The Official CSTSF Discord Group and CS Modding Community Modding Competition! (MODCON '17)

im fired up broooooo deadline pressure hittin me like a ford fiesta

 

I started two days ago and my house is under termite treatment.

By god I'm gonna make ends meet somehow and deliver something.

Spoiler: Professional Development Setup

 

Treasure Islands.

Sail the sea in search of ancient pirate treasure!

Screenshots:

Spoiler

Download:
http://noxid.ca/files/TreasureIslands.zip

Credits:
Noxid - Coding, Art and Level Design
Matt - Art and Level Design
PlusWPlus - Testing and Music
Safusaka - Additional Music
Greychapel - Testing and Art
Talking Tadpol - Art

 

A+ mod.
Would work for free for 2 months again.

 

I don't even have to look further than the screenshots to know who's taking this baby on a home run.

 

Treasure Islands.

Sail the sea in search of ancient pirate treasure!

Screenshots:

Spoiler

Download:
http://noxid.ca/files/TreasureIslands.zip

Credits:
Noxid - Coding, Art and Level Design
Matt - Art and Level Design
PlusWPlus - Testing and Music
Greychapel - Testing and Art
Talking Tadpol - Art

Your mod may be practically guaranteed first place, but at least mine was the first entry; first blood, if you will. Gotta take the minor victories where I can...

Pretty excited to play Treasure Islands, though. Gonna try to go through it and give my thoughts as soon as possible (read: after all four of my classes).

 

Surprise, Polaris is still a deadbeat! But I also had a lot of fun working on my submission, so even if it isn’t ready, I have to say thanks to the organizers for giving me drive. :3

Here’s a little writeup for the people in my head that like those!

Spoiler: PROGRESS

★PROGRESS REPORT 1★
~After The End~
It’s been a minute since I did these, huh? I still have plans for [not a] MOD (or at least what it essentially turned into, which is a playable fanfic set 20 seconds after Cave Story and ending a day later), but this isn’t a great backdrop for those plans. A more skilled and passionate Polaris who hopefully finishes this tiny one-off game is what that bigger project will need...and luckily, the Official Cave Story Tribute Site Forums Discord Group Summer Modding Contest (or OCSTSFDGSMC for short) at least got the passions flowing a little. Perhaps the new environment of college will help keep them circulating~

No Staycation for the Timid is an adventure designed to be short, about a small blond kid who’s dragged to the beach without any preparation, and decides to hunt around the unique environment for stuff to make the day more enjoyable. It’s meant to be sort of Metroid-ish, if the upgrades were all either in your head or laughably mundane: a nice person who teaches you to climb vines, someone's sandals that you can borrow, swimming goggles, and enough counseling to not only hold your breath longer, but have the courage to get into the water at all. I’m still torn on whether the progression would be one final item or mini-quests for several, but I think it’d pace the day nicely to find more than one thing to amuse yourself with.

All that said, this has a better shot than [not a] MOD of becoming finished reality due to some actual planning in the form of a few sketches I’ve had done of the environment! One of the few interesting mechanics will be that there aren’t any doors and only one or two cave entrances - at certain points you’ll be indicated that you can move into the background or foreground, moving through the environment from a new perspective (so, for example, a branching path on a cliff over the beach will have two exits: one into the mountain and one into the screen, the latter on a path that leads to a nice view of the sun. Going into the mountain will start you on the left side of the screen heading right, going into the screen will start you on the right heading left, kind of like Super Paper Mario if it was always 2D). I rather like my cliff/mountain over the ocean, and all of the little nooks it allows for, so I took advantage of the picture I had in my head.

I still ran into some lengthy issues, though, as someone with my levels of rust will.

