An Overview on the Lifecycle of Slimes

 ~~~ Royal Archive ~~~

Year 821
Slime-Craft Guild
- Selena Arcadia Eoghan -

Slimes have been around as long as we have been alive. According to the oral traditions of our people, the land was once a vibrant place full of so many different plants and animals a single person could never count them all. The sun rose every morning to a cacophony of bird calls, beasts with hooves and horns ran wild, and the hills were covered in trees as far as the eye could see.

Today the landscape is barren. The grass that we so carefully seed in our cities has all but died out, with only the toughest kinds remaining. Some of the plants and fungi have taken on distinct slime-related qualities that deters the wild slimelins from eating them. Larger slimes used to dominate the landscape, but with our efforts at hunting and destroying their spawning pools the local flora is slowly returning to its natural state.

This overview details the general life cycle of a slime. Normal slimes go through three phases: Slimelin, Aberration, and Pool.

All slimes appear to follow this general pattern. The sheer variety of types makes this hard to classify, as some aberrations will mutate further in their life multiple times. Specific types will be discussed in detail in their own papers.

Young slimes, or Slimelins, are strange creatures that inhabit the world on a small scale. They are found hiding in crevasses, caves, or anywhere that a sufficiently small creature can hide. They are often seen eating bits of plants or fungi, or anything else that they can possibly get their bodies around.

Slimelins are scavengers, bottom feeders, and occasionally predators. They seem to absorb anything that was once living. Some have been seen eating tree roots, dirt, or even small rocks. The less digestible material is left remarkably clean near the place it was found.

Slimelins and insects appear to use each other as sport. Insects will instinctively attack a slimelin on sight. The most successful insects have hard outer armor with spikes or horns that can successfully pierce the bouncy outer skin of their prey. Less successful insects are swallowed whole by the small round creatures, disappearing into the inner gel of the slime over the course of a day.

The body of these creatures are composed of two major parts: A tough outer skin and an inner gel.

The outer skin seems to act both as a protective layer and as a muscle. It defines both the shape of the creature and acts as its first and only line of defense. It contracts or expands as a whole. The skin becomes pliable and hard when removed from the rest of the body.

The inner layer is a gooey substance that somewhat resembles tree sap. It forms a thick gel where food is broken down and energy stored for later.

All slimelins are very resilient. Their bodies are elastic; they can compress, expand, or bend themselves into odd shapes at will. They can absorb blows across their entire body, bouncing around somewhat uncontrollably in the worst case scenario. This lets them roll around, use their entire body as a battering ram, or survive seemingly impossible falls.

When a slimelin absorbs enough food to grow beyond its bounds, it heads back to its home pool to start the next phase of its life. Many young slimes will wander very far from their home

The slimelin throws itself into the pool. The outer skin is shed and re-absorbed by the pool. The gel grows hard and smooth, forming itself into a core. Part of the pool is absorbed and grows into a fully fleshed out abomination. The pool is thought to be similar to the center of an egg, with the slimelin reconstituting itself into a new form at the end.

The process is usually the same but varies in time; on average, it takes a week. Some species have been known to complete the cycle in two days, while others take an entire month to gestate. When the slime re-emerges into the world it has grown new features: a face, an individualized body that has distinct parts, and a much higher intelligence.

The newly formed core of the Slime functions at the brain of the creature, storing memories and controlling the body. If the core is removed the body remains motionless and quickly decomposes into a thick, viscous mucus. The core can survive roughly a month if left alone or exposed to the elements. It can survive much longer if fed, usually through a solution of sugar water. Storing a core inside liquid slime is not recommended as the core will reconstitute as a creature.

New adult slimes will resemble the slime from which their pool was made. They will constantly change to fit their surroundings and seem to possess an intelligence that exceeds that of other known animals. Many slimes will mimic a familiar sight in the environment, such as a plant or another creature. No slimes have been spotted mimicking humans, but we suspect it will only be a matter of time.

The exact behavior of particular types of slimes is beyond the scope of this article; every variant seems to have its own peculiarities and interests in how they see the world. Some seem to embody elements or other ideas, such as water and the wind itself.

At first, we thought that pools were the result of a large amount of corpses piled into a hole. Now we know that it is a sort of end of life stage for the species. It is not yet known what dictates that a slime turn into a pool, but they are never found close to one another. It is currently thought that pools are similar to a bee hive or a bird nest, and that the entire local area will be claimed as a territory of a single slime.

No active slimes have been observed to turn into pools. The only known transition was found by chance in the year 818 after a Tinker had found a particularly large slime midway through its metamorphosis. No slimes were observed in the area for 100 days before or after the pool was found. We suspect that the area had not been claimed yet, but the means of claiming a territory are not yet known.

The half-formed pool was burned 100 days after it was found. No slimes have been sighted in the area since. The only conclusion we can draw is that the area has been marked as a territory somehow. Unlike other burned pools, this area is still devoid of the creatures. More study needs to be done on this phenomenon to understand it better.

This concludes the overview on the life cycle of slimes. More information will be added as our understanding of these creatures grows.

 

Problem Solving Engine

I've been struggling a fair bit lately. The problem is... well, it's not. I haven't had a real problem to deal with for quite some time now. The complete lack of a problem has led me to re-analyze and re-experience everything that I can just to figure out what's going on when I have nothing that actually matters more than just sitting here. The only thing that's really clear right now is that there is something that figures things out for me. I call it the Problem Solving Engine.

