Official CSTSF Mirai Modding Contest Discussion Thread (Over)

I'm not extending it forever, you're getting an extra week at probably the absolute most

 

Since I played the early versions I guess I should respond~

Spoiler

@zxin - I feel like I stepped into a time machine and played a DOS game about an alien invasion. So random! But, you nailed the silver pear x) Haven't seen it used in the other mods yet.
Somehow I didn't realize the save points were save points though. You'd think I'd have investigated those giant heads.

And man some of those weapons are hard to use lol. Made for a challenge though. That tractor beam gun. D:::

@RareBeeph - Now that's an interesting but frustrating use of a Cave Story mechanic never utilized in the game. Thinking outside the box, I like it!

 

I'm sure BLink has something done for it, though. We'll just have to wait on him to get his levels done.
Hopefully I spent my 2 weeks well.

I'm really debating if I want to meet the deadline or push things out making my entry just another demo omitting the final area of the game and then finish the game when it gets finished. It all really boils down to how much sleep I want to loose, how hard I want to push myself and how many extras I'm going to get off this upcoming (two) weeks.

Also the silver pear would be found in the last area of the game so there's that as well, AND last area is really where the whole tie-in to the future theme is. (I mean I can just TELL you that you're humans in the far future after all land sinks underwater but that isn't going to score me many points if you don't actually get to access the final area)

Also I've been stating that this is ""my"" mod but I have to shoutout Seasons as he's done some of the level work for me, and Safu designed the main character. As well as SIM and Brayconn helping me with some .dll inject fuckery on top of the mess I've created to make all this work.

God this has been an absolutely terrifyingly, beautiful mess under the hood.

 

Having conferred with the various entrants, I've agreed to bestow exactly one extra week of work time to the second period (same time, 26th November). Make the most of it!

 

Ok guys here's a public demo that I'm a lot less reluctant sharing.

Some part of it are a bit sketchy but overall the quality improvement is something to note for sure.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a8dpn68ey96wojf/TideWalkers Second Public Beta.zip?dl=0

Have at it.

 

Ok guys here's a public demo that I'm a lot less reluctant sharing.

Some part of it are a bit sketchy but overall the quality improvement is something to note for sure.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a8dpn68ey96wojf/TideWalkers Second Public Beta.zip?dl=0

Have at it.

A rare example of me actually having time to help. A shocker, for sure.

 

@BLink -

Spoiler

Sis... don't give me that look...
xD

Noticed one technical bug: If you die mid-swing and choose not to retry, you'll be unable to swim until restarting the application.

Looks and sounds beautiful, and now the story is beginning to take shape!
I hope you can keep adding more. To me the mod is currently like their house. It's large, and looks interesting but lacks much to do in it. For now.
Anything from additional narrative along the way, to moving enemies, currents, obstacles, quests... (Or a timed race with a friend at that one stretch..?) Or just the occasional unique eye-candy...
Well, on second thought, just being able to reach the end of your intended mod (with the pear) might be the first order of business...

Well, can't wait to see how it turns out!
...btw have you played Aquaria? Just curious as to what influenced your choice of subject.

 

stuff

The swinging bug is known of, the balrog bug... well I forgot to remove a <FAC, oops. There's also a few other things people have pointed out, but all the fixes will have to wait until the final modcon build.

The house, Open Ocean, and jellyfish forest were all done like, 4 hours before this demo dropped, it's a bit rough in parts but definitively more shape has taken place.

Inspiration has come a lot from both myself and Seasons. Some sort of port-apocolypse Idea for a "future" theme would fit well, and submerging the whole world underwater was a good baseline. I grew up playing Echo on an original Genesis and wanted to recreate that in some manners and thought instead of dolphins let's do mermaids. The ideas clashed perfectly and we had evolved humans as mermaids. With the backbone set, a lot of back and forth between the two of us happened on ideas, but the execution was mostly my own part, everything here was suppose to be in the first demo but Seasons has been super super busy with other things in life so most of the project has fallen on me single handedly. I've never actually heard of Aquaria before so I'll have to check it out sometime in the future maybe.

The ORGs are by Safusaka for the most part, I made some of them that were in the original demo but they ended up getting replaced with better tracks he made, also he made the sprites for the main character, everything safu touches becomes really good for no reason so I though having him help with the project would be a good idea. (Also 2Dbro made the open ocean song so there's that, Hi 2D!)

