Official CSTSF Mirai Modding Contest Discussion Thread (Over)

It's a review. You don't need to reply to it, because it isn't addressed to you or BLink, because it's a review.

My notes are essentially reviews in the end, and people respond to mine all the time; you have, too. BLink doesn't need to reply to it and neither do I, but I also don't appreciate being thrown under the bus.

Could've at least made an attempt to keep it unbiased.

 

My notes are essentially reviews in the end, and people respond to mine all the time; you have, too. BLink doesn't need to reply to it and neither do I, but I also don't appreciate being thrown under the bus.

Could've at least made an attempt to keep it unbiased.

I don't want to start flaming competition v.2 but how exactly was his review biased? As far as I understand it he said he wants BLink to improve the mod since it has tons of potential.

 

I don't want to start flaming competition v.2 but how exactly was his review biased? As far as I understand it he said he wants BLink to improve the mod since it has tons of potential.

It is expressly against my wishes for this to turn into another damned "flame war". It is entirely possible to disagree with someone without devolving into something rabid, and I'm sorry if you see it that way.

I would also rather not spend time I currently don't have digging for examples (hence why I said I would make a proper reply later), but if you insist here's one that I had already mentioned:
"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!"

 

It is expressly against my wishes for this to turn into another damned "flame war". It is entirely possible to disagree with someone without devolving into something rabid, and I'm sorry if you see it that way.

I would also rather not spend time I currently don't have digging for examples (hence why I said I would make a proper reply later), but if you insist here's one that I had already mentioned:
"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!"

That isnt really bias. He's just saying he's disappointed since he had high hopes for the mod. If anything, that's the least biased you could be.

EDIT: And regarding your flame war comment, I have no idea how to respond, since I never said it would start a flame war, I just said I was trying to be careful since these forums often get a bit heated.

 

A review is usually a nonlinear analysis, whereas notes are usually chronologically listed and have an entirely different format. They usually lack an overarching narrative.
I think calling notes like those taken in order to compose a review reviews in themselves is kinda pretentious. Reviews are far less open ended.
Also I don't think that mentioning you counts as throwing you under the bus.

And you don't get to call me biased just because I didn't like your level design.
It seems like you guys keep forgetting that you are separate from your works, and that if I didn't like something that you made then that has almost no bearing on whether or not I like you. The same applies in reverse. I can say "this level design is putting me to sleep with how utterly fucking shit it is, God this shit makes me want to die," and still feel indifferent towards the level's designer.

And I am disappointed in him for not being able to live up to the hype he built. (HUGE tip to every developer of everything ever: don't make hype you can't live up to, I swear it will not pay off... also it's really easy to do so be careful!)
And I do hope that people enjoy Task Force and Slip... err I keep forgetting its name... Rare's mod more than I enjoyed TideWalkers. Which was not very much, as I stated in the review.

I don't see how chronologically-listed notes could be considered "pretentious", but for more organized submissions like contests mine always come with their own much more concise summary. I'm also thinking of the team here, not just me. BLink isn't joking when he said he was working himself so hard, and I give him massive kudos for powering through despite life trying so hard to get in our way.

Our credits image does imply that I did all of the level design. Just to clarify, I was pretty much only involved with the first two "main" maps in this submission, with minor changes and additions made to the others. Also, while you can say such while feeling indifferent towards the creator themselves, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so. It isn't so difficult to be considerate, yes?

I also apologize for being a part of the aforementioned disappointment, but we are planning on continuing production of Tide Walkers after a deserved break. I still need to wrap up the first semester of my senior year, and BLink needs some time off to cool his burnout.

 

I don't see how chronologically-listed notes could be considered "pretentious", but for more organized submissions like contests mine always come with their own much more concise summary. I'm also thinking of the team here, not just me. BLink isn't joking when he said he was working himself so hard, and I give him massive kudos for powering through despite life trying so hard to get in our way.

