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

According to?

the mod??? It states it in the intro. Did you even play it?

 

holy fucking shit,

 

the mod??? It states it in the intro.

Ah, I see.

Did you even play it?

Did you hear that I don't even want to play/trust it?

 

yes but is it a tropical cave?
whether the cave in ctd2 looks "tropical" or not doesn't matter, since ctd2 takes place on a tropical island, therefore every area is tropical.

I guess that means that it can't ever be cold in a place that's usually hot, right?

 

Did you hear that I don't even want to play/trust it?

I don't see why.

 

well it really depends on the tree. Palm trees are tropical.

This is where i stop you right here and now. Palm trees being a tropical plant is a huge misconception. They're actually more accustomed to thrive in the desert than in the tropics.

 

This is where i stop you right here and now. Palm trees being a tropical plant is a huge misconception. They're actually more accustomed to thrive in the desert than in the tropics.

people still consider them "tropical", whatever that means.

 

look it's really not that complicated
palm trees on a beach next to the sea? unrealistic but looks tropical
a cave tileset with a read-me note saying "this happens on an island"? technically canon but doesn't look tropical

you're supposed to be aiming for a recognizable trope, not be a smartass

 

Let's play some mods:

CTD2:

Spoiler

Oh wow it actually runs, I'm a bit surprised after hearing all the horror stories about it not running so far.

How exactly am I supposed to hit a multiple of 25 with the number picker being so slidey? You should just limit it to increments of 25 if that's best, really. Not very good design on this number picker.

What gun is this supposed to be? I can't tell from this sprite due to the snake icon blending in with the block colors. Also, I'm not a fan of how the game is reading mouse inputs even when the window has lost focus.

Also not a fan of how I have to use the arrows and Z to select a choice here, when the mouse seems to control everything else. It'd be better if the game used one or the other (and had an explanation of the controls at the start?). I understand there's a README but you have to understand that most players will not read the README, so it's better for this information to be within the game itself.

Oh wow I'm already starting to get frames drops into the 30s. And this isn't a terrible PC either, it can run Rocket League at its highest settings.

At least turning off transparency helps a bit, but now a lot of sprites flicker for some reason (including critter sprites). Kind of makes it hard to see what's going on?

Jesus is this all turrets? Guess I know where I'm building spurs next.

Oh good the rainbow critter is still here. Guess I'm not playing this anymore. I survived the other rounds all without getting hurt and this tanky enemy just 1 hit KOs you? Talk about balanced gameplay right there

Also I'd like to take a moment to talk about the HUD, since it's terrible. It's just a row of numbers and I have barely any idea what any of them mean besides the FPS counter and the money counter. It'd be nice if this was explained somewhere in game and/or if they were labelled or something.

Overall this just seems like a slightly beefed up CTD except you didn't really fix any of the problems the first game had and instead just added new features (the snazzy title screen stuff was kind of neat). Also it doesn't fit the theme so... why is it in this contest again?

Shipwrecked:

Spoiler

I'm not sure where you got the title screen art but it's pretty obvious that it's been stretched here. Try stretching it without interpolation maybe, since the anti-aliasing looks kind of ugly.

The sound effect used for the drip here (the item pickup sound effect) doesn't really sound like a drip and is kind of distracting due to that fact. You should use a different sound effect, or maybe just no sound effect at all. I wouldn't have commented on it but since this dialogue occurs 3 times in a row it sticks out to me.

The background tiles and foreground tiles here are just different enough to be told apart, and I really do mean just barely different enough. I don't know if this will be much of an issue going on, but these back tiles could stand to be a bit darker, they blend in too well with the foreground tiles right now IMO.

Oh hey we have music now, so this would be a good time to talk about it. The composition sounds alright but the instrument choice leaves a bit to be desired, it's using those very buzzy waves that are a bit much on the ears at their current volume I think. In general the instruments could be mixed/balanced better, volume wise (the whole song sounds a bit too loud).