The problem solving engine is that feeling in the back of your head that looks at something and tries to organize it without you needing to do anything. Its goal is to bring order and satisfaction to a world where everything can change at a moment's notice. The engine can be applied to basic survival needs or to that one boss in the video game that you couldn't get past and suddenly figured it out right before drifting off to sleep.

My problem solving engine has been focused on two questions: "How do I survive through the day?" and "What is wrong with me?" These questions are baked in analysis, fear, and necessity. The first question is rooted in the lizard brain; it's the thing that tells you that you need to survive today for the sake of living tomorrow. It's something everyone has to a reasonable extent, or we'd all stop eating and walk into traffic.

The second question is more pernicious. It's a kind of all-encompassing question that keeps turning back on itself, The question must be answered and it must be acted upon or things will never change. Without the knowledge required to answer the question, you would be forever trapped in time unable to move forward or backward or any other way that wasn't "all these things are wrong with me". The question itself has weight, power, and compelled me to act.

The only time I really got away from the survival mindset was when I found something that I really, really wanted to do. The problem solving engine could stop focusing on the ever-present questions and could start working on something else for awhile. I could forget anything else for days or weeks at a time and just immerse myself in a new game or a new place or just talking to a friend for awhile. The easiest way out was to solve a problem that was difficult and meaningful in some small way.

That was true a few months ago. It feels like an entire lifetime has passed since I finally had an answer to these questions. It's... freeing. The entire weight of my problems has been lifted off of my shoulders and is floating around in the ether somewhere else, never to bother me again.

I've been floating around in a daze. Everything felt like a dream that I could wake up from and go back to the cruddy way of life I was living before. I've been waiting for the rug to get pulled out from under me, just watching out for some small thing to set me back to before I could even think about getting here. That pernicious fear is something that has reared its ugly head, and I keep shoving it down until it drowns.

I'm mostly past that. So now what?

The past month has been mostly spent mired in nostalgia. It's been quite interesting seeing how much my preferences have changed. I've gone from escapism and guilty pleasures to unfettered creation - when my head allows it - and I feel like I've gotten more things done lately than I have most of my life.

I had a kind of pathological aversion to something that I had done before. It seemed like I kept trying to find something new and exciting or I wouldn't have any purpose in doing anything at all. There's a kind of hunger behind it; constantly seeking new information, constantly craving answers that I didn't have to solve something that couldn't be done. That problem is completely gone and I can re-experience everything to my own liking.

The problem solving engine is alive and well. In fact, the problem solving engine is doing better than ever. I don't think I could turn it off even if I wanted to. This engine lets me feel useful. My body may be a steaming pile of crud, but it's all I've got and I can do anything I set my mind to.

There's nothing stopping me anymore. There's also nothing propelling me forward. It's been weird; the problem solving engine has applied itself to that dreamlike state of "what if?" and "this is my life now" and has mostly settled on "There's a 0% chance that things will revert so badly that I have a migraine for 3 months again." I want to say that is a relief... but in reality, it's nothing.

I wanted nothing. Absolute nothing, the inability to feel and change and be anything that could be real or fake or even remembered. That kind of absolution is unsatisfying and meaningless. The absolute lack of anything that had any real meaning in my current life meant that I had no frame of reference and nothing that I actually knew I could do. I can fix things when they go wrong and I can improve things when they're bad. 

What can I do when they're good? The problem solving engine doesn't stop. It's a consuming feeling, gnawing at the edges of reality, seeping down to my very core. The feeling wants to be useful. It strives to improve my situation in all circumstances, no matter how good I may be doing. That kind of feeling doesn't go away with time; the engine hungers, never sated, always striving for satisfaction and perfection.

"What can I do when times are good?" 

That question is what I've been wrestling with since the start of this blog. I want to do something with my life. I can't stand the thought of being reduced to a drooling pile of flesh that can't do a single worthwhile thing in my life.

"I can change the past."

That... is an answer that I did not expect. What kind of crazy answer is that?! It's completely absurd to try and change what was before. We have history to respect. There are lessons to be learned from the way that we lived and grew and did the best we could at the time. Everyone makes mistakes, some worse than others, and each time we make a mistake we grow and change our behavior or perspective with the inadequacies we've stumbled into.

The very nostalgia I had been swimming around in was the answer that I had come to. Things were different back then, and I have a different idea of how things should be in my head than they actually were. The amount of fantasy, just trying to improve something because I couldn't improve myself, was overwhelming and awesome and one of the only things I cared about. In fact, it's one of the only things I care about now; I can enjoy other things, but there's still a potential to be had from the worst sources.

Each and every piece of content I've been going through has gone through a process of reclamation. Entire years have gone to waste as I struggled to survive against everything that was going against me. I don't just want to see the works of our past for what they are. I want to see them for what they could be, what it might have been if they had just existed in another time. 

The problem solving engine is taking one thing at a time and spinning it into a new creation. It's been overwhelming, but good. The creation process is pure and no longer tainted by fear. I think... I'd like to make something as a way of bringing everything together. Let's take my experience and turn it into an experience that I would like to share with everyone.

I don't have any questions left to ask of the universe anymore. I think that's for the best.

Does a Perfect Video Game Exist?

A perfect video game is a game that everyone on the planet can enjoy from the day they start playing it to the day they die.

I don't think a perfect video game will ever be made. Not every game appeals to every person. Each person is going to have their own taste in the way they experience a game, and what is ideal for me won't be ideal for anyone else. Nor should a perfect video game exist; if one did, it would make every other video game pale in comparison.

When I think of the closest thing to a video game can come to perfection, a few names pop up again and again. Minecraft is the first and closest example that currently exists. It can be played by anyone for almost any reason at all; the missing piece of narrative can be found on Youtube, in every person sharing the story of their Minecraft world with anyone willing to watch. 

