Sendy Dash- Genious!!

[Dustin]

Hi
Recently I started playing Sendy's games and I just wanted to say that some of the caves are genious!! Fantastic ideas, and all with only the classical elements! My favorites of SD1:

#24: A very detailed and funny voodoo puzzle!

#27- These magic wall puzzles are quite amazing! Just the time limit is a bit short, I think.

#37- I've never seen such an idea before- using the Growing Wall as a timer so that you have to collect the diamonds very fast! I haven't made it through this one yet- I always miss 2 diamonds at least...

#42 (upper half) Another funny puzzle! The lower half... well I don't know how this one could possibly be solved...

#47: Is there any cave before in which a diamond must be converted into a rock? Not very hard, but a very funny level!

Just wanted to say that ;D

Cheers Dustin

[Sendy]

Hi, Sendy here, 6 years late, but there you go

Thanks for your compliments. I'm glad you had fun. Level 42, the bottom part IS possible, but it's ridiculously hard. You need to savestate all the time and exploit quirks in the boulder physics.

There was an update I put out for SD1 that was on my website, but it got pulled by an angry ex before I could back it up. I have all the SD files somewhere on my computer, but very disrganized. There was an almost finished SD4 with custom graphics.

Anyway, I'm thinking of getting back into Boulderdash sometime soon. First thing I want to do is re-issue the SD series, but with some of the more stupid design choices (like the crazy time limits on some levels) removed.

In the meantime, try SD2, I tried to make easier levels in that one

[LogicDeLuxe]

You need to savestate all the time

Very bad and unfair design, imho. A good Boulder Dash should be playable on a C64 without a freezer.
Somewhere here in the forum, it was suggested that you shouldn't consider a cave done before you can beat it 3 times without savestates.

and exploit quirks in the boulder physics.

I would guess that every second Boulder Dash game on the C64 does this one way or another. Thus that would be generally considered valid game design here, I guess.
I did that a lot too. And even Boulder Dash 3 did this.

[Sendy]

Oh, don't get me wrong, I could complete the level without savestates three times in a row, I tested all my levels like this (it was someone else's advice I read), but because I knew all the tricks and designed the last part of that level around them, I could just whizz through it.

So fair and predictable, but not really fun, at all, unless you were me. I've long since forgotten the solution, so I got to experience it how anyone else would - as a blind maze of savestating

If I ever re-release the levelset, that part will go. I've learned a lot about level design in 10 years. Back then it seemed the trend was that if you were making games for emulated systems, you could make them super hard and have the player save after every succesful move.

These days, I'm interested in fluid gameplay. I think because the homebrew scene has blown up so big that people are actually playing game edits and new C64/Speccy games on the original hardware or cartriges, there's more a focus on making them fun, as opposed to showcasing "too clever for their own good but not fun" level layouts. And Hall of Mirrors' 2nd half was a prime example of this kind of thing.

Oh yeah, and this being 10 years old. That makes me feel REALLY old. I'm releasing a platform game for the ZX spectrum soon. 2D Platform games and others like Boulderdash seem to be so much more popular now. It's a good time to be alive and into game design!

[Dr Guru]

Hi Sendy,

welcome back!!!

Before I started to design my own caveset, I had a deeper look at what other people had come up with. Your caves were especially inspirational, both in their extremely clever ideas and some design phenomena that I have decided to avoid E.g. one design rule I have come up with is not to combine "dexterity caves" with "puzzle caves", as it is not very nice to have to repeat a long hard run of joysticks acrobatics again and again just to arrive at the puzzle you actually want to solve.

That said, again, your puzzle ideas to me belong to the absolute cream of all boulderdash caves every designed in the whole universe.

Also, as you had been away for aeons even when I arrived, I have always counted you as legendary rather than a living person...

Dr Guru