December 2020 Create Competition - Extraterrestrial Research

[Sharpeye]

A Create Competition is a level design contest where anyone can make a level or levels from a given prompt or theme, which are then judged and ranked, with feedback. Whether you're a veteran designer with hundreds of levels or have never made a level before in your life, your submission is welcome here!

This competition requires use of everyone's favourite CC2 addition, the rover. Time to get creative with it! Admittedly an offshoot of last month's ideas, but I wanted to see what kind of creations could be used to utilize the rover creature to its fullest untapped potential. Simply put, add a rover, make it the main part of the level and go from there. The rover must be doing something and not just idly sitting in a walled off section or something of that nature.

To keep judging fair and balanced, I'm enlisting the help of my ex-son, Mrs. Milky Way Wishes (Sickly Silver Moon) to ensure a large variety of level preferences are used when considering what has been submitted.

Some administrative details:

• Submit your level(s) to either Sharpeye468#9238 or A Sickly Silver Moon#4836 on Discord or by PM on the forums before January 10th. Extensions will be granted on a case for case basis depending on who bribes me enough money, or if one is needed because there are creative ideas flowing.
  
• There is no limit to the amount of levels you can submit, but only your best 4 levels will be considered for ranking, so please specify which 4 you want considered in case you submit multiple over the time period.
  
• Please ensure that these are new levels. I don't want to play nonsense from currently existing packs, or anything that was submitted for CC2LP1. Inspiration from the levels may be used (as I don't think there are too many options for these darn things).
  
• Levels should be solvable and replays are required.
  
• I will save looking and spoiling the levels for myself until the day of the judging process in which Mx. Moon and I will be going through the levels in a collaborative method, most likely through a discord stream.
  
• If you have any additional questions, don't hesitate to ask either directly or in this thread.
  

[Sharpeye]

Reminder that there is another week or so left for submissions (unless someone requests an extension!) I look forward to seeing everyone's designs!

[MilkyWayWishes]

Someone has requested a one week extension in order to finish level designs, as such all entries must now be in before Sunday January 17th. I look forward to seeing everyone's levels!

[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.