 

 Skyblock!

Minecraft is such a joy to play. It's an infinite world that resembles a sandbox that has so much variety in the types of sand that it may as well be something else. The game can be understood immediately by anyone looking on, even for the first time. You can play by yourself or jump on a server to have fun with friends or strangers. When the game runs dry, all you need to do to reinvigorate it is download someone's map, install some mods, or even step away for awhile and let your mind wander.

I've built my fair share of Minecraft worlds since release. There's a whole youtube series on a modpack called Magic Maiden where cute little maids were perfect stand-ins for soldiers. Being able to command my own personal army while delving into a dungeon and completely wrecking the entire world as I went along is such a unique experience that I was still playing it up until 2018 when the Aquatic Update released.

In the past, I would have said that Minecraft was a wonderful game with a flawed experience in its gameplay loop. The end result was always worthwhile but it took a long time to get there. Mods in Minecraft's early life span were very popular to shore up some of the missing content and add in systems that could be in the game someday. 

Now, the game doesn't really have any glaring flaws. The worst I can say about the game is that you can't get more than 200 people on a server or that it doesn't run well on every computer.

 

Who put Touhou in my randomizer?!

Super Metroid is Nintendo's shining masterpiece of a platformer that did all of the right things at the right time. , but the game is designed to be played multiple times. You get better and better at it each time the game is played and the game rewards you for getting better. 

Super Metroid is one of the most ran games in all of speedrunning experience. The game has a functionally infinite skill ceiling. It's a game that anyone can get into due to the low skill floor. The amount of mastery you can express over the game and the sheer amount of competition that can be eked out of a game that is only 3 MB in size is quite astonishing.

Super Metroid only has a few flaws. The graphics are dated due to being designed for a CRT and the controls are kind of weird to wrap your head around. There's a concept known as the "Metroid Moment", where you can't figure out what to do so you start bombing everything you can see. The very end of the game has a door that you can save in, and can never go back. A proper update to the graphics via hacking and a control scheme that closer resembles Metriod: Zero Mission would fix nearly everything.

Super Metroid by itself isn't that interesting to me. When you strap on another game and randomize both of them, well... a thousand hours of my life have been very well spent. I have some friends that like to race against me and there's a niche speedrunning community around this ascended meme that I can poke at any time. It does help that both of the games are masterpieces in and of their own right; putting them together like this has to be the crowning achievement of ROM hacking.

The experience of running two games side-by-side and figuring out the best route to get from point A to point F is quite compelling. The technical skill to do this fast is also quite fun. The worst thing I can say about strapping two games together like this is that Super Metroid has roughly 40% of the time in any given run but requires far, far more skill to pull off at any decent speed. That and the bugs.

Courtesy of reddit

Mabinogi is my go-to for a general gaming experience. The sheer amount of content that you can pull out of an MMORPG that is currently 16 years old is something that only really happens in a game that's constantly worked on by a large team. The game is still putting out content to this day.

Mabinogi's combat system is quite unique. It is best described as rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock meets Dark Souls. Most of the skills have strengths and weaknesses, including the basic attack. You have to be aware of what each enemy is doing and have the game knowledge of what every skill does. Skills have massive penalties for guessing wrong. There are large charge up times and huge moments where you get stunned from an attack and can't do a thing.

Characters aren't broken up into classes like other games in the same genre. Instead, your character can learn every skill in the game. Characters are differentiated by the amount of training they want to do in a skill, and a lot of skills have learning requirements based on the level of other skills. Spend enough time using each skill and you'll feel like you master both the mechanics and the skill leveling system.

Mabinogi's crafting system puts Minecraft to shame. Every skill in the game can be trained, including life skills. Each skill has a minigame for processing or finishing a product, and the end results can be worn or used for other crafts depending on whether it's a utility skill, like carpentry, or a finishing skill, like handicraft. Enchanting is present in the usual MMO modifier style, but it's generally forgiving to use. Just ignore the pay-to-win reforging hammers added in 2016 and all is fine in the world.

Dungeons complement both of these ideas so perfectly that I'm surprised I haven't seen it elsewhere. You can enter an instance of a dungeon, fight off room after room of enemies, gather some of their loot, and pick herbs or mine ores along the way. You can get weapons, crafting items, or enchant scrolls at the end of the dungeon, but it's random so you're encouraged to try the same dungeon multiple times.

The story is something else. Mabinogi's entire world is steeped in Celtic lore, until it's not. One day you'll be working through the rolling plains around Bangor and hearing the story of Lugh, the Knight of Light. The next day you'll be exploring the icy land of giants or the lost desert of the elves. The story progresses from searching out the shadow world, to gods and alchemic magic, all the way up to divine creatures trying to corrupt everything in the entire land. Quality here is good and the variety has to be played to be believed. 

No old MMORPG is complete without completely arbitrary side content. There's a land of forever carnival called Festia that rolls the idea of carnival rides, christmas, and various other holidays together in a place you can warp to at any time. You can bring out your inner merchant

I really want to play Mabinogi again. Unfortunately, the game has bright white full-screen flashing that easily causes migraines if I see more than two. One of the reasons I played so much of the game was that there was a modding system that could change some of the client-side graphics. Flashing could be disabled, shadow mission instances could have maps showing where the orbs were, and there was a bunch of other useful effects that mods provide.