Also the scrolling background here is kind of ugly and suffers from the same stretching issues that were present in the title screen art. And I'm on an island, right? Why is the water scrolling by so fast?? Is this island moving??? (If not this is an issue, I would say. I don't know the full story here yet though.)

This door really blends into the background tiles here, I almost walked past it without knowing what it was.

Oh hey geno's forest music. Nice. This song sounds much better than the last.

And now we get to meet not Toroko. The last area was pretty alright, I enjoyed the mini-puzzle with having to drop the metal block to get across the water.

Oh, another snake fight. I guess I'll comment on this now, but I don't like having to fight the snakes as a boss, or fighting them at all really. They're okay as normal enemies since you can just ignore them normally, but as an enemy you're forced to fight they become annoying, since their movement is pretty random so it's hard to come up with a good strategy to attack them.

Also the stampys (flying dudes) have this issue where their eyes are transparent? Their spritesheet must be messed up in this mod.

There, that only took like 20 tries. Not a fan of this fight, mainly due to the snakes random behavior.

You didn't help me at all during that snake fight, why should I be doing you any favors?

Apparently no is not an option, since this dialogue just loops. Oh well.

Is the rest of this game just cutscenes now?

How did not-toroko learn to speak just from books? I don't think that's how learning a language works. Sure, she could maybe learn to read it in some form, but speak?

Okay yeah this is just cutscenes now. I can only guess at this point you ran out of time and had all the writing done already or something.

What? There's more gameplay? Okay then, here we go.

Oh hey, it's not king.

And he's not speaking English (although I suppose this isn't surprising).

Very engaging dialogue, yes.

These doors still blend in with the background, albeit a bit less with the ropes to help differentiate.

I like the explanation for why this guy puts out the fire, letting me have a reusable save point.

The sideways doors in this downed plane is a nice touch.

I think I found a bug. This is where the 2nd shield in the ship used to be, but instead of clearing out the room I went into here I just went in and out after talking to the terminal, and the shield went away all on its own. I don't think that was supposed to happen?

Did you lower how many iframes the player gets? Either that or there's an event trigger here since I took 2 hits right after another, which stacked the damage and killed me. Either way, this is bad design and this combat grows more and more tiresome (especially since I can't reuse save points nearby).

(Actually, looking back on it, this is probably caused by you having all the enemies call events on death, which resets the iframes. Either way it's something you'd want to fix or avoid)

I don't get why all the text logs here have batteries that are about to die. I don't think it really adds anything to the plot? Would it be too hard to let them sit where they are and let us read them again?

Oh hey we're back in the village again. How convenient that not-toroko wants to ride on my back once more.

I guess I'll just stand here and swing the oar until the snake runs into it. Safe!

Please tell me this cat means what I think it means.

Fuck, he's just a save point. How long is this mod? Are you really supposed to be able to finish this in 20 minutes or less??

There, I did it. The last boss fights weren't too bad, but you really needed to level up the oar over the gun at the start of the fight, which once I learned made things much easier. Overall having the pistol require ammo just made things more tedious/less fun, really.

So it wasn't too bad, had an interesting-ish story but the fights/bosses bogged things down somewhat. You need to either scale down the difficulty a bit or give the players a better means of fighting, since the shitty range the oar has doesn't carry you very far throughout the whole game, and the pistol works better but having such limited ammo really prevents you from using it well enough. At least this mod fits the theme, despite going probably at least an hour over the time limit that was recommended on my first playthrough.

More reviews/thoughts later.

 

Let's play some mods:

Shipwrecked:

Spoiler

I'm not sure where you got the title screen art but it's pretty obvious that it's been stretched here. Try stretching it without interpolation maybe, since the anti-aliasing looks kind of ugly.

The sound effect used for the drip here (the item pickup sound effect) doesn't really sound like a drip and is kind of distracting due to that fact. You should use a different sound effect, or maybe just no sound effect at all. I wouldn't have commented on it but since this dialogue occurs 3 times in a row it sticks out to me.

