December 2020 Create Competition - Extraterrestrial Research

[MilkyWayWishes]

So after a lengthy and emotionally charged discussion period, ya boi Sharpeye468 and myself have come to a working compromise on the level rankings.

7th place [Click to Show Content]

Ida - Switch Board Operator

A good concept but we felt it ran a bit too long and had too much repetition for its own good, a shrunken down version would be a fun puzzle we think.

6th place [Click to Show Content]

Ida - Bell Socked


Man I do love me some Jezzball and that's what this level felt like, unfortunately it was also a bit too large so you could easily walk around the level outskirts and collect the chips without dealing with rovers too much, a more compressed version with the same amount of chips and rovers would be perfect.

5th place [Click to Show Content]

Chipster - Let the Robot Do the Work


NO, GOD DAMMIT, NO PUT IT BACK, JUST PUSH THE BLOCK, NO GET BACK HERE, JESUS.


This is the kind of level we were expecting the entire competition to be, a frustration of trying to force rovers to do things no sane person would ever try to get a rover to do, and we had an absolute blast playing it.

4th place [Click to Show Content]

Ida - Ok, Shoot!



Short and fairly sweet, the only real issues we had with it was that hiding the second railroad sign implied there would be a third one hidden as well, however once you figure out that's not the case by cooking the level once you can figure out the puzzle pretty quickly after; the other issue was the ending portion which involved corralling a rover towards a door without a helmet which can lead to death.

3rd place [Click to Show Content]

IHNN - Grey Goo Incident


An interesting time based crunch with a familiar theme, there was debate over whether to place this 3rd or 2nd but we decided on 3rd due to how tight the crunches could be at times and the usage of rovers as a semi-random room filler that could be achieved with another mob such as walkers rather than using some of their unique features.

2th place [Click to Show Content]

Will C-S - Ground Delivery

An interesting use of item bestowal and rover mechanics, the only issues were how slow each rover cycle was (could be improved with speed boots for the rover), the somewhat lengthy ending process, and the minor busts that were encountered that skipped some of the level's end.

1st place [Click to Show Content]

Ida - A Range of Rovers


Wowie! (last time I ever use that phrase you can count on it) A level that uses many of the unique features of rovers and doesn't feel like a complete chore to finish, now this is certainly something to behold. Of course the level is a bit finicky at times, however that's due to the mechanics of rovers and not something that could be easily mitigated. Overall we felt that this level was the best display of the rover in the competition and as such is awarded the official Sharp-Moon Medal of Honor.

tl;dr person ranking [Click to Show Content]

1. Ida
   
2. Will C-S
   
3. IHNN
   
4. Chipster
   

You can observe the process of us playing (and skipping to replay viewing) here:








And the levelset bundled together in the order we played them is attached to this post.