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The Foundry Roundtable Episode 35: Riddle Me This
drogyn1701
Member Posts: 3,606 Media Corps
Welcome to the Foundry Roundtable, a weekly podcast dedicated to Foundry missions, mission building and other UGC issues starring Foundry authors Drogyn1701, Markhawkman, Hippiejohn and Greendragoon (absent this week) with guest Bazag.
We're on iTunes! Subscribe to our podcast by going to https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/foundry-roundtable/id666311364?mt=2
Listen to it here, here and here:
Subjects:
News: Foundry Featured Episode Series and Challenge #8 Playing Begins
Voth in the Foundry = Possible
Tech Topic: Puzzles
Has Cryptic been too heavy handed with exploit fixes?
What music do you listen to whilst in the Foundry?
Missions:
The Iconian Connection by @TFR_MACO_Specialist (mattjohnson)
Homesick Heroes by Amahood
Challenge Mission: Bloodstained Mirror by isthisscience
Other Notes:
isthisscience has since fixed the issue preventing Hippie and Baz from finishing his mission. Also here's the playlist I mentioned http://grooveshark.com/playlist/Female
+Metal/89385261
If you have a topic you?d like to see us cover or would like to be a guest-host, e-mail us at FoundryRoundtable@live.com or follow us on Twitter: @FoundryRoundtab
We're on iTunes! Subscribe to our podcast by going to https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/foundry-roundtable/id666311364?mt=2
Listen to it here, here and here:
Subjects:
News: Foundry Featured Episode Series and Challenge #8 Playing Begins
Voth in the Foundry = Possible
Tech Topic: Puzzles
Has Cryptic been too heavy handed with exploit fixes?
What music do you listen to whilst in the Foundry?
Missions:
The Iconian Connection by @TFR_MACO_Specialist (mattjohnson)
Homesick Heroes by Amahood
Challenge Mission: Bloodstained Mirror by isthisscience
Other Notes:
isthisscience has since fixed the issue preventing Hippie and Baz from finishing his mission. Also here's the playlist I mentioned http://grooveshark.com/playlist/Female
+Metal/89385261
If you have a topic you?d like to see us cover or would like to be a guest-host, e-mail us at FoundryRoundtable@live.com or follow us on Twitter: @FoundryRoundtab
The Foundry Roundtable live Saturdays at 7:30PM EST/4:30PM PST on twitch.tv/thefoundryroundtable
Post edited by drogyn1701 on
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Comments
My character Tsin'xing
Keep in mind that there's a character limit on in-game mission reviews, which severely limits the level of specificity in one's criticism. I, like you, recently played amahood's "Homesick Heroes" and commented in my review that the dialogue could use a lot of work, which, unfortunately, was about as much detail as I could give without bumping into the character limit and/or removing my other comments on that mission.
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
The question about which music you're listening to while playing or doing foundry is also a fun one... It might sound strange but I usually play without any sound or music what so ever. This forces me working a bit more with my eyes.
I call it, the Stoutes paradox.
When playing I usually listen to either STO's own soundtrack or a mix of music from various Trek episodes and movies, but while in the Foundry I also prefer no background music or other sound. I've found that, especially when writing or tweaking dialogue, the fewer distractions, the better.
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
My character Tsin'xing
Yeah the review box doesn't lend itself to in-depth feedback. But I think that even if you were to simply tell me that my dialogue needed work that would be more useful than just saying "bad writing" because it would give me a specific place to improve. I'd look at that and interpret that "The reviewer was ok with my plot and story structure (assuming you don't mention those elsewhere in the review), but feels the dialogue needs improvement. ok I'll go do a pass on the dialogue." If you say "bad writing" I don't really know where to start.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2au0gvfByyk
I'm a hippie.
I forget things.
Distracted easily. Never expect me to remem ...
OOOOOOOOOOhhhhhhhhhh Doughnuts !
I call it, the Stoutes paradox.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I am with Stoutes, I think authors demanding nerfs hurts the community and it looks like it's our fault.
I wish social zones were not nerfed. I'm not a dev and I don't advocate for them, Making a mission on a social map would be a great way to start out as an author. I know the devs are generous with the player base, free ships etc and a truly f2p game.