Our credits image does imply that I did all of the level design. Just to clarify, I was pretty much only involved with the first two "main" maps in this submission, with minor changes and additions made to the others. Also, while you can say such while feeling indifferent towards the creator themselves, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so. It isn't so difficult to be considerate, yes?

I also apologize for being a part of the aforementioned disappointment, but we are planning on continuing production of Tide Walkers after a deserved break. I still need to wrap up the first semester of my senior year, and BLink needs some time off to cool his burnout.

Sorry for sounding like an apathatic piece of garbage but how long you worked on something doesn't change whether it's bad or not. Just look at some triple A games released in the last few years. The fanbase will still be thoroughly disappointed if the game doesn't live up to the hype. BLink should not be hyping something up when he barely has time to make levels for it, and knows that the person he chose to make levels is drenched in schoolwork or whatever. I'm glad Tide Walkers is going to be finished after this break, but by no means is it finished right now and it should be reviewed as it was submitted. You've had months to work on this, and couldn't even finish after the EXTENDED deadline. Task Force was made in the span of two weeks and is far more balanced and dare I say it, it has more heart put in. Obviously some serious mistakes we're made on BLink's part, which I hope he learns from.

 

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.

Oops fixed, everyone make sure to download again before voting.

Speaking of which, voting is now open! Check the first post of the thread again for more details!!

also you can stop discussing zxin's "review" now, we've gone this long without dumb drama and it's going to stay that way

 

Here are a few additional comments after playing the final submissions:
SlipTouch

Spoiler

Oh! I like the sprites! A prison theme huh? Interesting choice~
I have a feeling a lot of people might get aggravated focusing your mod around that obscure CS engine gimmick (especially, since you could use advanced hacks, etc.)
But, honestly I love it xD Seeing someone use that little known trick tickled me. I wish there was a whole lot more however... since you could have added a whole bunch more stages to really fill it out to a satisfying length.
And that final stage... I had to check the text file to make sure it was possible, and not finished (I regret peeking!) But, I was honestly surprised x) I learned a new trick with the CS engine today thank to you!
I love it lol

Sadly... however, I don't really see how it fits the sci-fi theme, and the pear wasn't used... so you'll have to settle with a thumbs up from me

Task Force

Spoiler

I should replay the earlier version to see how much has changed, but your initial submission was pretty similar, but now it's more polished!

I did run into what might be a bug though... Or at least something unfortunate.
After beating the game with a character, I was happy to unlock time attack. Plus a new character! And so I played through that once...
However, after playing through it again, I wanted to switch to saves, but saw no way to switch back to normal mode, So I chose new game...
But new game is really a NEW game... No time attack and no extra character. So when I saved I had to beat it again to unlock it.
While the mod is short enough, I didn't want to restart. (Already played multiple times.)

I stick by what I said in my last post about Task Force, but to add:
Task Force has the best gameplay imo. Cave Story's engine is usually best with combat and the various weapons, enemies and bosses make for a fun little romp.
Story is very basic, but on point with the sci-fi theme. Neat character select too.

I have some mixed feelings with some of the graphics, and some parts of the music, yet it all mixes quite well.
Nice adding the pear, and a cool feature, but unless I missed some secret area; was relatively useless besides feeling like Sonic for a moment lol.
(I guess for speed running?)

Overall, nice submission. Reminded me of old DOS games, which I enjoyed. (Nice with the save point info sign! x)
My only wish was that you added even more with all that additional time. I'm greedy. Morrrre levellls, Addditional storrrry background, etc

TideWalker

Spoiler: Messy notes~

Oh very nice! I do like seeing how things were added and improved with each release. I was surprised when Coral needed to join the party! And even more surprised to see her AI in action! Sweet.
She was still a little glitchy, getting stuck, but pathfinding kept up for a while! That's some wizardry.

I did run into a bug where I had to restart btw: If you talk to the girl on the bottom a second time, and at least while not swimming but walking, and you won't be able to switch to swimming until you restart/load again.