The background tiles and foreground tiles here are just different enough to be told apart, and I really do mean just barely different enough. I don't know if this will be much of an issue going on, but these back tiles could stand to be a bit darker, they blend in too well with the foreground tiles right now IMO.

Oh hey we have music now, so this would be a good time to talk about it. The composition sounds alright but the instrument choice leaves a bit to be desired, it's using those very buzzy waves that are a bit much on the ears at their current volume I think. In general the instruments could be mixed/balanced better, volume wise (the whole song sounds a bit too loud).

Also the scrolling background here is kind of ugly and suffers from the same stretching issues that were present in the title screen art. And I'm on an island, right? Why is the water scrolling by so fast?? Is this island moving??? (If not this is an issue, I would say. I don't know the full story here yet though.)

This door really blends into the background tiles here, I almost walked past it without knowing what it was.

Oh hey geno's forest music. Nice. This song sounds much better than the last.

And now we get to meet not Toroko. The last area was pretty alright, I enjoyed the mini-puzzle with having to drop the metal block to get across the water.

Oh, another snake fight. I guess I'll comment on this now, but I don't like having to fight the snakes as a boss, or fighting them at all really. They're okay as normal enemies since you can just ignore them normally, but as an enemy you're forced to fight they become annoying, since their movement is pretty random so it's hard to come up with a good strategy to attack them.

Also the stampys (flying dudes) have this issue where their eyes are transparent? Their spritesheet must be messed up in this mod.

There, that only took like 20 tries. Not a fan of this fight, mainly due to the snakes random behavior.

You didn't help me at all during that snake fight, why should I be doing you any favors?

Apparently no is not an option, since this dialogue just loops. Oh well.

Is the rest of this game just cutscenes now?

How did not-toroko learn to speak just from books? I don't think that's how learning a language works. Sure, she could maybe learn to read it in some form, but speak?

Okay yeah this is just cutscenes now. I can only guess at this point you ran out of time and had all the writing done already or something.

What? There's more gameplay? Okay then, here we go.

Oh hey, it's not king.

And he's not speaking English (although I suppose this isn't surprising).

Very engaging dialogue, yes.

These doors still blend in with the background, albeit a bit less with the ropes to help differentiate.

I like the explanation for why this guy puts out the fire, letting me have a reusable save point.

The sideways doors in this downed plane is a nice touch.

I think I found a bug. This is where the 2nd shield in the ship used to be, but instead of clearing out the room I went into here I just went in and out after talking to the terminal, and the shield went away all on its own. I don't think that was supposed to happen?

Did you lower how many iframes the player gets? Either that or there's an event trigger here since I took 2 hits right after another, which stacked the damage and killed me. Either way, this is bad design and this combat grows more and more tiresome (especially since I can't reuse save points nearby).

(Actually, looking back on it, this is probably caused by you having all the enemies call events on death, which resets the iframes. Either way it's something you'd want to fix or avoid)

I don't get why all the text logs here have batteries that are about to die. I don't think it really adds anything to the plot? Would it be too hard to let them sit where they are and let us read them again?

Oh hey we're back in the village again. How convenient that not-toroko wants to ride on my back once more.

I guess I'll just stand here and swing the oar until the snake runs into it. Safe!

Please tell me this cat means what I think it means.

Fuck, he's just a save point. How long is this mod? Are you really supposed to be able to finish this in 20 minutes or less??

There, I did it. The last boss fights weren't too bad, but you really needed to level up the oar over the gun at the start of the fight, which once I learned made things much easier. Overall having the pistol require ammo just made things more tedious/less fun, really.

So it wasn't too bad, had an interesting-ish story but the fights/bosses bogged things down somewhat. You need to either scale down the difficulty a bit or give the players a better means of fighting, since the shitty range the oar has doesn't carry you very far throughout the whole game, and the pistol works better but having such limited ammo really prevents you from using it well enough. At least this mod fits the theme, despite going probably at least an hour over the time limit that was recommended on my first playthrough.

