Bricks Holiday 4 Commentary

Bricks Holiday IV comments

              I'm not sure what made me organize Bricks Holiday 4. Probably it was uncertainty whether anyone else would be ready ;-)
              I should probably chronicle my thoughts in something vaguely approximating chronological order, so here goes...

              Most of the levels were designed in March 2011 (the only exception being Trivial, which dates much further back), though
              a couple were edited later. I have plenty of experience designing Bricks levels, but it was almost five years at this point since
              I'd last designed really short and easy levels (Hockey and Soccer Champs), and that was definitely showing to begin with.
              Many of my early designs were a bit too long and/or difficult to be very good Bricks Holiday designs (indeed, I ended up
              shelving a lot of those levels - names like Nothing Special, Such a Pity, Snopes, Open Defiance will remain total mysteries
              for the Bricks-playing public, at least for the time being!). Still, it wasn't all doom and gloom; my very first design (after Tri-
              vial, that is) was Gloopy, which in some ways I consider the best of them all for a nice easy competition like this: a short,
              natural, compact, playable design. And around design #7 or so I managed to promise myself that from this point I would
              definitely make short, BH4-worthy levels. Yes, that's why design #7 was named Promise ;-)

              From there it was surprisingly smooth sailing for quite a while, though I did continue to have problems with level length.
              Mosquito is the level that went through the most design changes, the first six or seven (some of them under the name "Lynx")
              being simply too long for a comp like this. (A couple of those early Lynx versions were in fact impossible, which is of
              course even worse than merely being long :p) I had actual problems even solving Tooth Fairy, with an all-too-long initial
              of 217 moves (in the end, I made this level easier by removing one 2x2 brick). Stetson was wayyyy too long, totally
              unacceptable, but I managed to save it by removing a couple bricks and replacing the lower half of the barrier with traps ;-))
              Somewhere around design 40 I started to run out of steam and ideas (despite stealing other designers' ideas a lot!)... this
              is when I designed Inertia and decided to tough it out ;-)

             A number of the levels turned out to have unintended paths: Out of Place, Dandruff and Adding Up. Not that I was clever
   enough to find them in time... I found the correct path in Out of Place just two days before the competition started (I had 21
          until then), and probably would have changed the level except I desperately wanted to get to 46000 ;-) Of course, sometimes
   an unintended path can actually make a level better than it would otherwise be; no real need for changes. In Dandruff I did
             have 14, but overlooked Henru's much simpler, easier 14. (Though I guess that neither Henru or any other player would
             characterise his 14-move solution as being simple and easy to find ;-)) This was, in a way, one of the most surprising levels to
             me. I had expected nearly everyone to pick what I considered the "totally obvious path", leading to either 15 or 16 depending
             on how good a day the player was having. Very nearly nobody did - I think Ahmad and Dominique may have been the only
             two to use it - instead, I was to be overwhelmed by a variety of paths, culminating in Henru's 14.) In Adding Up I had totally
             overlooked a whole complex of paths, first discovered by James; James had great, inventive ideas in other levels as well,
             and I felt a bit sorry he didn't get more records in the end.

             James was far from the only player to show me how sloppy I had been (and how lucky I was not to compete in this one
             myself!) Just a few days into the competition, Eckhard's first submission broke many of my designer records, including totally
             obliterating my Slider Magic. In the end, I was lucky for my designer record not to end up red there! Henru was fighting toe
             to toe (TTT?) with Eckhard for most of the first month (and Johan eventually joined them, of course!) Michael didn't have
             many perfects, but those he did were amazing records - I never expected 35 in Euclid (I had 37, and was stuck at 40 for
             quite a while... incidentally, exactly the same happened to me in Traditional, another bad level for me!) or 41 in Promise,
             and he was also the first to submit 50 in Gloopy. (At the other end, he found a highly interesting 622-move solution to
             Lullaby thatvividly reminded me of my original San!) Many other players impressed me, too - if the first month taught me any
             one thing, it was to respect the hell out of everybody.

             A number of levels had been designed to be tricky. Trivial was an interesting experiment, with quite a few players (including
   Henru!) not discovering the optimal during the first month. No Hovers Club was so tricky I tricked myself with it (I had 44...)
             Soapy worked just as intended (it was named after the 19th century American con man and gangster Soapy Smith in
         what can't really be called a great effort to disguise its nature...) Skylarkiad fooled surprisingly many players, including Johan.
             In Swamp many players guessed there was a simpler path, but in the end only two of them discovered it. Orca tricked
             absolutely everybody one way or another, up to and including me :-)

            A couple levels weren't played very much, especially during the first month - probably owing to their ugly looks. An undisputed
            #1 among these was Quagmire, where the 1/3 record was more than 2x optimal! This is the one level I regret including in
            Bricks Holiday 4 - I really should have made it much shorter and easier :( Apologies everybody - if I ever design another
            Bricks Holiday, I promise there won't be another level like that :) In the end, the first month WR ended up being quite low
            (well below the designer total) due to these unplayed levels, yet it was already clear that UR would be much higher than I
            could ever have guessed.

