[4604910] Trial of Radiance

[sterile flower]

[Puzzle-Solving, Traditional, Boss Battle, Mapless/Ringless]
You must use heat and light to your advantage if you hope to survive long enough to find the treasures hidden in this frigid cavern. Master ice and flame to claim the Ice Diamond from the Keeper!

After a little break, I'm back with my first Coldfang Grotto theme dungeon 🙂 This one is all about heat and light. You use torches to create some radiant heat around them (sunlight), and activate crystals which shine beams of light which be can redirected by other crystals and melt things a long ways away. There are 3 hidden rings, hinted at by one of the Tattle Totems. Without these, the boss fight is significantly more difficult, but still possible.

Would love to hear some thoughts after you've tried it out, in particular - was the Clutch Claw room too painful? Puzzles too hard? Did you find the rings? How was the boss?

Thank you in advance, and stay warm! 🙂

[north igloo]

I liked the dungeon, a fair challenge, BUT too much freezing on the boss room if you dont find the ||anti-freeze ring|| like i did not. Would not change it tho, the eye clearly says so, i was advised yet went straight there.

[empty lance]

On F1 in the left room, how are you meant to get the heart container in the top right and also get back? The bottom of the stairs lead directly into water and I can't seem to fire the ice boomerang in any way that freezes the water to let me out. I always drown when I get too close to the bottom of the stairs.

[sterile flower]

It’s a little more finicky than I’d prefer. You can do it from the bottom edge of the stairs

But it might be too precise

So I can just pop some perm ice there

[sterile flower]

Hehehe yeah I think it’d be a nightmare without the rings

[sterile flower]

Thank you both for playing it and sharing your thoughts!

[sterile flower]

made some updates - there is now ice at the bottom of those stairs, and I added another tattle totem just before the boss drop that reveals a way to backtrack in case you missed the rings

[brisk turret]

I did not manage to get this chest

Really cool level. It took me an annoying amount of time to register the unlit wall torch in one of the later rooms I walked around that moat so many times 😦

Last room lagged a lot but I managed to beat it somehow, probably due to all the hearts and rings. This might be a problem on my end since it feels like a lot of people upload levels that run really bad on my end and I assume it is fine on theirs 🤷‍♂️

[sterile flower]

||that little ice shard in the water there is inidicating something invisible. there is an invis bridge between the two banners on the walls||

[sterile flower]

that also took Madalee a while to notice, i think ill just make it a floor torch. its the only one in the dungeon and an unneccessary difference

thanks for playing it and the feedback!

[eternal pine]

aight playing it now

torch stuff immediately interesting; very good intro to the mechanic

why sunlight here? it seems weird considering the light mechanics to have sunlight for decor purposes

this room is just random luck with enemy ai and its rather annoying

also why is it mapless

it just hiders navigation

free heart crystal, interesting

[eternal pine]

again gonna reiterate this should probably be rails

its used in other places like here, why not there?

this room as a whole was pretty cool, but rather annoying to navigate mapless

this would all be so cool to look at on the map
sadly there is not a map

finally

still dont see why it has to be mapless until this point

this couldve fit up there, it didnt need to be a long ahh corridoor 💀

another random gap 😭

[eternal pine]

nvm i just realized that was the whole crystal reflection thing

very interesting usage of crystals in that case

been kinda sad whenever ive gotten a heart container honestly, thought they'd be rings

couldnt there have just been more ring choice?

these freezeslide spawners are SO incredibly annoying when youre trying to time a chest and they spawn every 0.1s

..And its just another heart container.

what

boss was easy enough (didnt get the antifreeze ring and never got frozen anyway)

cool dungeon, cool mechanics, didnt overstay its welcome too much

[sterile flower]

Thanks for playing it!