As much as I want to play the game again... I do not wish to torture myself. The modding system is updated sparsely, if at all. Some of the content is still a huge amount of fun, but some of it false flat compared to everything else the game has to offer. Ranking up skills require ability points, and when those are gone the urge to train anything vanishes.

There's also a few things that don't belong. Shakespeare does not belong in a game about gods and celts, and neither does alchemy. At least alchemy was worked into the story in a way that made sense... sort of.

This game is perfect! Except for, y'know, the bugs

I do think that a video game in a single category can exist, and maybe even cross across quite a few genres to pull in a lot of people. Minecraft is certainly evidence of that. I don't even think that a perfect video game should exist. There's a lot of value to be found in the flaws, quirks, and bugs that come with games. Sometimes the flaws can make the experience that much better. The bugs make things more memorable at the very least.

Reclamation Project - Part 5.5: Deciding how to move forward

Any time I sit down on a project that I'm interested in, I like to get ahead of myself just a little bit. The process works in a loop: I pull myself ahead a little bit to anticipate what's going on, compare that to the existing work, decide how long it's going to take based on previous steps and experience, and I make a decision. This process has some of the benefits of foresight, hindsight, and analysis baked into the work. There's a lot of value in trying to predict what I'm trying to do.

Sometimes that process runs into a roadblock. For this project, the roadblock was simple: I want to make a game, a platform, future games, artwork, designs, and self-evaluate all of that simultaneously. The roadblock was also far more complicated than I could have anticipated.

Building on top of a project that is a gibbering mesh of experimentation, prototypes, ideas, and eclectic half-built systems is sort of like riding a unicorn on top of a mine cart track in the dark. It's definitely possible to move forward because the unicorn glows in the dark, but it's bumpy, uncomfortable, magical, and I'm sure I could get to the end... but not without getting thrown off and hitting my head somewhere.

I've decided I'm going to take my base project and wrangle it into the one thing it doesn't have currently: plans. There's a lot of digging I've had to do just to get things in order. I've had to uncover ideas that are years old and try to tie them together in a nice bow. Some of the concepts don't work very well together and some of them work too well, so I'm having to segment out the different ideas that are basic and the ones that are game specific.

Essence HUD for Hyper Metroid Remake

I'm currently working on a design document to refine a lot of these ideas. They work pretty well in my head, and a good deal of them are based on working code. Taking the design and turning it into something real should take a lot less time than writing everything from scratch.

I would very much like to take this design and show it to others. If someone has the impetus to actually work with me in the future, it would be very, very valuable to show them a design doc so they can wrap their heads around how the systems are supposed to work and interact with each other on a conceptual level.

Once I have the base project built up I can go into detail on how to dissect and rebuild a level. I can also share artwork and the process of making it for a game with a particular design in mind without stumbling over everything. I'll probably release a working prototype with my avatar as the main character, so stay tuned for that.

Working screenshot of a broken UI image. Circa September 11 2020

Progress Update - January 2021

 I think this was inevitable.

It's one thing to tear apart a game. The entire thing is like a puzzle; I can pull out each individual piece, examine it, take a lot of notes, and put that piece in a box for later. I can break the piece down into the bits that comprise it, the process it was made out of, and identify every single limitation that was placed on it. I can even start making a new piece to slot back into the same slot.

It's another thing entirely to put the game back together. Games are built in a completely different way than you would build a physical device. Every single thing that exists is something that only works in your head. There are no properties to the game until we actually define what a game is. Even using another game as an example, we can make changes to the end result that turn the result into something unrecognizable.

...

Trying to put anything into words is difficult. I keep using analogies to try and relate what I'm currently experiencing to something concrete and real. That way of doing things has served me well until recently, where everything seems to be going right in a lot of ways that I never expected to happen. Today feels completely different than a month ago, and I think that's a good thing. Difficult words still mean the words come out instead of getting jammed somewhere and buried so deep that they can't come out.

I am finding myself with an abundance of time. A lot has improved in my life lately. I feel like everything I know has upended itself and I've been wandering around scattering pieces of thoughts and ideas around for so long that I lost track of where I wanted to go. It's hard to explain exactly what has happened... it feels like I can think now, and anything that I want to do gains 100% of my attention. I have been putting in maybe 30% until recently.

30% isn't right. 30% is all I had. I was spending so much time trying to figure out my problems, fix everything in my life, and move out of my absolute hell that was a series of migraines and sleep deprivation that led to more migraines and sleep deprivation, I didn't have time for anything else. My other hobby is giving me a lot of hope for moving forward. Let's focus on this one for awhile.

I don't just want to gather up my thoughts. That's all I've been doing for the past few years. Instead, I want to make new and exciting experiences and entire worlds out of the ideas that I've simply ignored for so long. I want to take other people's works that are both wonderful and terrible and make them into something great. I want to create a system that can work with all of that, and to build upon it in the coming months.

There's a lot of designs I have stored in scattered files, fragmented and disorganized. Let's turn those into a fully fleshed out design document. Heck, let's overdesign the entire thing so that way any game that wants to come into being can just pull parts out of the design and ignore the rest.

Some of the design already has working code. The code has more structure to it than loose files, but like everything else I've done for the past few years it's unfocused, unpolished, and hidden. I'd like to build a game on this system. Maybe ten. Who knows; I'm not one to pick anything and go halfway with it.

...

I'm not sure how I'm going to organize a design page yet. I have been putting off doing this for awhile; peeking into my creative process is something that I am not too keen on sharing, but it's better than languishing on the sideline or "suddenly pineapples" happens.

The end goal is to remake Alisia Dragoon. How do we get there? Plans. Lots of creativity. Lots of effort. Lots of love. A bit of snark and a blog to document it all.