• First was that I wasted a long time just thinking of the mod's name (wasting time perfecting aesthetics before any substance is done is a terrible habit of mine!), in addition to trying to figure out how to make a completely wiped Cave Story to mod cleanly on (I’m still not sure how BL's “new” option is supposed to work, this turned out to not matter, and I went back to editing from Start Point as I once did).[/*]
• Then there was Riley (as I call the intentionally ambiguous blond kid, a vibrant rehash of an old project's protagonist), whose myChar was lots of fun to make but took forever, and the endless tinkering with physics I did to make a human character play more, well, human. [/*]
• And finally there was even more aesthetic work: my title (which is intentionally pure garbage right now, and even that took more time than I would have liked u.u), the pointless flourishes of the textbox and the hard lesson that is tilesets and tiletypes. The latter, and the realization that a lot of the little effects I want to do with the environment will need to be custom, is why I gave up the ghost on getting this finished for the contest.[/*]
• ...oh! Right! Also tiling takes a long time, moreso when your environment is a little on the huge side and you’re just learning. I didn’t do much tiling for [not a] MOD and this is about as good of a crash course as I’ll get, since I have stuff on paper this time![/*]

So with so much written, here’s why I wanted to write this: ★a magical moment involving water★. As noted earlier, I’ve been messing with the protagonist's physics for a long while now using the helpful submission to Noxid's Hackinator. A light, young human moves quickly but with a shorter jump and heavier fall, because I still headcanon that scout robots like Quote were explicitly made for jumping but still weighed down enough to focus on long-term movement more than sprints.

What really vexed me was the water - I hate the idea of a human just sinking to the bottom and walking/jumping down there. Setting gravity to a negative value fixes that by causing the protagonist to bob up and down in the water (affected by the heavier gravity I set in air), simulating a swim up for breath and then a dive back down, but this created the issue of not letting you go any lower (necessary to enter a watery cave below the first beach). Holding the jump button would let you hang in the water without floating up, so I did more experimenting and finally found it a few hours ago!

Rising gravity seems to affect how quickly you lose upwards momentum when holding the jump button. By setting it to a much higher value than what I initially had, I found that it allowed you to make little dips down into the water so long as jump is held! It works so much better than I initially dreamed I could manage without ASM, I don’t even care that it causes Riley to spasm when you try to keep diving onto the floor.

Alright, I’m finally mostly done. One last thing before I go:

★Short term goals★
- Figure out the exact sequence of upgrades, where in the cliffs and beach you get them, and draw out the remaining alternate views/side areas. This is not easy, but it’s very important to have a vision.
- Somehow manage to whip up appropriately dark ocean water. The main issue is water slope tiles, because background water tiles don’t come in those flavors and thus colored-in water will be drawn over you for those.
- Make extra myChars for the visual upgrades. Swimming really has no animation, so maybe the flippers can be implied, if they’re included at all.
Finish tiling the first view.

For the people that toiled to get an entry done: great job, seriously. You took a slightly tough theme and didn’t shy away from it! As the purpose of these contests is to spur good design and creativity, I’m pretty excited about the fact that you’re collectively working to build up a grand cache of finished, creative Cave Story mods to point people towards. Thanks for your hard work ~w~

 

addendum:
for a fun game, try to guess which islands/maps were made by me and which ones were made by Matt

 

Okay, so submissions have been closed for awhile now and I'm releasing the official entry pool:

Google Drive Folder | Dropbox Folder

Judging, handling of the community vote, and handling of prizes will commence in the following months.

Best of luck to everyone!

---

Official business aside, let me note that me and Dunc literally tried to make our mods within the last weekend of the competition. I have never been so stressed in my little free time before, and Dunc had to dust the cobwebs and relearn some basics. Tis a very wide variety of skill and dedication in this pool.

(Oh, and yes, I fucking know about my title screen being unchanged, it slipped my mind and now I'm going to be up all night crying).

 

@Thomas Xin is your mod even safe to run? Im hearing from a lot of people that they cant even run it.

 

@Thomas Xin is your mod even safe to run? Im hearing from a lot of people that they cant even run it.

Me and some others have been running it at various stages, but I'm not fully aware of everything it does behind the scenes

 

CTD2 doesn't work for me

 

The mod crashes right when I open it.

