Special World: Moonside (Updated 9/3/2022)

Following a series of unfinished large mods I've had the smart idea to make a small stage-based mod not unlike vorC, but without the cheap 'horror' so I can actually make a finished mod.
This idea probably came like almost 2 years ago, but after multiple extreme hiatuses here it finally is!

The idea behind the name of 'Special World' was to have a nice series name should I ever manage to make more of this kind of mod, as well as playing on the idea that the stages may have a focus on some gimmicks, rather than looks or story.

In the end, it's just a couple concepts sprinkled into a few stages, and will probably last around 10 minutes.


Download:
Link


Features:

Spoiler

• 5 Stages and a boss
• A stage select similiar to vorC
• A couple extra lives to pick up and a few secrets.
• A speedrun mode that adds a timer, makes the experience a bit faster and turns off saving.

Screenshots:
Soon

Changelog:

Spoiler

[9/3/22]
Changes;
• Speedrun mode now skips the Hermit Gunsmith dialogue.
• Speedrun mode will now also skip the stage select; Clearing a stage immediately brings you into the next.
• The EXP UI has been adjusted for (Hopefully) better visibility.
• To make it possible to fully play the mod with gamepad, you can now select a stage with the weapon toggle buttons.
• A sign has been added to stage 1 warning about the pillar 'spikes'.

Bug Fixes;
• The boss stage is now properly unlocked. If you have already cleared stage 5 you will have to beat it again.
• The boss stage will now show up as unlocked when loading your savegame, rather than when leaving a stage.
• The Hermit Gunsmith dialogue now doesn't repeat.
And possibly more that I may have forgotten.

[7/3/22]
• The boss' health has been increased from 30×6 to 120×6.
• Fixed a bug where entering a level after fighting the boss will glitch the camera.

Known bugs:

Spoiler

• Entering a stage may put you in a glitched position with no way to move. Reload the game and it should work properly again.
• The player character is animated on the stage select when the boss stage is selected.

Please let me know if you run into any issues and I would certainly love to hear any feedback, this mod may be in a bit of a rough state so feedback would help in rebalancing/polishing this.

 

Hey Mint, nice to see you around again. Also nice to see you release a mod that, by the sound of it, is sort of finished with maybe a few things to still be polished up. I have a few mods in the queue that I want to play first, but after I get those knocked out, I'll have to give this one a try.

Might be a few weeks, but I have a pretty good track record of following through when I say I'm gonna play a mod, so hang tight if no one else ends up giving this mod much attention.

 

Why do you have a book focused on earthquakes?

 

I think the pillars being spikes could've been communicated a little better with a red tip to them, I've died to them so many times already just because they blend in with the already same colored regular pillars.

 

I think the pillars being spikes could've been communicated a little better with a red tip to them, I've died to them so many times already just because they blend in with the already same colored regular pillars.

I was hoping the the pillar spikes being dangerous would've been hinted sufficiently by the fact that one of the floors is covered by them but if that's not the case and/or they're not easy enough to distinguish I can change that.

EDIT: Lightning quick hotfix: The boss' health has been increased to not be at it's debug values, and the camera issue should be resolved.
I'll work on the spikes and possibly add some skips (ie skipping stage select) for speedrun mode at a later date.

 

now this was a lovely quick mod, i enjoyed everything about it save for me not remembering that i still had the booster during the final boss, leading to five deaths due to the peanut brain of mine

first thing of note: somebody seems to like moonsong : P (no i did not read the title saying moonside)
secondly, the stages are pretty fair. things deal a lot of damage but i didn't pick up any life capsules so that's my own fault for not following the rules
oh yeh, the pointy pillars in the first stage were a bit... off-putting? i did expect them to hurt because of the layout, but somehow i couldn't subconsciously piece together that the same vanilla tile was a decoration but it wasn't one in this mod, leading to some interesting results. only died once there, though. could have been the ACTUAL spikes tossed around that got me confused though!
aaand before i forget: why do the "energy capsules" drop health sometimesssss
it's annoying! not really a big issue to be honest, just... you can't even reach it. but i understand it's the engine's limitations

overall, it was fun! if you're ever planning to add more levels to this, or make anything similar, i'll be sure to be one of the first people to play it. i just like the idea of short stages that present different challenges

 

overall, it was fun! if you're ever planning to add more levels to this, or make anything similar, i'll be sure to be one of the first people to play it. i just like the idea of short stages that present different challenges

Oh thank you, it's words like these that make me happy to have put in the effort!

I don't know if I'll expand on this or make something new anytime soon, though I'll try to at least make an effort to polish this up while I'm in the rhythm.

first thing of note: somebody seems to like moonsong : P (no i did not read the title saying moonside)

I will not deny that I'm a fan, and probably could've thrown in a bit more variation.

could have been the ACTUAL spikes tossed around that got me confused though!

Oh don't give me ideas for next time

aaand before i forget: why do the "energy capsules" drop health sometimesssss
it's annoying! not really a big issue to be honest, just... you can't even reach it. but i understand it's the engine's limitations

This is something thay's beyond me as well, actually! It could be related to how they are 'defeated' but it's been a while since I've made this system.

 

Okay, since it looks like another release is coming pretty soon for Evergreen, I've decided to play this mod first. I enjoyed this mod. It has a smooth pace, and some interesting and fun puzzles and platforming. Nothing amazing, but for what it is, it's pretty well-polished.

That was an interesting little map select screen. It was simple, but cute. That was a clever little effect with the broken pillars being spikes. Given the way they were laid out on the map, I suspected that they might hurt me. Others have been complaining about the unexpected nature of this, but that didn't really bother me. It was obvious enough for me.