[sterile flower]

Did you catch the hint about using the shield? The room is much easier if you redirect them with blocks

[eternal pine]

they'd still respawn every 2s

[sterile flower]

It could have fit if I rearranged rooms but the massive boss room with side halls for the freezlide launchers got in the way, I didn’t want to move it all lol

I mean the crab room

[eternal pine]

oh yeah i forgot it'd get taken into that room

[sterile flower]

But yeah the respawning freezlides in the big water room are maybe a bit too much. It is very annoying to try to get the chest if you are doing it before the room is lit up, but after you hit the crystals the freezlides die before reaching you mostly

There were 3 rings in total, the two ice ones and the water damage reduction one. Sounds like you didn’t find them all though?

[sterile flower]

|| This was a subtle hint to get that chest, plus the matching wall flags across from each other. The ice crystals are an invisible bridge between that gap leading right to the chest. ||

[eternal pine]

oh

did NOT get that

[eternal pine]

they dont cause theres a spawner right next to the chest

[eternal pine]

i got the grip and damage redux

[sterile flower]

|| at the big chest where you get the fire boomerang, you can go left along the cliff side to reach the third ring ||

[sterile flower]

I’ll likely adjust that then. It’s annoying enough to raise the sunken chest without being harassed lol

[untold dawn]

really cool dungeon really like the lighting gimmic 🙂 will steal for sure someday

[worthy plover]

really great dungeon. I usually prefer non-linear stuff but this was just so absurdly well made

great ideas all around and everything was very polished

and it had some exploration aspect to it as well because even though the dungeon is linear, the rooms are very big and full of stuff

[sterile flower]

Thank you very much, I’m glad you liked it 🙂

[faint terrace]

This was a really cool dungeon, I had a lot of fun with it

[torpid osprey]

I think this is my favourite dungeon in the game rn

[sterile flower]

I'm happy you are enjoying it, thank you!

[torpid osprey]

ofc

it's very clever

I'll probably replicate tying light with stuff like torches when I decide to use the melting mechanic since that's so much easier to understand

[sterile flower]

Definitely steal it! Would love to see it in more levels 🙂

[torpid osprey]

I just wish you could draw sunlight in more interesting shapes

[sterile flower]

yeah had to work around that in some spots. would be cool if it smart-connected itself to adjacent light spots

[torpid osprey]

absolutely

[eternal pine]

julian rejected that fsr

it'd be great though

[torpid osprey]

unfortunate, I think that hinders sunlight to being purely gameplay useful

[sterile flower]

Ehh, I would like it but the limitation also creates some opportunity for clever uses too

[hollow jewel]

so glad I got to play this finally. it was worth the wait.

pretty flawless dungeon. the challenges were fair, though the fact all the heart crystals were crystals rather than fragments felt very unnecessary. I liked collecting all the hidden stuff but it did trivialize the fight at the end. the rings were a great help, I wouldn't have gone into the fight without them. but if I had like 4 less heart crystals for that fight it would have felt more tense and impactful. that said I did like the fight a lot!

I wish the game still had featured dungeons bc this seriously deserves to be featured. it's so fun and creative, and the way you used the light, crystals, braziers, and even terrain parts (to cast and reflect light) was somehow completely intuitive. you used the parts to create your own unique set of mechanics that stayed consistent and easy to understand and utilize for the whole dungeon. that's the kind of stuff I want to see more of.

using the parts that exist to make all new, higher layer mechanics, through the consistency and repetition of the specific ways you used those parts. very inspiring!

[sterile flower]

Thank you so much 🙂

It’s so hard to know about heart crystals and boss difficulty. I wanted to have a good number of secrets, and you never know if someone is gonna go out of their way to collect them all or just grab the ones they see readily

[hollow jewel]

definitely better to err on the side of too easy. but I think it's safe to reduce the rewards to heart fragments (at least most of them), especially since one of the chests was a fairy.

at first I was surprised to get a whole crystal from a chest, but eventually it became kind of annoying 😅 like, I want to be a completionist but I don't want to make the whole dungeon a cakewalk

a good metric would be to check how difficult the dungeon is if you go through it without any extras. or without heart crystals but all the rings. or with all the crystals but no rings

though with longer dungeons like this that is ofc very time consuming to test