BaseProject History

I've been hiding a secret.

This isn't my first attempt at trying to remake a flawed game that I enjoy playing. It's not even the first form that this has taken: it's the fourth.

My first attempt at remaking a game had noble intentions. I have a design for a followup to Tinkers Construct fully fleshed out in the background. There are multiple characters, a fun and vibrant story, the game world changes based on the decisions you make and the other characters that you find.

Melvin, Selene, Thruul M'Gon, Skyla, Nemea, and Mr. Slimey. Not pictured: Nixie, Warren

My goal for the longest time has been to take these characters and make a Metroidvania-style game, but with a completely different spin on things. Instead of unlocking new upgrades by wandering around and finding lost artifacts, you would find characters with their own expertise that can make tools or equipment. This is an idea I haven't seen anywhere else and I would love to take it to its fullest.

Unfortunately, the project isn't good enough for me to care about it yet. I am highly invested in making this project a reality and at the same time completely cannot make it real. How did I deal with that? Build up a "new game" and start taking pieces of it. Which "new game" would I build up?

Boho Youyoumu: The worst game that I will play 50 more times

This is a bad game. There's a few levels that are completely bland and lack any kind of personality. Characters are all pulled from the Touhou games and put into this platforming game. Levels are long, linear, and if it weren't for the metroid style upgrades the game wouldn't hold my attention for more than a couple minutes.

Still, I played the game all the way to the end 7 times now. Basic platforming is still a fair bit of fun if you have upgrades that change your ability to get around. The dash skill is lots of fun and the dual swords really make the game feel like a full experience. I'm an absolute sucker for good Touhou music and upgrading characters. I do actually enjoy this a lot, but it's so bad... what should I do about it?

Boho Selene?

How about remake the entire game in the Unity engine? I spent 6 weeks on building out the entire game because I'm was in the middle of nowhere while my apartment is renovated and had no internet access. I figured this would be a safe way to build up skill with making a level, a save system, and inventory management.

I was mostly right. There is a working save system buried in this project. Inventory is mostly working, also buried somewhere in the whole thing. I can spawn enemies, the map is divided up into rooms, there's good camera work, and the terrain is divided up into neat little chunks that can make auto-tiling a breeze.

I misjudged how bad the level layout is in this game. It's not that the level itself is laid out poorly, it's that there is nothing in the level worth looking at. There are only four things on the screen at any given time: blocks, Youmu, enemies, and bullets. I'm surprised I didn't get lost when I was playing the game the first time.

This was my first attempt at remaking something. The whole thing used to work flawlessly. Now there's 20 errors any time I would start up the scene and I can't be bothered to fix any of it. There's just so little of the entire level layout in Boho Youyoumu to work with that the amount of time it would take to create something worthwhile would be as much time as creating the game I wanted to from scratch.

I thought that inserting my own character into the level would make for an interesting test. It certainly was interesting, but in a horrible way. There are huge level layout problems when you try to expand a one tile character - Youmu - into a three tile space. None of the platforms, crawlspaces, or even the general layout of the entire game was built for that. In response I started adapting the character to the level, the level to the character, something inbetween, and realized nothing about this would actually work right because the levels themselves are boring.

If this game won't work, how about something a bit closer to the mark? Say... a game that only had a single apparent flaw on the surface?

Hyper Metroid in its natural habitat

I am a huge fan of the combo randomizer of Super Metroid and A Link To the Past. It's such a fun experience to switch games and get items that could be the past and future version of a related character. I am also a huge fan of ROM hacks for Super Metroid and play new ones periodically. A few of them are so good that I keep them around, and two of them are so good they could pass as an enhanced sequel of the original.

 

Randomizers for games appear when there's enough interest for them. Randomizers for a rom hack on the other hand... I didn't think it would ever happen. The characters were the right size, the world was there, and even though it was one of the best games I have played, I couldn't randomize it. I'm sure you can see where this is going.

 

I knew that I wasn't going to be satisfied by making most of this project. It was either going to be a huge learning project, or it was going to end up as a complete remake of a hack of a masterpiece of a game. I bared down and focused hard on the most technical aspects of the hack.

 

The method I was using before to create the level wasn't nearly fast enough to satisfy my urge to create quickly. Fortunately, Super Metroid has a number of tools that can help with the level creation process. SMILE (Super Metroid Integrated Level Editor) can open up the ROM itself and let you edit level data such as tiles, terrain, enemy placement, and more esoteric elements such as PLMs. Here's what an extracted level looks like:

I saved every single level that I could out of SMILE. Any room that was edited manually and was too obscure for the program to open was manually stitched together with screenshots, and all of the rooms were sorted by area. I also sliced up all of the tiles in the game and imported them into Unity; there are 571 tiles in all. I could pull up each level and arrange them properly, then place all of the tiles manually, but this was also too tedious and slow for me.

Unity has the ability to directly compare colors on a pixel that's loaded anywhere, including files on disk. If you compare a group of pixels in a screenshot to another group of pixels in a file, well... it just takes a bit of magic to automatically place tiles in the scene. Here's how I'm doing it currently. It's not commented or done yet, but I'm very proud of the result. I would estimate that it cut down the amount of work from a few days to a few hours just for the main area.

Look at this level. Isn't it neat? Wouldn't you say my obsession's complete?

This was the second attempt at remaking a game. I didn't get very far into it, and I think I gave up after a couple weeks. Or years. Some of the enemies in Super Metroid have unique behavior and recreating them wasn't what I wanted to do yet, and having an accurate world to test my characters was much more of a strength than I had anticipated. I finally have a proper tuning ground for testing different character abilities and tools.