            During the next two months the records continued to fall. Henru showed me how totally wrong I had been in the beginning of
          Mosquito, and as Johan submitted his second half - much stronger than his already impressive first half - I started to believe
            that 46100 might be possible. Never would have thought that when the competition started, and now it seems almost a
            certainty! The main highlights of Johan's update were his amazing 23 in Mystery Potato and 26 in Flagistan.

By this time I was half expecting new records every time I opened a .brk file, totally regardless of who was sending it. Jyrki
            (who like James had plenty of good ideas but was often a bit sloppy with the execution) found 37 in Nitrogen - at the
            beginning, I thought my 42 in that level was great! Overall though, the third month was much slower than the previous two.
            Yet there was one more major shock in store for me. Mere minutes before the end, when I was already preparing to compile
            everything, Andreas submitted 41 in Hungary!!!!!! This was perhaps the most incredible score in the whole competition, with
            the added nice detail that he took more steps for that level than anybody else. It was a "64 in Perikles... 64... is Kurt joking or
    what?" moment.

            Even so, for all the great efforts of the competitors, a number of designer records remained undiscovered. Some of these were
            expected (such as Chimpan-Five ;-) ) and some were not (I never thought no one would get below 30 in Merthyr Tydfil, and
            the failure of anyone to find 47 in Mid-Sized Dancer or 37 in Trapping Bag was also surprising; in the latter case, Eckhard
            found 36 after the competition!) In Breakfast I expected more players to find 113, though the presence of two different paths
did complicate things of course. In many cases no single player discovered an optimal, and the virtual record went to Franken-
stein.

            Designing 48 levels isn't easy, and more than a bit of the credit belongs to those who supplied me with ideas. Below is my
            official master list of the sources of inspiration for given levels:

            - Trivial = Easy
                      This shouldn't surprise anybody very much ;-)
            - Traditional = Reiki
                      A somewhat unclear case. This obviously has something in common with more than just one level
                     (thus its name!), and I wasn't even thinking of Reiki while designing. But even so, I don't think I'd have
                     designed a level like this if I'd never seen Reiki...
           - Not Again = Carousel
                      Thus its name and placing (Carousel was also #4) - if you noticed the similarity you probably went "oh no,
                      Not Again..."
           - Vowel Harmony = Mu
                      I think this was the very last level I designed. I always did like Mu :-)
           - British Cities = Goldfish Bowl
                     The UK cities series of Oxford, Cambridge and Merthyr Tydfil was very directly inspired by Eckhard and his
                     Goldfish Bowl :)
           - Mid-Sized Dancer = Big Slider Block
                     Even though the sliders here are a lot less of a nuisance :)
           - Throwback = Tuffi
                     Thus its placing as #17. What I'd actually planned was a design inspired by TOMAT, but I ended up with a
                     Tuffi-inspired level instead ;-)
           - Tooth Fairy = Toothache and Stamp (in a way...)
                     In a way only. Really, it was inspired by the general themes of toothy levels and stampy levels rather than any
                     given level in particular.
           - Arctic Adventure = Switzerland (the reversed flag level, not the real flag level)
                     Of course, the reversed flag Switzerland in Hockey Champs was itself inspired by Fire on Ice. I guess Fire on Ice
                     should count as the progenitor of all levels of this type...
           - Machiavelli = Venice
                  Eckhard is right, there's a connection with the other Italian similar-looking 68-move #27 :-)
           - Quagmire = Disorganized
                    Man, did I mess this one up :(
           - Trapping Bag = Shopping Bag
                    Am I hearing cries of "no, what? You serious? Can't be!"
          - Flagistan = Denmark
                    Another very clear case :)
          - Euclid = Dilemma
                    Yes, really, Dilemma, the 164-move horror in Bricks V. That's why Alan's name is on the list of players whose
                    designs I was inspired by. You can see it has an L-shaped master - a theme absolutely everyone associates with
                    Dilemma and Dilemma only - and a keystone. And of course both levels also have magic bricks, except Euclid.
          - Petty Theft = Switching
                    This one doesn't even pretend to be original, thus the name.
          - Orca = Shark
                    Another very, very obvious connection.
          - Inertia = Tilted and Titania
                    The only level directly inspired by more than one level, since Tooth Fairy doesn't really count. I actually set out
                    to create a Tilted/Titania hybrid here.
          - Malformed Rhino = Up
                  The similarity was much more noticeable with the old version of Malformed Rhino, in which most of the now
                  empty squares were full of hovers. I removed those to keep it a manageable length :)
          - Zweizüger = Pleiades
                  I did expect this to be among the harder levels (together with Slider Magic), but I was surprised only 3 players
                solved it. It's just 2 moves after all, and only one of them is at all hard to find :-))