The first two areas are pretty polished. Liked the basic moving jellyfish~ I actually went back into that area to clear them out once I got the trident x)
I wonder if I could have had Coral come with me...

I kinda wish there was a way to know when NPCs had more dialogue to say, I only found out about the extra dialogues randomly.

I didn't notice any bonus for trying to swim fast in the long horizontal level. ...and no more Coral AI... Still fun to try to speed through it!

In the jellyfish sea area, I didn't get to appreciate that song very long... swam through the jellyfish quickly and it's kinda a waste! I want to go back and listen to it more x)

In the large underwater caves... Looking pretty good now. I happened upon the pearl, and later backtracked and found the sign... lol
I killed one shark last time I played, didn't feel like attempting it this time lol

Ohh, and things are starting to get interesting...? Made it to the future ruins... Neat enemy concepts, but I recommend tweaking... The cannons are way too slow firing to ever hit anything, and not sure I ever took damage. And the odd heart enemies... Uh, kinda annoying silent strange attackers. Those actually can pose a threat, but are still very easy to avoid and kill...

I kinda wish bumping into them dealt damage to the player. That would add a slight more difficulty to the situation with so many of them around, instead of just ignoring them. And the boss, looked awesome... But, never took damage... just sat on the jelly and beat him up! I wouldn't have been surprised if you would have made a twist where the jelly was connected to Coral somehow... since it never attacked. And killing it would be bad... D:

But that's not the case is it x)

That final area has a few issues, which you probably know. The first issue, being that you can trigger the highest water level at the start. So you can skip the normal sequence completely... Pretty sure... Or likely mess up the sequence by hitting it early.

And then the secret pear... Aw................ It looks like you were going for something really interesting here, but in the end there seemed to be no effect. Whether I ignore the rings, or go for the rings; whether I attack the pear or try to use the pear before it disappears... Nada... I'm guessing it didn't make it in time...? That's sad... I wanted to vote for your use of the pear in plot, but it doesn't quite give me enough information to actually know if it would have any effect. A simple small event would have made the difference there for the contest D:

I do have an issue with the music in that area being quite repetitious due to it being a long level with a very noticeable repeating theme. It's nice like all the other songs, but that area could benefit with some musical variation or something...

Nooooo it ends like that xD

Anyway, all in all high quality, complicated mod following the contest theme in a creative manner... The final submission is quite good.
If you can continue to polish it as you have been, it'll only get better and better... and I continue to look forward to the next release!

PS - I love jumping out of the water... if only it could splash each time xD

I wish there had been more entries (looks in the mirror as well), but I enjoyed everyone's submissions!

 

@zxin - Ah thanks for the correction! I kept writing that earlier too.

btw! I just noticed you CAN attack out of water in Tide Walkers. You have to leap, switch to swimming and attack while falling... It's easy to do on my programmable controller, but didn't try to see how natural it felt on the keyboard. So you might find that as a fault, but I was amused by leaping like a fish and attacking.
Maybe you would think you should be able to attack standing on land too... ...unless she uses it like a walking stick to stay standing up on her tail's midsection. (Paying closer attention to her walking animation.) Which could make sense, since it seems like it would be hard to walk on land like that...

 

review

Thank you for the review! I wanted the mod to have a strong aesthetic and wasn't really focusing on making the combat a super strong point in the mod's creation. It was considered at one point, but I decided to push the art, music, and dialogue to the foreground as well as the swimming controls. You're intentionally suppose to not fight the sharks, and there are way to many jellyfish in certain areas for combat to be anything near interesting past wacking stuff directly in your way. I spent a few more hours just, swimming around getting lost in the deep caves. it's really what the game is about along with the art, the music, and just the atmosphere of the mod. I think in this regard we just differ on what we prioritize in our games, but I've always been interested in strong aesthetics and storytelling. (Such as Sue's story and Dreams of Reality 3 being very story heavy in almost every aspect). I just decided to take it a step further by not reusing any vanilla art and completely redoing the physics/combat for the most part.