Might as well respond to a few things you mentioned:

Spoiler: Response to Feedback

- The odd choice of drip SFX was actually to mask the sound that plays whenever you have an item added to your inventory. It probably wasn't the most fitting application, but I thought it'd be better than it randomly playing.

- The reason the lower sections of the water background scroll so quickly is because this is using bkFog's scrolling; felt weird having a static background in this environment, and my testers agreed that the effect worked. If there was a way to lower the scroll speed that I knew of, though, I would have gladly done it.

- I agree that the snakes were a difficult enemy to fight with the oar, but no other AI type really fit that kind of enemy other than the Midorin. Personally, I would try to short-hop over them and fire down as I pass over.

- Strange how the Stumpy enemies had transparent eyes given that I never consciously touched the sprites themselves.

- Funny how you thought that I ran out of time to work when you got to the exposition bit after saving Toko. I started brainstorming for and working on my entry the day the contest began.

- No, the 2nd shield isn't supposed to disappear until after you clear the corresponding room. Given that the Wrecked Airlab was such a tangle of flags to make sure each shield would disappear and stay gone, I'm not surprised that there was a hiccup somewhere in the TSC. I am a little surprised, though, that I didn't find it on my own; I could have sworn that I checked and rechecked all the doors.

- I was painfully aware of events resetting invincibility frames the entire time I was making these encounters, but I didn't know of any other way to have the game keep track of how many more enemies had to die before the next wave.

- The text logs constantly dying was a matter of consistency, really. It wouldn't have hurt if they remained interactable, though.

- You could also level the gun up for Phase 1 of the final boss and then level up the oar during Phase 2, but the better choice in general was to use the free levels on the oar, yeah.

- As for the combat, I was hoping that after spending enough time with the oar the player would have had enough practice to effectively use it in close-quarters combat. I wasn't expecting them to solely use it during areas like the Wrecked Airlab, though, and that brings me to my other point. Even though the gun had limited ammo, I beefed up its damage to make killing the next several enemies trivial. After a few kills, a savvy player might have looked at the damage numbers and discovered that the best way to use the gun was to weaken an enemy from afar and then finish it off with a swing of the oar. With this new method, the gun could take care of up to 24 enemies as opposed to just 12 excluding any missed shots.

- Been hearing a few comments on the length, but I talked with a few of the contest coordinators/helpers and got the OK on it. While it was suggested to make the mods shorter, we were free to go over if we both had sufficient reason to do so and weren't going to just add filler.

Glad you liked the mod... at least, if I'm interpreting "not too bad" correctly. Here's to hoping that you enjoy yourself with the other three entries.

 

Since seasons responded to the feedback, I might as well do so too.

Let's play some mods:

CTD2:

Spoiler

Oh wow it actually runs, I'm a bit surprised after hearing all the horror stories about it not running so far.

Well the compatibility issues were in fact a little specific to the hardware used...

How exactly am I supposed to hit a multiple of 25 with the number picker being so slidey? You should just limit it to increments of 25 if that's best, really. Not very good design on this number picker.

The readme tells you that the W key rounds off to the nearest 25, but I couldn't fit that into the message box there, and any more text causes the input there to completely lock up.

What gun is this supposed to be? I can't tell from this sprite due to the snake icon blending in with the block colors. Also, I'm not a fan of how the game is reading mouse inputs even when the window has lost focus.

Yeah, it tracks clicking when you're building a tower. I was trying to fix that but ran out of time. As for the towers being hard to see, maybe that's just with the snake since its colour matches the tower box under a greyscale filter...

Also not a fan of how I have to use the arrows and Z to select a choice here, when the mouse seems to control everything else. It'd be better if the game used one or the other (and had an explanation of the controls at the start?). I understand there's a README but you have to understand that most players will not read the README, so it's better for this information to be within the game itself.