 

streaming mods rn

 

My supposedly expensive computer (i7 6700HQ 2.6 GHz, GTX 970M) can run Txin's mod. However, it's running at an amazing 1 FPS, with CPU 0 clocking in at 100% capacity with no apparent workload on the graphics card or the other CPUs.
So even though I can run it, I sure can't play it. If you want this mod to be as flashy as possible, consider spending some time optimizing its performances (and less time programming in useless particle generators maybe). I'd wager that the mod would look more impressive if it ran smoothly on computers that are owned by regular people.

 

CTD2 isn't playable here either. I got it to boot but without turning the transparency off I get a max of 7 FPS on the menu, and with the transparency off stuff flickers constantly.

Also, I was unable to exit the game. I had to use taskmanager.

 

Update: after turning transparency off (thanks Omen), I can play just fine (65 FPS). Consider leaving it off by default maybe? I struggled to reach that pause menu.

EDIT : especially since the setting isn't saved, you have to go back to the pause menu whenever you open the game.

 

I sure wish that this isn't the case for me.

 

I probably won't set the time aside to look at the mods myself so Doors' stream was a godsend. I'm going to drop my opinions in here based on what i've seen. Gotta note that I sometimes had tabbed out to play some Disgaea 2.

Spoiler

Spoiler: Season's submission

This might as well be the most vanilla mod of this year's modcon, though this isnt necessarily a bad thing.
What is easy to notice is that this mod focuses a bunch on it's aesthetics and story, which I wasn't surprised by considering the creator. Though this gets a little in the way of the gameplay. Especially considering how descriptive it is. Have you perhaps considered writing big stories, Seasons?
What is great to see is that of all the mods, most enemies here look the most unique, I dont even know anything that could be conpared with the snakes! Sadly however, this trait dwindled a little later on, and the swarm of crabs and the big blue snake can be really hard.
Overall, I'd say it looks a little interesting, and there are a few unique parts here and there. But there isnt much else to point out.

Spoiler: Dunc's submission

If there ever is a good way to use the word calm, it's here. This short little mod messing and puzzling around with switches that control the water's height, combined with a very short booster 0.8. The first thing that caught my attention though, is the really calm and cute music. It was really lovely, and I felt like that combined with how everything looked in general gave off a really great feeling.
Overall I'd say that while this mod is a bit on the short side, it's ambeance made it pretty good.

Spoiler: Enlightened's submission

After a little silly intro, a quite large stage appears thatis entirely underwater! To keep the player alive, a weapon is goven that can give a short moment of air, although it looked like the ammo could've been a bit less. Apparently, the whole thing ends up being a loop. And the enemies are just the same as ever (except that their sprites were nice).
Overall this is something with an interesting mechanic, but doesnt have much else to note, really.

Spoiler: Noxid's submission

Now this mod, it really shows good usage on asm (this is god tier levels compared to the next, but more on that below.). This felt more of a unique game than a cave story mod, even with it's own UI and a weapon that slashes! The music is enjoyable and the the map system looks great.
Overall its not hard to say that this is very amazing, and I would not be surprised if this took at least a month to code up.

Now I've saved the obvious worst for last.

Spoiler: Txin's submission

I want to be as unbiased as possible, but this just is bad in presentation, no matter how you look at it. Most people(including doors) being unable to run it at all, being about the same thing as last year, using loopholes in the rules to be allowed...
It's not hard to tell I dont think i could enjoy this really. The transparency (active on default!) can lag on the greatest beasts. And I don't even want to run it because I can't even trust that this does nothing funny to my laptop!
Once I saw a screenshot of the menu, I noticed an insane amount of numbers in the top right corner, too much information!
I can already guess that this will be a simple tower defense game, with nothing else on it, so even if it ran like a velociraptor, who said it'd be fun to play?
Overall, I'd say that there could have been potential here, that has been thrown into the gutter thanks to gimmicky things such as the transparency and the menu. I don't want to be rude or anything but really, I already think the whole loopholing is totally unfair.

 

txin I really wanted this to work but my PC wouldn't even let me open up the zip folder containing the mod's files. I wish I was joking.