictable than Rocks'n'Diamonds, and I've been playing more and more Emerald Mine levels over the years, and even making some levelsets that I have yet to release, but fortunately Random Placement Mine is one of those instances that I'm finally releasing! This doesn't require any special artwork, but it would be ideal to play it with artwork that includes Emerald Mine Club special elements.

Yes, this means it also retains the level dimensions that all the other Emerald Mine Club levelsets have, 64 by 32. The only exceptions is that the amount of gems needed exceeds 255, which I don't think that was a thing at all in all of the other Emerald Mine Club levelsets at all. The other one is the naming scheme, since all other levels in the Emerald Mine Club levelsets just say the level number; I wrote down the name of the levels, and sometimes explicit actions the player needs to do for certain levels, so you don't need to guess whether or not you needed all the gems.

Why make this levelset? Thought it would be a novel concept to restrict myself by the random placement tool. Also, because I thought it would be better than playing countless repetitive random levels in countless levelsets in the Emerald Mine Club, since there's definitely levels that I made that I couldn't find in the Emerald Mine Club levelsets, saying as someone who played a lot of those levelsets, oof.

It turns out that it was harder to squeeze out 80 unique levels from it, each one being simple but distinct enough from each other to make it unique to play through. I first started this project on 2022 January, and made the first 60 levels, but then stopped. Then to help me actually push it into finishing earlier on 2023 February, I bothered to make a spreadsheet of what objects I used so I can easily see and visualize what objects haven't been used, and it helped.

Here's the spreadsheet of 80 levels, .ods, an Open Document Spreadsheet:
Random Placement Mine object presence.ods
(14.7 KiB) Downloaded 187 times
Making all 80 levels, did some playtesting, tweaking stuff whether it there's levels that need the difficulty to be reduced, or the amount of gems required tweaked; sometimes I had to change the concept partially to make it more interesting or less tedious for players to go through, since the intended time for a successful run is less than 5 minutes, which each level averaging from a few minutes to maybe an hour or two depending on player skill, as I did not use the save and load feature intentionally to make the levels reasonably difficult but fair. It is fortunate that I pushed on and it took a week to do so, no more procrastinating!

Here's the levelset along with solution tapes:
random_placement_mine.zip
(143.65 KiB) Downloaded 190 times
Would appreciate feedback or thoughts on this. I'm not sure if I can made a second levelset based on Random Placement Mine, because I feel I exhausted a lot of the ideas even with the spreadsheet help. Maybe a levelset just based on the final level, level 80, but that might be a strong stretch whether I can make unique levels or just a grab bag of random stuff.
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