Don't the S and W keys work? Doesn't left and right click work?

Oh wow I'm already starting to get frames drops into the 30s. And this isn't a terrible PC either, it can run Rocket League at its highest settings.

Yes, the first level is surprisingly laggy. The transparent water was removed in the compatibility version, which helped a bit

At least turning off transparency helps a bit, but now a lot of sprites flicker for some reason (including critter sprites). Kind of makes it hard to see what's going on?

The flickering is intentional. It was deliberately made so that the player can still tell between fading and regular critters.

Jesus is this all turrets? Guess I know where I'm building spurs next.

Maybe that's not the best idea...

Oh good the rainbow critter is still here. Guess I'm not playing this anymore. I survived the other rounds all without getting hurt and this tanky enemy just 1 hit KOs you? Talk about balanced gameplay right there

OK, I have absolutely no idea how you actually managed to lose here. As mentioned in previous posts, the rainbow critter is amazingly weak to level 4 snake, machine gun and spur towers, requiring only two blasts from the spur to kill. Even without them, I seriously cannot seem to figure out how you managed to let it through, unless you released multiple waves at the same time

Also I'd like to take a moment to talk about the HUD, since it's terrible. It's just a row of numbers and I have barely any idea what any of them mean besides the FPS counter and the money counter. It'd be nice if this was explained somewhere in game and/or if they were labelled or something.

Oops. They were going to be removed, if I'd had enough time.

Overall this just seems like a slightly beefed up CTD except you didn't really fix any of the problems the first game had and instead just added new features (the snazzy title screen stuff was kind of neat). Also it doesn't fit the theme so... why is it in this contest again?

OK well, I'm just going to say, I fixed over 5 of the issues from the original Ctd, including the difficulty of placing towers to the music getting boring.
I had in fact made the first three levels so easy that people were complaining about that.
Also, I tried as hard as I could to make this mod fit the theme, and maybe if you had played a bit more you would've seen more (I wanted more people to try out critters mode) , but anyway, thanks for playing.

 

Also, I tried as hard as I could to make this mod fit the theme, and maybe if you had played a bit more you would've seen more (I wanted more people to try out critters mode) , but anyway, thanks for playing.

maybe instead of trying to force a mod within your comfort zone into the contest you should have brainstormed an idea that was actually based on the theme

design game around theme, not the other way around

 

maybe instead of trying to force a mod within your comfort zone into the contest you should have brainstormed an idea that was actually based on the theme

design game around theme, not the other way around

I think you've already seen how well I do in making other kinds of mods. It was either that, or not submit an entry altogether. I've already given up on 'regular' mods

 

I think you've already seen how well I do in making other kinds of mods. It was either that, or not submit an entry altogether. I've already given up on 'regular' mods

Okay, it seems you are in a rough spot, shaken up by all of this. I'm putting on my finest Buddhist robes and will give you a personal sermon. I'm spending a two full hours on what I'm about to say, so take the following text to heart:

Spoiler: A lot of words

I see you as a reflection of me. Perhaps a little exaggerated reflection, but nonetheless an alternate standing in the mirror.

My first mod Sucked with tons of fake difficulty and unfair/confusing moments for the player. You literally had to quit the game to kill an enemy, and it never explained that. People actually stopped playing at that part with a (at least to me at the time) easy 3 second solution.

I quit that and instead went the route of Carnage Clash, with fighting more and more bosses at once, up to 10 or so bosses in one room, and procedural generation and such to frost the cake. Pure invincibility frames and a shop system that basically forced you to get the health upgrades or die, and It sucked even more. No joke the prize for beating the regular game was being able to just spawn everything possible in the room and hoping you can spam your weapons fast enough... isn't that just fun and dandy?

It turns out modding is rather hard to get right and an imperfect science, and honestly you are doing fucking rad for a 16-something who joined in 2015. We're all imperfect and every single modcon submission, both this year and last, are far from flawless. Heck every mod is far from flawless. I would mention that CTD 1 was my favorite mod of last year but that's besides the point.