Sometime about week 5 of development when the village was alive, and the deep caves were finished, I was the happiest I had ever been, The mod was really something and I was happy with what direction it was going in. The very nice dialogue seasons wrote, the amazing music by Safu, and the smooth as butter mechanics as you swam through the village and the caves.

I realize that what Cyber has said is valuable in the aspect of "it matters nothing in who made the mod or how long it took", but there is quite sadly nothing I could have done to present a better product due to my computer breaking, the deadline being 7 weeks long compared to the amount of content I attempted to shove into the game, and other people on my team just ending up committing to the project about a 1/10th the hours I would have foreseen. I hope next time around I make something better. Development of the mod will eventually continue, but it will take a long while before the mod gets where I want it to go, so another demo isn't something that's going to happen anytime before the end of January or possibly Febuary even. I have to make a lot more polish happen before I'm happy with this game

What ended up happening with the silver pear was I DM'd Double Think 2 hours before the submission deadline and asking how much it would hurt to not have the pear in the mod. Due to the result of said conversation, I then decided to focus on adding it in instead of cleaning up the ending more. (yes this is seriously how down to the wire everything panned out to be.) Eventually the ending got scrapped and replaced with something a bit more... hacked in. I feel that the mod need about 50 more man-hours of work at least to make it something clean and presentable, and about 2-4 months to not have any of the content that was originally cut put in. (of course assuming that I would slow development down to a somewhat reasonable pace instead of the lightning fast maniacal late nights I've been doing up until about 48 hours ago. [Damn, sleep is nice to have.] )

Speaking of some cut content, you were actually suppose to reach the Sunken city and go raiding with your sister before reaching a jellyfish giant and beat it, you were suppose to talk to your parents in the village (you can see their facepics in face.bmp but they never got put in the actual game ) And you were suppose to encounter the silver pear in a nursery in the alien base, that would make you learn about the past via a flashback, when the earth got flooded in the first place forcing you to evolve into mermaid people.

Looking at this in hindsight, Trying to do what a 3 man team was suppose to using 1.2 people to do it didn't exactly work, hopefully what is functional is good enough to make the game actually worth everyone's time. When the rubber hits the road though, I couldn't have really put any more effort in, so hopefully this is good enough for everyone (except Zxin) to enjoy.

I realize as I'm finishing this up, It's kind of a messy scrambled collection of thoughts, but all the same, thanks for the kind words X-Calibar. It's been a super hectic 7 weeks, (somehow I've put myself through nothing short of figurative hell making what happened happen in the time it did) and I've gotten next to no sleep working to get what got done, done. I'm especially glad you of all people enjoyed what was there my friend. With a modcon under my belt hopefully it will be slightly easier to gauge how long it takes to make things and we'll see if I can avoid the errors and lack of polish/content that has transpired next time.

 

@BLink - Just thought I should tell you, I appreciated reading about your creative process. It adds some history, perspective and insight when you read about all the work that goes into participating in these events! When one puts the time into something, for an audience, one would hope their efforts will leave some kind of noticeable impact on that audience...

@everyone - ...And I hope everyone can check these mods out! Perhaps all the opinions are in discord or elsewhere, but I would love to hear more reactions here too

 

Polling over, all results will be presented hopefully some time today (or failing that tomorrow yadda yadda)

 

MiraiCon Official Results

Spoiler: Bonus Item

As you may have noticed before this, Task Force won the poll 5 to 0 (to 0). Since it was the only mod that actually had the item do something, this wasn't really surprising.

Spoiler: People's Choice

From the grand total of TWO VOTES received, the points tally for each entry ended up as such:
1. Task Force (5)
2. TideWalkers (4)
3. SlipTouch (3)

Power to the people

Spoiler: Official Judging

Due to the low number of entrants, I have had to reconsider this process somewhat. Rather than trying to categorise and/or score everything, I've used a more traditional approach of overall comparison of pros and cons and then tying this into the contest as necessary. I'll offer some notes regarding my thought process, but they won't be super-detailed or outline things that are mostly self-evident.