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
What "Bad Writing" to me is something people put down for something they don't like but they don't know what it is. There may be something about the writing they didn't like but rubbed them the wrong way so they just use this term... that or they just don't like it or you and just use the term to make the author doubt themselves.
MUSIC:
The first thing I listen to when working in the Foundry is podcasts that are about the Foundry. Mission reviews/tips and tricks all inspire me to push what I can. But when there are no Foundry Podcasts to listen to, I listen to Pandora.
I listen from Johnny Cash, to Tech N9ne, Linkin Park, to just about anything. Anything thats not Gospel, boy/girl bands, and some people that just rub me the wrong way. I just enjoy "banging out" to music while I work in the Foundry. The Silence scares me lol
@Rellimtime82 - Foundry Author
Silence... is an underappreciated beauty..
I call it, the Stoutes paradox.
I don't know that authors are asking for nerfs as much as them just fixing the core issue. Seeing as we've still got an exploit on the top ten list in game this did nothing so there's my problem right there. Also I don't see why they just can't ban people from the foundry who make these things so they don't have to jump to these nerfs right away. From what I heard Neverwinter immediately put the ban hammer to exploit makers over there and pulled the missions, where as STO is known for letting exploits go on for quite some time (like the famous console clickie that went unfixed for over a year...) Cryptic just needs to take a harder stance with players who exploit the foundry instead of saying "Oh naughty naughty you" and then making "fixes" that end up affecting genuine missions as well while exploiters as far as I know don't get banned, their missions just become useless. Even then they still have access to the tool to try something else to exploit the foundry.
Also while I haven't made a mission in a while, when I did I tend not to listen to music, same as when I'm playing. I was always so focused on what I was working on in the foundry as I would spend all day working on a mission that I didn't want the distraction. Same goes for reviewing and playing missions, I want all my attention on that so I just leave the in game track on.
Now if I somehow end up going boring grinding like in STFs, I'll put on my Pandora or iTunes.
I use social-zone dialog in two of my missions, but in both cases it is fairly brief (only a handful of dialog boxes each). One of them is in my still-in-development "Valley of the Shadow II". The other is in my newly re-remastered "Ghosts of War, Part III" which also has two mid-mission returns to sector space (the social-zone dialog taking place one of these).
I'm not really worried about it being hurt by this new exploit fix though, because one of the very reasons I added these sector-space breaks in the first place is to break up a mission that will now clock in at well over an hour anyway, because I've added a new subplot to it with three new maps. (The other reason was artistic, to separate the mission into distinct Romulan, Klingon and Cardassian "sections", each with its own door in the appropriate part of the galactic map, to give the mission more of an epic, galaxy-spanning feel to it.)
Re: Puzzles
Two of my puzzles are worth a mention. One is in the very first map of "Ghosts of War, Part I", which is actually designed as a space puzzle. Off the top of my head I can't think of any other missions that have space map puzzles (by which I mean puzzles made with space objects, not just, say, a garden-variety dialog puzzle that happens to be on a space map). By and large, in most missions I've played the rule of thumb tends to be that space maps are for combat, and ground maps are for puzzles (and more combat).
The other one is one you mentioned in your review of "Valley of the Shadow I" a couple of months back. There, I originally tried to challenge the viewer by giving four possible "keys" to the puzzle, with only one being the correct one. One key was a mathematical problem, another was a chemical property found in any Periodic Table, a third was derived from Trek canon, and the fourth was just something I pulled out of my TRIBBLE$ (obviously, this was not the correct one).
The idea was that figuring out which key was the right one would be the trick (this could have been inferred by the available options in the first stage of the puzzle); once the player accomplished that, solving the rest of the puzzle would be relatively easy. Well, suffice it to say, it didn't work out that way. You guys didn't get it, and neither did AdmiralMurphy or Ooiue from Foundry Files, or some of the in-game review comments I've gotten, so finally I just nerfed the puzzle by getting rid of all the false keys.
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
My character Tsin'xing
Dino-mite!
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
Jurassic Trek anyone?
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sKVrl6oP0vc/UBXGSo4DmfI/AAAAAAAAAhc/PF8Wqm58QfQ/s1600/doingthehappydance.gif