We make mistakes. We have people seemingly angry at us over something we made. We have our comfort zones and we have our aspects of the hobby we don't like to touch. You are no different than the rest of us.

Now here's the important question: Why do you mod?

If you are purely making these for your own enjoyment, then despite what anyone else thinks or says, you are doing just fine with CTD 2. You had fun making it, you broke the barriers and exploited things you only dreamed of months prior. CTD 2 will always be your creation and vision. If society says your daughter is ugly as fuck, you still love her with all your heart and she will always be your crowning achievement. It's the reason you wake up every morning. You can make whatever you want, share whatever of it you want, and decide to drop a project if you so desire. There's really no obligations except your own desire.

There's also the other purpose for modding: to share and bring joy to others. You already know what I'm about to say here. That part of sharing your creations to others for them to enjoy requires it to be... well... enjoyable to those will play it. Unfortunately the CS mod-playing community is small, so while there are groups that enjoy "I Want to be The Guy" and "Kazio" type gameplay, or desire for strategy games with lots of spectacle and effects/features, it's not as wide what's accepted here.

And yes, I see the toxicity of the situation, and the people seemingly getting upset on a personal level over the existence of this mod. It's a disgusting group mentality that since everyone else is hating on your work that it's okay to ridicule it way beyond any criticism that could be deemed constructive. CTD 2 is partially a scapegoat for people to feel better about their own work. Truth is you did something radically different and have one of the most unique mods out there, and most of us here can't ever achieve something like that.
[/rant]

But here's the deal breaker: You submitted this mod into the contest, so it will be judged under theme and playability. You can't hide under the idea of "I made this for myself, this is how I wanted it made, this is what I do" when being compared in a tight pile with money on the line dictated by the community. It's a sequel/remake of your previous work, so people will be expecting more from it. Also, as your friend and someone who followed development and anticipated being able to play this since early this year, the tropical theme and its submission into modcon itself seems like an afterthought, and it's a stretch to say this wasn't merely adapted into the contest guidelines.

I'm starting to get tired writing this from 3-5 AM half awake, and I might have rambled a bit, but here's the actual main thing I want to say:

Had it not been in the tiny modcon pool, even with the compatibility issues and unfinished nature, I feel CTD 2 would have had a better launch. Contests are harder since they require pleasing people or will be criticized so that a victor can eventually be announced. Outside that though, you don't have to abandon "normal" mods completely. Honestly you should make whatever you want to make, and stop worrying about appealing to everyone. If you are having way more fun making a certain type of mod, than you should be continuing that and disregard any suggestions to give it up. If you yourself don't want to make a "normal" mod, whatever that even means, than that's alright, but don't blame it on insecurities, it's just because your interest lies elsewhere.

There's an awkward balance to all of this. I still get people telling me that Cave (No Story) should have been shorter, or it should have been designed to be engaging. I don't give a damn about what people think about that mod, it exists the way I want it to and anything different would go against my self-indulgence. The opposite is true for some other projects, I'm specifically wanting as many people as possible to get something positive out of the ending to Enthology, and so I'll compromise my vision to make it more presentable to the audience I'm hosting.

TL;DR: Modding is a self-defined balance of making things for yourself and sharing something for others to enjoy, and I never want you to feel pressured into making things a certain way if it ruins the fun of the hobby. The contest muddles this a bit but I'm gonna ask you to take a vacation, celebrate the achievements of your work, accept what it is, and figure out what drives you to modding, whether its yourself or the joy of others, and keep doing it.

I'm going to lie down now and go into a deep sleep, and about 60% of this post was to reassure myself to keep doing this, but I feel you could use the message too. In the morning I probably won't even remember I wrote this.

 

Oh, you got 3 warning points, you say? Please, do tell.