I'm really glad the story actually has some structure instead of being a tech demo strictly. The final release is going to get the story finished hopefully, there's one or two big things that I hope I can finish in time, if not though this might close the official contest with a "to be continued" and I'll finish it outside of the contest instead. (after I catch up on sleep and take a short vacation, I'm very ready to throw in the towel at this point.) Also good lord I swear, I've taken only ONE day off working on this mod and lost dozens of hours of sleep making sure it's gotten to the point it has. Damn you Noxid, I bring my best and you DROP OUT on me I was suppose to crush you, not make you chicken out!!!

But uhh, *ahem* yes, I'm glad you're having fun with the new build, modcon or no this is getting finished in it's full glory one way or another.

 

Final rollcall, 15 hours to go.

 

Well, it's not a total shitshow but this isn't nearly as polished as I would have liked it to be, I guess that's what I get when I only put 450 hours into a mod I KNEW was going to take 900. I call my teammates being overloaded with irl things, my PC breaking down during the last 4 days. and my lack of knowledge of C to blame over this.

God I swear I put nearly 100% of the effort into this (minus the village area and the orgs)
Anyway what a crazy 7 weeks I'm going to rage quit the internet now, k thanks love you all.

TIDEWALKERS 0.3

Also the asm hacks if you even care to look through my code I wrote on way to many cans of redbull and monster at 3AM

ASM HAX

 

Well, it's not a total shitshow but this isn't nearly as polished as I would have liked it to be, I guess that's what I get when I only put 450 hours into a mod I KNEW was going to take 900. I call my teammates being overloaded with irl things, my PC breaking down during the last 4 days. and my lack of knowledge of C to blame over this.

God I swear I put nearly 100% of the effort into this (minus the village area and the orgs)
Anyway what a crazy 7 weeks I'm going to rage quit the internet now, k thanks love you all.

TIDEWALKERS 0.3

Also the asm hacks if you even care to look through my code I wrote on way to many cans of redbull and monster at 3AM

ASM HAX

Also I helped! Even if college and work make for a terrible combination! A dreadful, awful combination!

 

Clock has over'd. Once Rarebeeph has sent me through whatever he's got I'll update the whole download package at once. Public voting for populism and pear will be started some time later tonight after that.

 

The final entries are now permanently affixed to the OP, orrr here if you're reading this and want to save yourself a click.

 

The final entries are now permanently affixed to the OP, orrr here if you're reading this and want to save yourself a click.

Hey DT, just wanted to let you know that the .zip file you have linked has an outdated version of Tide Walkers. The most current version is the one BLink posted last night (v0.3), not v0.2.

Well, this is my first time doing a proper review. (No, notes do not count as reviews. How many times do I have to tell you that?)
This review is a bit of a mess, because it's my first, but hopefully my point is reasonably well conveyed at each juncture regardless.

TIDE WALKERS

by Bombchu Link​

SPOILERS AHEAD... y'dummy!

Spoiler: Review

Background...
I have been keeping up with Tide Walkers for a while now.
It spawned intrigue in me when I first saw a GIF of it, posted by BLink in mLurker's ORG server. At the time it was about the most intimidating thing ever, and thoroughly convinced me that entering the modding competition was a lost cause, and I scrapped my project shortly afterwards. Given that what I saw was presumably a fraction of what the mod already had to offer, I had some high expectations.


Overall presentation...
First of all, I cannot say that I'm impressed with the way that this mod presents itself. Half of the credits are provided in a PNG file, which is a screenshot of a Discord chat. And the other half are in the Readme.txt file, which has an abundance of missing capitalisation (yeah, well played). This combined with the facepics that still contain their palettes, the mod files which still contain script sources, etc., all show that a lack of care and consideration went into packaging and releasing this mod.

Moving onto the artwork side, this mod has a very nice purple and aqua/turquoise aesthetic. Most of the artwork itself is pretty top-notch, although I can't say much for some of the animations, and the prongs of the trident in its character sprite don't look so straight.


Exposition...
This mod has a lot of dialogue. Some of it is information that the player supposedly needs, but a great deal of it is just uninteresting character background.
What I particularly dislike about this mod is that it forces the player to hear information that they don't care about. For instance, it forces the player to talk to Gerundo, who tells you a few ways to use the Trident. However, I was already very familiar with the Trident and how it's used, and so I scrolled through it absent-mindedly. I'm fine with there being people to talk to, but I wish their dialogue wasn't so long winded. I asked that some of the dialogue be shortened, but no luck. And God forbid you forget to save, or you'll be forced to read the unabridged dialogue all over again. SKIPFLAGS, CHILDREN! SKIPFLAGS!!


sigh Gameplay...
So here's where things can get either really good, or really bad.
The good news for this mod is that it has some really nice swimming controls, and they make for a pretty fun first area. The player is immediately rewarded for going left rather than right (albeit in a way that would kinda suck for you if you never went that way).