This attempt was mixed into the same project as the first one. I didn't particularly want to rip out the relevant code and I figured the first attempt was just a learning project at this point, so I could build on the thing in a weird space that has all kinds of cruft involved.

The third attempt was also in the same project, but had a new goal. The entire thing was getting bloated to the point of being unusable, and I had my eyes set on a new prize. That combo randomizer is such a fun experience, what if I could do that with three games? I wracked my brain for something suitable and came up with a very tempting idea: vehicle combat upgrades. 

 

There's an NES game named Blaster Master that has a few flaws but is otherwise a lot of fun. I hurriedly wrote up some ideas, played through the game, started the rest of the research and...

It has a remake. IT HAS A REMAKE?!?!

 

I spent the next few hours playing the remake, and such a fine remake it was. Every one of the flaws the old game had was addressed, from adding a save system to redoing some of the crud that top-down segments ran with. They even added a story. How could I do something that had already been done better than I could do?

I couldn't. I can't. It's too much fun and I've played it 8 times now.

There was only one thing I could do with all of the everything I had made and was depending on. I took all of the code, textures, prefabs, materials, concepts, examples, and unfinished things and put them in one place. It took a lot longer than I expected to wrap everything up in a nice package, and even longer to decouple all the assumptions from the ideas. 

212 megabytes of code, textures, and prefabs

This base project is being shared across all of my projects. Other creators will refer to something similar as an engine, when in reality the program you're building on is the engine and the thing you've made is a framework or a skeleton. It's the foundation of a working game or a prototype in and of itself.

 

The best part about this process is that I am not working from scratch. I can simply drop in the project and get to work. Adjust a script here, import a screenshot there, rig up an animation that I've never done before... and suddenly we have a working prototype. It takes more time to analyze a game and stitch together screenshots than it does to import everything after the fact.

 

The worst part about this process is that I have been working on it for so long that it feels like it's taken on a life of its own. The entire thing has the potential to drag me down into depths unto which the lord himself shuns. There is so much history and so much work put into this that I am afraid of what I have made. It's an incomplete mess that still wants to have enemy behavior and pathfinding and mario styled powerups and slopes sonic would be proud of.

I may need to spend more time on the system itself. Not just for the sake of the system, but to polish it up and bring out the full potential of everything a fully-realized level creation engine can be. I can't decide if that fits in the best or the worst part of the project. Maybe both.

I was going to wait and show off the BaseProject some time in the future. Maybe tease out a thing or two, comment on the history, have a full write up somewhere, and show off some of my great coding skills. I don't think that's appropriate for what's happening here. I have so much potential and so much time invested into the base project, and yet I feel like I've done so little with it.

 

Parting Thoughts

 
Some super metroid hacks have a randomizer now. Hyper Metroid, Project Base, and Z-Factor are all great fun to begin with. I'm not keen on randomizing Z-Factor but the others are great.

 

There's a folder with every note on every game that I've ever played with the idea of re-making, cross-randomizing, or just pulling apart because it wasn't good enough. There's detailed notes for re-creating Boho Youyoumu with proper level layouts, various Touhou fangame items, general writeups on 20XX and AM2R, UI mockups for cross-randomized maps, and a breakdown of a card mechanic that builds rooms out of templates.

Circa 9/17/2017

A great tool to go with the auto-build of a level would be a program that can automatically map out a level in a game as you play it, along with any tiles that the game has. I may look into this sometime in the future.

I may go over the entire project in detail at a later date. The project still needs some fixing up and there's quite a few parts tied to other people's work, like Anima2D and a pathfinding tutorial. This project wasn't ever intended to see the light of day and it certainly reflects that.

 

This is the third attempt at writing this post. Trying to explain my feelings with words has made everything real in a way that is hard to accept. I have more time and emotions invested in this project than possibly anything else in my entire life and it's both my greatest failure and my greatest strength in the past five years.

If I can pull off something real with this... just maybe, I won't have to give up yet.

Reclamation Project - Part 2: Initial Impressions (Alisia Dragoon)

 Alisia Dragoon. A game that makes me nostalgic for a time I never had. Let's jump right in.

Ah yes, the good old days. I'm a bit disappointed that there isn't a blaring S E G A right at the front screen, but the animated shine is a nice touch.

The logo fades out onto a scrolling background reminiscent of Mayan mythology. The music has a nice folksy tone to it, but also has that characteristic genesis grunge mixed in. The background seems somewhat important and impossible to read properly... until it reaches this.

I'm guessing there's an epic story somewhere in here referencing characters and stories in the game. There's a lot of polish in the title screen alone; this should be fun!

I haven't played a Genesis game in quite awhile, but I know two things about these games: we can take a look at the controls and difficulty is probably hidden in the options. There's an entire discussion to be had about asking players to pick a difficulty right at the start of a game, but luckily we don't have to make that choice in older games; it's already been set at a default for us.

Normal and Hard is a bit unusual for difficulty. If the game has a difficulty setting, you can usually pick easy. Most difficulty modes are just the number of starting lives or maximum health anyhow, so we'll leave this alone. I'm much more interested in the controls - monster select, thunder, jump. All of the other control types have jump not on the C button, which is a bit disappointing, but the default looks fine anyhow.

Enough plot contrivances, let me get to the game!