 

Okay, it seems you are in a rough spot, shaken up by all of this. I'm putting on my finest Buddhist robes and will give you a personal sermon. I'm spending a two full hours on what I'm about to say, so take the following text to heart:

Spoiler: A lot of words

I see you as a reflection of me. Perhaps a little exaggerated reflection, but nonetheless an alternate standing in the mirror.

My first mod Sucked with tons of fake difficulty and unfair/confusing moments for the player. You literally had to quit the game to kill an enemy, and it never explained that. People actually stopped playing at that part with a (at least to me at the time) easy 3 second solution.

I quit that and instead went the route of Carnage Clash, with fighting more and more bosses at once, up to 10 or so bosses in one room, and procedural generation and such to frost the cake. Pure invincibility frames and a shop system that basically forced you to get the health upgrades or die, and It sucked even more. No joke the prize for beating the regular game was being able to just spawn everything possible in the room and hoping you can spam your weapons fast enough... isn't that just fun and dandy?

It turns out modding is rather hard to get right and an imperfect science, and honestly you are doing fucking rad for a 16-something who joined in 2015. We're all imperfect and every single modcon submission, both this year and last, are far from flawless. Heck every mod is far from flawless. I would mention that CTD 1 was my favorite mod of last year but that's besides the point.

We make mistakes. We have people seemingly angry at us over something we made. We have our comfort zones and we have our aspects of the hobby we don't like to touch. You are no different than the rest of us.

Now here's the important question: Why do you mod?

If you are purely making these for your own enjoyment, then despite what anyone else thinks or says, you are doing just fine with CTD 2. You had fun making it, you broke the barriers and exploited things you only dreamed of months prior. CTD 2 will always be your creation and vision. If society says your daughter is ugly as fuck, you still love her with all your heart and she will always be your crowning achievement. It's the reason you wake up every morning. You can make whatever you want, share whatever of it you want, and decide to drop a project if you so desire. There's really no obligations except your own desire.

There's also the other purpose for modding: to share and bring joy to others. You already know what I'm about to say here. That part of sharing your creations to others for them to enjoy requires it to be... well... enjoyable to those will play it. Unfortunately the CS mod-playing community is small, so while there are groups that enjoy "I Want to be The Guy" and "Kazio" type gameplay, or desire for strategy games with lots of spectacle and effects/features, it's not as wide what's accepted here.

And yes, I see the toxicity of the situation, and the people seemingly getting upset on a personal level over the existence of this mod. It's a disgusting group mentality that since everyone else is hating on your work that it's okay to ridicule it way beyond any criticism that could be deemed constructive. CTD 2 is partially a scapegoat for people to feel better about their own work. Truth is you did something radically different and have one of the most unique mods out there, and most of us here can't ever achieve something like that.
[/rant]

But here's the deal breaker: You submitted this mod into the contest, so it will be judged under theme and playability. You can't hide under the idea of "I made this for myself, this is how I wanted it made, this is what I do" when being compared in a tight pile with money on the line dictated by the community. It's a sequel/remake of your previous work, so people will be expecting more from it. Also, as your friend and someone who followed development and anticipated being able to play this since early this year, the tropical theme and its submission into modcon itself seems like an afterthought, and it's a stretch to say this wasn't merely adapted into the contest guidelines.

I'm starting to get tired writing this from 3-5 AM half awake, and I might have rambled a bit, but here's the actual main thing I want to say:

Had it not been in the tiny modcon pool, even with the compatibility issues and unfinished nature, I feel CTD 2 would have had a better launch. Contests are harder since they require pleasing people or will be criticized so that a victor can eventually be announced. Outside that though, you don't have to abandon "normal" mods completely. Honestly you should make whatever you want to make, and stop worrying about appealing to everyone. If you are having way more fun making a certain type of mod, than you should be continuing that and disregard any suggestions to give it up. If you yourself don't want to make a "normal" mod, whatever that even means, than that's alright, but don't blame it on insecurities, it's just because your interest lies elsewhere.

