UPDATE:

Wow! Well over NINE HUNDRED people played the dungeon! That's a lot more than I expected! Thank you to all of the players and key-givers for helping make this a successful event! And, as always, a big thanks to SErVER51 for creating the Dungeon Sandbox that makes things like this possible. 😎

I will be handling the bonus Easter Egg GA later today. I'm still determining some options. I'll update this thread with more info very soon, and will post the winner here as well as ping them in one of their own GA threads to ensure that they see it. If the winner doesn't respond in 48 hours, I move on to a second one, and so forth until the prize is claimed.

Misiu! Congrats! You're the Easter Egg GA winner!

Update: Misiu got back to me and selected her prize from the list! Congrats again!

Running stats:

• Number of people who have entered the dungeon: 922 (Wow!)
• Number of people who have completed the dungeon: 287
• Number of people who have found 100% of the treasure: 164 (SErVER51 upgraded the leaderboard! Thanks!!!)
• Number of verified people who have found the Easter Egg: 187

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All right, all of you smartasses (I have been laughing my butt off at all of the "placeholder" commentary...y'all are hilarious), the time is finally here. Welcome to...

Grez's Halloween 2019 Dungeon Adventure!

That's right, instead of a regular ol' train, you get to play an adventure game created with SErVER51's Dungeon Sandbox! As you play through the adventure, you'll find treasure chests with loot that will link you to invite-only SteamGifts GAs.

I had done a similar event earlier (back in February of this year), and learned a lot from it. So, I really pulled out the stops on this one and put in as much content as I could before my deadline hit. Some quick notes:

• Roughly 35 NPCs with which to interact
• Over 400 individual graphics (many of them custom) were used in its construction
• Fun sound effects from time to time - make sure that you have your speakers/headphones on!
• Several cases where accessibility to the next part of the dungeon is plot/action-dependent
• There is an Easter Egg in the dungeon (bonus GA -- see details at bottom of thread)
• Almost double the surface area of the previous dungeon; max grid size is 100X100, and while I didn't use all of it, I did use most of it 🤓
• Approximately 10X the number of events compared to the previous dungeon
• Over 350 hours of development & resource acquisition time

Here's how it works

• You must be at least level 1 to participate in the GAs (but you can play the dungeon if you'd like no matter what your level). Don't complain, buster -- that's a pretty low bar. I want as many people as possible to be able to play, but also want to filter out the tendency for unregistered wins. Ain't nobody got time for that.
• There are GAs scattered through the dungeon, and they are all in treasure chests
• You need to explore the dungeon to find them all
• Some parts of the dungeon (most of them, actually) are only accessible by finding keys to unlock doors, switches to raise gates or activate portals, objects to give to NPCs, or riddles to solve
• The deeper you explore in the dungeon, the better the GAs become
• This time around, all GAs will be listed as treasures, so you'll know if you found them all
• Spoiler alert: there is a final treasure room, and almost 50% of the GAs are in there! It's a virtual orgy of treasure! It's your reward for having solved the entire adventure, so stick with it...there's some pretty good stuff in there!

There are 121 GAs in total throughout the dungeon. As mentioned earlier, the more obstacles you pass, the better on average that the GAs become. Don't exit the dungeon (via the exit portal -- it's obvious and looks different from the regular portals) if you are still looking for treasures! Once you exit, you'll get your current stats, and to re-enter, you'll have to start at the beginning (that's just how the Dungeon Sandbox works). Speaking of treasures, I want to thank some people. I provided 96 GAs (originally, it was 85, but I got crazy last night to make the treasure room look like I wanted and bought a few more 😆), which means that 25 of the GAs in here were graciously donated by other people. A big "thank you" to D3D (DripleD), seNs, Hiro, nazamout, c_e_e_b_e_r_s, and B{+}mbakl@ts for their contributions to the event!

The GAs will run for three weeks, meaning that they end mid-day on November 1st (All Hallow's Day), US Central time. That will give you lots of time to complete the adventure and just enjoy it without feeling rushed. I'll leave the dungeon open after the GAs are done in case anyone wants to continue exploring or use it for ideas for their own event.

