The Clock Tower, 2 years later
first, I apologize for the incredibly pretentious and condescending tone scattered throughout the document. my innards briefly attempted to commit sudoku while reading this. perhaps I’ll clean it up later and make it more reader-friendly, but not tonight because it’s late and I’m tired.
after rereading what exactly everything does now, perhaps I’ve been a little hard on myself when it comes to judging the quality of this dungeon concept. there’s a bunch of ideas in here that really aren’t too bad and could be pretty interesting with a little polish. the major recurring issue with my old approach to dungeon design is in the rage phases. there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, it’s just a ton of projectile spam to the point where no one can really tell what’s going on anymore. dodging isn’t an option, it’s just a faceful of death that you’re just supposed to sit there and take. it’s sort of like what you get if you took old feargus’s hardmode behavior and mapped it onto an ice sphere. that’s a terrible approach to design in general.
I can see some pretty big problems for the dungeon design as well, the stasis blast on the doors when they come down won’t stop leeching since they can just camp in the first room instead. plus, there’s 12 minibosses that are all required in order to progress to the final boss. that’s frankly just absurd. the goal of a dungeon should be to create an enjoyable experience, not to create something you think is “hard”. that’s a major flaw with the Clock Tower overall imo, it cares more about being impossibly difficult more than it cares about being actually good.
A lot of the UT’s/ST’s are kinda meh too: the star literally does nothing, the ST armor doesn’t have a clue what it wants to be, and the spell is nearly an inferior parasite spell. the later ones are okay though, maybe I’ll have to suggest them to deca the next time they try to throw together UT’s for a dungeon at the last possible second. I’d recommend something for the fungal cavern, but that releases tomorrow and there’s no time anymore.
also a lot of these sprites are absolutely godawful and I feel bad for defending them in the past. the concepts in my mind look just fine, but when turned into sprite form they fail to live up to my imagination.
lastly, the shades are clearly shoehorned in there in the sloppiest way possible because “dARkNeSs iS CooL”
so yeah, now you know why I dislike the Clock Tower.