There's an awkward balance to all of this. I still get people telling me that Cave (No Story) should have been shorter, or it should have been designed to be engaging. I don't give a damn about what people think about that mod, it exists the way I want it to and anything different would go against my self-indulgence. The opposite is true for some other projects, I'm specifically wanting as many people as possible to get something positive out of the ending to Enthology, and so I'll compromise my vision to make it more presentable to the audience I'm hosting.

TL;DR: Modding is a self-defined balance of making things for yourself and sharing something for others to enjoy, and I never want you to feel pressured into making things a certain way if it ruins the fun of the hobby. The contest muddles this a bit but I'm gonna ask you to take a vacation, celebrate the achievements of your work, accept what it is, and figure out what drives you to modding, whether its yourself or the joy of others, and keep doing it.

I'm going to lie down now and go into a deep sleep, and about 60% of this post was to reassure myself to keep doing this, but I feel you could use the message too. In the morning I probably won't even remember I wrote this.

Spoiler: Oops I better put this in a spoiler too

OK I just woke up, and saw this. I have absolutely no idea how to respond to this here, but I'll just mention that I'd always wanted to make my own games. I'd played games like both versions of nsmb, and wanted really bad to make something like that (super Mario maker wasn't out back then). I also had a fun time composing music, but at the time, there was no use for anything I composed. Anyway, cs was introduced to me by a friend, and as soon as I saw that it could be modded, I made a sequel, or RoB. Now this was heavily criticised by others, to the point where people were telling me to stop modding. Well there was no chance that would happen at that point, so I instead started making mods that were unique, I learned assembly, and generally had fun writing entire sections of code myself.
So anyway, ctd2 was going to be the last actual mod I was going to make, I had plans to make ctd3 as a separate engine fangame of cs (the cs engine was starting to badly hamper my assembly coding). I was going to take a break from here anyway; I won't have much time for the next year or so because of school.
As for the criticism, I'm just going to say that I was not expecting people to behave like this. I did expect a couple of people to attack the less finished/polished part of my mod, but was actually shocked to see that nearly everyone was completely ignoring the new features of the mod, ignoring pretty much everything I spent time on, and just assaulted every single possible part of the mod that make it less user-friendly/less fun.

Anyway Enlight, thanks for posting this, I was expecting someone at some point to post a massive page about this situation, but wasn't expecting you to do it. So thanks for being someone who cares.

 

look wanting to make games is great but you've got to try. my last message was straight up telling you that you tried to force your mod into the contest instead of trying to make a mod that fit the theme and you literally responded with "yeah but i gave up" so that's that i guess

you're missing so many fundamentals that a game needs to have, and even if your technical prowess is pretty on point (it seems like it is from what i've seen) you totally ignore any criticism on your other parts, and instead decide to make your mod fucking break on old operating systems because apparently that's player-centric design these days.

if you ever decide you want to actually start trying then hell, you've got my support

 

look wanting to make games is great but you've got to try. my last message was straight up telling you that you tried to force your mod into the contest instead of trying to make a mod that fit the theme and you literally responded with "yeah but i gave up" so that's that i guess

you're missing so many fundamentals that a game needs to have, and even if your technical prowess is pretty on point (it seems like it is from what i've seen) you totally ignore any criticism on your other parts, and instead decide to make your mod fucking break on old operating systems because apparently that's player-centric design these days.

if you ever decide you want to actually start trying then hell, you've got my support

OK you've got to stop commenting about whether I """tried""" in making my mod. I did not fucking "decide" to make it break on older operating systems, and the mod states in the intro where it takes place, not the readme. The readme tells you the technical stuff like controls and achievements, which you would've seen if you actually tried to open the compatibility version, which I am confident will work properly on your system. Currently the only one who still has a problem with it is TLink

 

huh weird, i could've sworn i heard that repeatedly. my bad in that case, should've done better research

still though forcing a theme is not good not good and just totally giving up is even worse