With that out of the way, let's get to the problems.

Combat in Tide Walkers is basically completely optional. You basically never have to attack anything. Okay but it's just like that in Cave Story right? Why's that so bad? ... well, there's absolutely no reward for participating in combat either. The most you'll get is some health (occasionally), but you're better off just avoiding the enemies in the first place. Combat feels extremely vapid when there's no reward system built around it. Most enemies lack interesting or engaging behaviour, and the couple that do are just as easily avoided as the others. (And are also extremely hard to kill, and one of them will 2 hit kill the player.)
It's impossible to hit enemies out of the water because you cannot swing the trident whilst standing, making for a handful of very frustrating encounters in the laboratory.
Adding to all of that are the terrible hitboxes. In general you can hit an enemy just as well with your back turned to them as you can facing them. I found myself able to walk through the visible part of quite a few enemies, but then I would get hit by some part of them that had no sprite.

In terms of level design, a lot of the levels are just too big and hard to remember and navigate.
After going through one specific section (the Deep Oceans) over 5 times I still felt that I had no idea how the level branched out, where I was supposed to go, and how I was supposed to know that I was supposed to go there.
The areas all look pretty similar, and don't have more than one specific landmark that I could remember.

The GUI is very... cough ... well... I had no idea that the necklace at the top left was my health until I died in the first demo, and I had no idea that the adjacent bar was a fucking air meter until I drowned... twice. If the player is actively drowning, it might do them some service to LET THEM KNOW about it. Put some bold text in their face like Cave Story did. Hell, just keep the original air meter!


Story & directive...
In terms of story, there isn't really that much. You come home from a shrine. Your sister wants to go exploring with you. She gets kidnapped. Hu, ha, the whole world works. Usually the story of a game is a pretty good way of conveying the directive. But since the only thing we get from the story is that we want to explore, the directive of the mod is a bit unclear. At no point is it extremely obvious how the main character feels about all of what's happening around her, besides her sister disappearing. She doesn't have much to say, which is okay; the player's determination to pursue her is more of a driving force than the story's ideas. But in general, I felt a lack of guidance of any kind past the village, other than when the game told me what to do outright like in the ocean. All of this lead me to become quite fatigued, especially in areas like the laboratory, where I desperately wanted it to be over so that I could save and come back later.
And then after the laboratory there's a fight with... nothing? Seriously, the main character starts talking to nothing, and then some enemies appear. There's no boss. Some funky music plays, though.


The bonus item...
So I went to the trouble of getting to the Silver Pear after I saw it from the boss room with no boss in it. I touched it and it disappeared... and then to my dismay, nothing happened. UMM???


Polish...
This is where I started to feel really bad about this mod. I found myself having a lot of trouble with polish in this mod. It's filled with moments like this:

Where I was unable to escape this flailing shark because I got stuck on a very slight incline. When bringing this issue up with BLink, he (bafflingly) refused to fix it!

Or here where my drowning sprite looks like some kind of deformed version of my walking sprite?

Or in the inventory menu where the trident is not classed as a weapon, and this is possible:

Or in the laboratory where there are blocks that look like they belong in the foreground, and have foreground decorations attached to them:

And vice versa here:

Or this shiny thing that I had exceeding amounts of trouble interacting with (which I realised much later is because you have to hit them with the trident), and then I took damage because there were two heart things right next to it:

Or this heart enemy that was placed behind a wall:

Or those spinning 2D bubbles that do nothing?

Or the fact that when you leave the village your sister disappears, but still converses with you regardless?

Or how the water still renders over the GUI... come on BLink, I told you about that weeks ago...


Final remarks.
This mod does not feel ready to have been released. It's a nightmare of partially unfinished enemies, stages and hacks.
I honestly hope that in the coming few months BLink will update this mod to be a fun and enjoyable experience, and that it will do things achievable outside of the scope of this modding competition. But as it is, I can say that I find that this mod simply isn't particularly fun.
I'm not sorry, but I am gravely disappointed.
I hope what everyone in Task Force Team (including myself) has done proves to be more enjoyable... and err, whatever CyberSleuth and RareBeepeh made too I guess!

Cheers,
~zxin

I'm going to let BLink be the one to properly reply to this (and I'll write a reply up later if he doesn't), but I will say this: the review, while thankfully much more structured than past ones, is just as blunt as ever. Personal opinion, but the comment at the very end is also in significantly poor taste.