Advice

• Step on every square of every room -- the automap only adds tiles for square you've actually stood upon, not everything you see, so if you want an accurate map (and I have this dungeon pretty well intertwined, so believe me that having an accurate map will help), you need to run around the entire room when you enter one. You can't die, so there's no danger in cruising quickly through the whole room.
• Talk to every character (by clicking on them)! You can't die, so you can do this without fear. Most characters want something from you in return for giving you something else, pressing a hidden switch/button, or moving out of your way. They will always tell you what they want if you speak to them.
• Doors show up as gaps on the map -- this can be kind of confusing, but based upon how doors work, they create a blank square on the map in between the two areas that they connect. Keep this in mind when you're examining your map and trying to determine which way to go.
• Sign in through Steam -- you can play anonymously, but if you want your progress to be saved (and the dungeon's pretty big, so let me tell you that, yes, this is something you definitely want to do), you'll need to be signed in
• This dungeon is much more complex than my last one, so give yourself plenty of time to go through the whole thing -- nothing in here is very complicated, but there's quite a bit of ground to cover, so be ready to invest some time to get to the best GAs. I did a full end-to-end speed run the night before launch, and it took me just over an hour to complete, even knowing all of the locations and puzzles. Estimated time for the average player is about 3-4 hours, but remember that you can leave and continue later (if you've registered and signed in through Steam).
• Leave no stone unturned -- I didn't put in any completely useless mazes or anything like that. So, be sure to go down every hallway and into every room...sometimes that annoying, windy, seems-to-go-nowhere passage has a GA at the end of it. Look at every wall.
• Consider making your own paper map -- you may want to dig out the graph paper and make your own map so that you can make notes as to where NPCs, portals, etc., are located.

Disclaimers and stuff

• This isn't my tool, I just used it to create the dungeon, so if it goes down or something, please let me know (and I'll tell SErVER51), but also understand that there's nothing I can do about it
• As always, I'm totally open to suggestions...but also don't be a douchebag if you don't find it fun. Making this stuff is a lot of work, and if you think you can create something better, then awesome, I would genuinely love to see it and learn from it. But anyone acting like a tool will get banned from the dungeon.
• You must explore the dungeon to enter the GAs. Do not share links with friends. Anyone involved in a leak (I'm only mentioning this because a couple of friends' events had this problem lately), either giving or receiving links to GAs will be treated like the cheater they are and blacklisted for life.
• It IS ok, however, to discuss puzzles or the maze with friends if you or they are stuck. But everyone needs to find the GAs by playing the game.
• Most of the keys came from HB, IG, or Fanatical and should all be good. One or two came from Otaku and we all know the drama that happened there. If that happens, please agree ahead of time to delete the GA in that scenario. But don't worry, I will give you some kind of consolation prize worth the same amount as the game in the GA (you'll likely have your pick of several options). I never leave anyone hanging. 👌🏻👍🏻
• A million thanks for SErVER51 for creating something cool like this so that the community here at SG has yet another option to do something creative, different, and fun. 💥🍻
• Ok, I think that covers it. Enough of my wordiness. It's time for you to ENTER THE DUNGEON.

Have fun, and good luck❗

Easter Egg Bonus GA

So, I got a little crazy at the last minute and decided to add an Easter Egg to the dungeon. Trust me, you'll know it when you find it. How do you find it, you may ask? Well, remember my commentary above about not liking useless hallways that go nowhere, etc. There may or may not be an old-school hidden room behind a clickable or penetrable wall. But if it looks like there should be something there but there isn't...well, you should start checking closely.

When you find the Easter egg, take a screen shot and save it! You can save your screen shots to a shareable folder I made on my OneDrive here. Please format the name as "YourSGName_EESS." I'll be checking file size, time stamps, etc., so no fair sending a screen shot for a friend to use. Let's make this fair and honest. After the event is done, I will use a random number generator against the list of people that found the Easter Egg to do a special bonus GA for that select group! I don't even know what the GA is yet, but it will be something pretty decent.

Note: there were some concerns about the OneDrive shared folder and being able to view people's details in the file attributes and link this back to their SG id (since it's part of the file name). That's the way that file sharing works (because you have to be able to tell if someone else has edited your file, etc.) and in fact all major file sharing that provides folders (like Dropbox, etc.) works like this. But, I totally get the concern, so I've created a private folder and am only using the shared folder for uploads. As the files come in, I'm moving them to the private folder so that no one can look at the file attributes of anyone else's screen shot.

Best of luck finding the Easter Egg!

Trivia

• The Creepy Art Gallery contains 42 unique pieces of art, as well as three sculptures
• The Doll House has 15 unique pieces of wall art
• Over 250 of the >400 graphics used in the game were manually compressed to reduce the resource load
• All custom graphics were created and/or edited with either (or both) MSPaint and Powerpoint
• Each of the thousands of objects in the dungeon (e.g., NPC, wall torch, creepy fog, etc.) was placed individually and manually scaled/rotated/etc.
• Keeping track of all of the dependencies (e.g., what object works with which NPC) and associations (e.g., which GA goes into which chest and where it's located) for the adventure required an Excel spreadsheet and eight sheets of notes
• Edge was used almost exclusively as the browser during creation; this was to ensure that when obtaining png graphics, they would be saved in their native format and not be converted to webp (which happens frequently in Chrome). Consequently, I also used bing as my search engine, and racked up almost 600 bing Rewards points while searching for graphics for the game. :D

P.S. Be sure to check the comments in the GAs for chances at additional games! Dys has added bonus GAs to every GA outside of the treasure room! That's 61 additional GAs!

View attached image.