Wait, what was that? There was some kind of bouncy sound effect and a bunch of sparkles and something? I had to restart the game and get a proper screenshot just to see what went on; the animation happened in less than a second

Alisia, of course! I didn't know she could fly. I'm impressed... by the amount of speed she can put out, of course. Not the legs showing all the way up to the hips or size of the bust or anything, I swear!

We don't have full control over the character to begin with. Notice the demo marker; that only appears when the player is trying to take control during a cutscene. Instead of getting right into the gameplay we watch Alisia walk in from the side of a large structure that resembles a castle. There's a nice sunny day in the background and the music positively drips with adventure. 

I like the idea of setting up the scene by bringing me in from the outside world into this fantasy land. It has the feeling of being transported into an unfamiliar land, brimming with danger and excitement. The cutscene goes on for just long enough that I drop my guard and...

We're under attack! I have control! I have no idea what the controls are, there's nowhere to experiment, push random buttons!

Ah, I see a problem. You can't see the problem or the character at all in this screenshot because the character is flashing on and off rapidly to represent an invincibility window. I've never really liked this technique because of the kind of headaches I can get from watching them for too long, but just taking a bit of damage should be fine. 

Thunder is something I'm a bit more worried about. The whole attack alternates between multiple sprites with the same kind of alternating flashing missing frames that invincibility causes. I'm sure it looked better on CRT TVs, but it's one of those things that hasn't aged well. We have a lot more awareness about what flashing lights can do to people nowadays.

On the UI there is a bar that charges over time. It decharges fairly slowly while in use, recharges quickly up to the yellow mark, and slowly after that. When it's full and you push the thunder button...

A huge swathe of thunder moves in two arcs from front to back and front again. It's flashing like the other thunder attack, but isn't so bad. In fact nothing of these flashing attacks really bother me, so I should be fine playing this game for a few hours. Let's move on...

Almost forgot about the monster select button.

Neat. I have a dragon and a fireball. There's also another dragon and a winged lizard. Each of them seem to be different for one reason or another, and they also appear to have their own health bar and maybe level. The arrows next to the monster's level also resemble the lightning bar under Alisia's health, so that's probably an attack.

Thunder homes in on enemies. These green creatures come flying out of the side of the screen in groups of 10 and thunder takes them all out in a second. Running and instantly zapping everything that can possibly come your way is definitely the best part of the game. You're going to be spending a lot of time doing this, so it's best that the core gameplay is the best part.

Alisia's dragon buddy seems to change color as they get damaged. That's a good way of showing the player that they need to take care of their pet without relying entirely on the UI.

On my first playthrough I got to this point and promptly lost. It's not that far into the level so I'm not too torn about that. Besides, these kinds of games have a life system so I can just start up from the beginning again and...

Oh.

That's pretty brutal. Very few games will take an arcade style game and end it immediately on the first loss. I can't say I'm happy with that idea. It smells... off. There aren't any good reasons to be this punishing in a game that you have confidence in.

There are only a few reasons I can think of to do this:
1. Artistic vision
2. Lack of development time to implement systems
3. Artificial difficulty enhancement
4. Artificial extension of game time

There are some other problems later on in the game that will make the answer to this oddity more clear. For now, take it as a sign of what's to come.

Reclamation Project - Part 1: Finding an Interest

Sometimes we blunder into things by accident. Other times we are looking for something to fill our lives, and don't know what we want to do. Still other times we have a lot going on in our lives and just haven't made room for anything. What's important is to recognize an opportunity when it comes up, even if it's not what you expect. That's what happened to me anyway.

I've been taking a lot of mental notes about what interests me. I've probably spent the last two years floating around, aimless and unfocused. I would float from idea to idea, pulling a bit at the strings, seeing what it could do, finding myself not really enjoying myself, and drifting off to the next one.

One of the floating tangents took me over to the Youtube channel Games Done Quick. I do rather enjoy speedruns. They're a great way to pass the time while learning about the pure skill and dedication that people put into something as wonderful as a video game. Between their main events - AGDQ and SGDQ - the channel posts other content in the form of a "hotfix".

The one that caught my attention was the Gauntlet. I've been looking for longer and longer videos to deal with my poor situation. They're great for drowning out background noise, and sometimes I find unexpected things. The entire gauntlet is around 25 hours long; good for a few days at least.

The gauntlet was a bit surprising. There are a variety of games played per video, and each one is played by someone who hasn't played the game before. The games themselves were generally bad. What's worse, the hosts were giving out save states to make a scenario in a game that could be difficult, horrible, or just plain long.

For the entire first video, I was completely enraptured. How could other people be playing horrible games in such a bizarre way while racing against each other? There were so many games I hadn't played in here, so I started taking down names and doing a bit of research on each one.

Sega Genesis games are my weak spot. I'm sure that I'm so fond of bad games because the quality of games on the Genesis was so wild. You never really knew what you were getting before you started the game. Was it the best game on the system, or was it complete trash? More likely was that it was experimental and somewhere inbetween the two.

I've been keeping a list of all the games I've never seen before that interest me. I thought I'd start with something familiar, but new. I'm always up for new things, even if the novelty doesn't last very long and I end up somewhere else in a few minutes. I've got plenty of time; what else do I have to lose?

The first game I tried was Alisia Dragoon. I died almost immediately, but the second playthrough went very well. It's the kind of game where you have a lot of dumb fun for awhile. The beginning was a bit boring and repetitive, but it seems more about learning the game so you can push forward. The second level was ostensibly a continuation of the first, but instead of traversing a field you would dive into a ruin. There were multiple side paths to take, each with goodies, and I learned very quickly that those goodies were making the game easier.