That was a neat little effect in the 2nd stage where falling down the drain doesn't kill you, it just pumps you back up to a slightly earlier point in the level.

"Don't you have better things to do?" Darn, you little trolling flower. I got hurt on the way there and brought my HP down to 7, but thankfully managed to make it back without getting hurt by the spikes.

The color contrast for the health bar and weapon level up bar is not very good. The sparkles just make it tough to tell where the bar is. When I was leveling up the crystal, it wasn't obvious to me at first that I was leveling up. It was only when I looked more closely that I realized I was actually doing something useful by grabbing more power crystals.

You don't have any flag set once you talk to Hermit Gunsmith, so if you talk to him again, he goes through the same lines and gives you the crystal again.

Unfortunately, I can't progress further because I got locked out of the boss fight due to a bug that I triggered after I finished stage 5.

You seem to have the logic a bit mixed up for whether or not you can access the boss at the end. When I was first able to access stage 5 (before I had beaten it), I was also able to move Quote over the island, but I didn't select that option because I wanted to visit stage 5 first. I was confused as to why I could access that. So then I completed stage 5, and it brought me back to the map screen, and I was over the island, but then I moved down onto another stage, then tried to move back up to the island, and it wouldn't let me access it. Looks like it's executing the island-blocking logic that was supposed to execute before, and before, it was executing the island-allowing logic that it's supposed to execute now that I've beaten stage 5.

In the past, I've hacked people's mods to progress, but I'm feeling lazy today, so I'll just wait for a bugfix on this and then fight the boss at the end.

 

That was a neat little effect in the 2nd stage where falling down the drain doesn't kill you, it just pumps you back up to a slightly earlier point in the level.

Glad to see this noticed! I felt it was too cheap to just leave it a Death Pit especially in case people were struggling with the section preceding it. And if it was gonna be a checkpoint anyway I may as well still punish the player by decreasing their health as they're sent back.

The color contrast for the health bar and weapon level up bar is not very good. The sparkles just make it tough to tell where the bar is. When I was leveling up the crystal, it wasn't obvious to me at first that I was leveling up. It was only when I looked more closely that I realized I was actually doing something useful by grabbing more power crystals.

You don't have any flag set once you talk to Hermit Gunsmith, so if you talk to him again, he goes through the same lines and gives you the crystal again.

Been thinking of fixing the former already, I'm not sure what I was thinking with it. I will also look into the latter.

Unfortunately, I can't progress further because I got locked out of the boss fight due to a bug that I triggered after I finished stage 5.

You seem to have the logic a bit mixed up for whether or not you can access the boss at the end. When I was first able to access stage 5 (before I had beaten it), I was also able to move Quote over the island, but I didn't select that option because I wanted to visit stage 5 first. I was confused as to why I could access that. So then I completed stage 5, and it brought me back to the map screen, and I was over the island, but then I moved down onto another stage, then tried to move back up to the island, and it wouldn't let me access it. Looks like it's executing the island-blocking logic that was supposed to execute before, and before, it was executing the island-allowing logic that it's supposed to execute now that I've beaten stage 5.

Dang, that's one helluva oversight, guess I didn't test it well enough. I'll have to look into the cause but for now I suppose the temporary fix would be to beat stage 5 again, my bad.




EDIT (I don't want to anger the double-post gods):
CONTROLLER IS NOW SUPPORTED!
Another update is out, fixing most of the issues so far, adding a way to move around on the stage select with gamepad and fixing a bug with unlocking the final stage.
Full details and download link are in the OP.

 

wat

aside from this, i almost managed to no-hit the entire mod!
not much to add, but that 0 hp glitch still has me perplexed

 

Just played the release with the fix for the bug I reported at the end of my previous poste in this thread, and man... That boss at the end was hard. It was pretty creative, and it was pretty fun, but I feel like it could be a bit more balanced. I would suggest either giving the player more of an opportunity to get a higher health capacity, making the bullets a little bit more forgiving, or giving those rollers less health. Even once I figured out a semi-effective strategy, I still found myself getting a bit frustrated, since the bullets felt kind of luck-based given how rampant they ran.

I was able to beat the boss after trying for a little less than 2 hours, but unlike the Sacred Grounds or boss fights from other games, I didn't feel that natural sense of progression where you feel like you're gradually getting farther each time. Once I figured out a good strategy, I was relying less on muscle memory and more on getting lucky with random bullets, and I don't like relying on something random. With a little bit better balance, I think this boss battle would be really good, and also the difficulty would better match the rest of the mod.

EDIT: Actually, I take back what I said about it needing to be more balanced.

After initially making this post, I realized that I didn't really utilize the ability to shoot at the rollers while they're above you. I also realized that you can still shoot at a roller for some time after it's gone off screen, which gives you a wider window of time to concentrate fire on one roller. So after discovering these 2 things, and incorporating them into my strategy, I was able to beat the boss again, this time more easily. So once you spend enough time experimenting around and form the right strategy, I think the balance for this boss is decent.

One thing I did discover, though, is that you can fall off the edge of the map (at least on the left side), and I'm softlocked. So you might want to add an invisible wall on the sides, or an H/V trigger that will tell you that you've fallen off the edge if you fall off the edge.

 

This is not the first ive been hearing about the boss being too difficult. (I thought it was just fine but yknow, devs somehow always being great at their things?)
I guess the strategies will make it a lot better (I've been primarily chasing the rollers with shots myself) but I might see about reducing incoming damage and/or health regardless.

As a side I've been attempting to set a record for myself but I...also died at the boss in my best attempt. If I didn't it would've probably been at roughly 6:50/7:00 so if you wanna shoot for a goal I guess there's one. Might consider adding a leaderboard if people are interested.