Third place is SlipTouch. While likely unsurprising, this shouldn't be taken as a negative and I very much appreciate it being here. I did manage to figure out how to do most of it myself and it's definitely a neat little mechanic; the room that has the fans is a particularly clever showcase. The overhauled graphics are appreciated too. Downsides here include being rather light on content (although I'm not sure how much longer this could get before it would become more annoying than interesting) and having next to zero obvious connection to the main theme.

Here is where things become more contentious, upon which I will start with Task Force. If you're going to go with aliens, going full retro definitely isn't a bad way of doing so (although one could argue it's not particularly futuristic as such). I really dig the prerenders, especially the big save point. Another positive is the weapons, which actually do make every character play differently and are all pretty fun to use, with my fave being the Proton Gun. I do have some sizable gripes here, however, mainly with level and enemy design. The maps are competent enough, but also sparse and kind of plain/samey, or even directionless at times. It's almost harder to find the comm boxes than it is to find where they tell you to go. Enemies are placed well but either don't really do much by custom enemy standards (aliens and orange shooters, the first boss which is 50% nothing happening) or they're those yellow chargers (that are definitely more annoying than the sharks in TideWalkers are). The exp-shedding laser on the final boss is also very cool, but again its overall pattern has a fair amount of downtime. This is the sort of mid-level entry I was wishing there'd be more of, and I really hope people start to get the idea for future contests.

TideWalkers I feel does have a lot to offer, despite being somewhat buggy and technically unfinished. All the work put into the movement physics definitely paid off; swimming mostly feels great and I find the close-range combat to be more enjoyable than either of last years' top two entries. The audiovisuals too are generally excellent. The sunken lab in particular is gorgeous, and really conveys the sort of feeling it's going for, solidifying this as the strongest use of the theme overall. I also really like how the bubbles function as both oxygen refills and mini-swim points. Making the heart shooters do no damage on contact definitely works out better I think, otherwise they'd become very irritating with their firing pattern. In this case the use of large, open maps does work somewhat better with the style of mod. Considering the various mitigating factors that turned up over the course of the contest and the lack of competition, I believe it's not unfair to say that this has still managed to show off most of its potential. If there's one thing I would have really advised, it would've been to leave Coral at home until post-contest and focus on the main quest, since having her pop in and out of existence is definitely the most flow-breaking element at the moment.

On judgement alone I give TideWalkers the edge... but there's the bonus item to consider. What I'd originally hoped for it was that it would offer a slightly different focus that could potentially shake up the final results; with only three entries, however, allowing it to be the main determinant of outcome would be disproportionate and irresponsible. The fairest thing I can think to do now is call TideWalkers and Task Force flat even and then consider what to use as a tiebreaker. Since we have convenient, meaningful precedents from the past, those are the strongest parallels I can think of to draw from at this point. As a result, what I'm left with here is a mod that's expansive but somewhat unfinished, much like DELETE or maybe Precious Thoughts, and zxin repeatedly acting like an unrepentantly smug twat over something that's maybe in line with a mod like The Final Level.

TideWalkers wins out.

Payouts will be organised in the near future. See you next year

 

Due to the low number of entrants, I have had to reconsider this process somewhat

It's indeed too bad that there haven't been a lot of submissions this year, less than last year even.
Makes me kinda wish we can go back to the days of '16 where we had waaaay more of them, although I suppose I could contribute towards that.
Next year I won't have to worry about any studies and I hope modcon '19 will be in a more free time, so I might consider trying to get back to modding for modcon next year, and I hope other will follow suit.
Good job on the ones that did go through the effort this year though. I haven't played them yet but I might considering giving them a whirl still this month, possibly stream/screenshare it while I'm at it.

 

There just wasn't time for it this year.