At the end of stage two there as a giant... ball? Plot happened, the ball floated off, and I had a mission: Survive to fight a wizard that shoots flaming dragons that will probably kill me. I tore across the country side, jumped into an air ship that had eyes, and promptly jumped off after a short stage. I really wanted to see more of the ship creature thing, but that was for another time.

The rest of that journey went into a generic cave, further into a generic lava cave, and I lost on stage 6. The game only has one life, with one or two scattered around, so I expected this to be somewhat difficult.

No problem, let's try again. Explore every nook and cranny, make sure I have all the dragons in line, and I'll beat the game in no time. The third time taught me about how the different dragon minions worked and how powerful lightning upgrades could be. Wonderful; I was improving.

I shot my way up to where I was and past it. The game itself started to become unforgiving, but I figured that was just the game building towards something. The boss of stage 6 took a bit too long to beat though... and it killed me the previous time, so I figured it was just designed a bit poorly. I waltzed into stage 7, spent roughly a minute climing some stairs up to the boss... and had my butt handed to me.

The fourth time would be my last try. The difficulty after stage 6 spiked up so high that it broke my sense of fun. It broke the play conditioning that had led up to that area. In fact, I'd wager that the game itself was designed in such a way to extend playtime by ramping the difficulty up way too far.

I looked for cheat codes just to finish off the game. The game actually has a debug mode that lets you have invincibility, choose what powerups you have, and skip stages. Perfect, I can get back to where I was and try again. Turn on invincibility (which doesn't stop damage, it just prevents you from losing at 0 health) for good measure and see how bad the end of this game actually is.

The boss in the middle of stage 7 is almost the end of the game. There's a difficult platforming section between that boss and stage 8, which didn't appear anywhere else in the game and involved platforms that moved in patterns that would kick you off at the end.

In stage 8, what I thought was the last boss was an even higher difficulty spike. The wizard from earlier had returned, and congratulated me on surviving the journey. The fight was challenging, frustrating, and I learned how to beat it; everything I would want in an arcade style boss. Then the wizard's ball woke up, and...

It was a hunk of meat. Dumb, boring, poor patterns, and a damage sponge. Nothing about this boss was worthwhile, and it had so much health that I spent longer just fighting the thing than I did on the previous stage. The entire lead-up to this epic moment was deflated over the course of a sad, grueling, endurance battle. Blehhhhhhhhhhhhhh! This is boring, give me something better!

It was at this moment I knew. This was a game that I had a lot of fun playing. The music is great, the combat is satisfying in the kind of dumb way that old arcade games used to be, and I had a glimpse into a world that wanted to be more than it was. Up until stage 7 there were a few warts, and the difficulty has some weird spikes and troughs that take balance and twist it up in a wrench, but after that point... I knew.

Alisia Dragoon had my attention. Now it has my interest.

It took 24 hours to figure out what I wanted to do. I sketched out a character related to the heroine, I did a bit of looking into unused content, I even grabbed a debugging device to look at the game in detail. None of that was enough. I wanted more... much more. In fact, this is what I had been looking for more than anything else. I'm going to rip this game apart all the way down to its fabric of existence and rebuild it in a way that brings out all of its untapped potential.

This project is something that's exciting in a way that's hard to describe. It's the kind of feeling that cuts through the fog, opens the skies, and shines a light on something that was left in a bygone era of my life. It's a kind of self-fulling prophecy, motivating itself to happen in a way that's impossible to describe properly. More than anything else, there's an itch I need to scratch.

Reclamation Project - Inception

There's an itch somewhere in the back of my mind that I haven't been able to scratch for a long time. It's that kind of creative problem solving itch that comes up whenever you look at something and say "I can make that, but better." It's a pernicious feeling, one that gets deep under my skin and shows me everything I don't want to see about the experience I'm having.

This feeling only comes up when there's a game or related experience I'm having that is fun or enjoyable in a lot of respects, but falls flat on its face in others. It's like a guilty pleasure; I'm having fun with the game and also having my way with the game at the same time. I don't often go back to a poor quality game unless it's particularly bad. Each time that happens it calls to me and says "why do you like me when I'm like this?"

I think the first time I scratched this itch was when I started modding Minecraft. By all accounts Minecraft is not a bad game. At worst, it was an incomplete game with a lot of potential. So much potential in fact that I could take what appeared to be a basic block game and make it better. Not just better though... I could do something so worthwhile with it that I could make the experience my own.

For context, Minecraft is nothing like it was back in the early 2010s. Today you can easily mine out the bottom of the world with a max-sized beacon and a pickaxe enchanted to the hilt. Most players have multiple double-chests full of cobblestone or dirt or whatever other resources they can get. There's a huge variety of biomes to explore and multiple mobs to see or fight. Minecraft itself is a complete experience. I don't want to work on that.

Minecraft in its early days was wholly unfinished. This was an era where you could spend gobs of time and in-game resources on building a castle, only to have it consume your entire being for a month as you struggle to gather everything needed for that perfect idea of a castle you had. You have to go mine individual blocks of stone, farm sheep for wool, grow a farm and chop each individual log for wood, and building all of the infrastructure for a base in a starting area could take as long as the build itself.

I played Minecraft for a month before really diving in with code. Three of those weeks were spent thinking about just how bad the experience felt. Every single thing in beta 1.5 was time consuming to a fault. I could get what I wanted in the game... eventually... sort of. The selection of blocks was limited, tools were slow, and anything resembling progression just wasn't there.

It's telling that I played a game that had such an ugly presentation for 3 weeks before diving into anything. I absolutely loved the game, and hated it at the same time. It was wonderful, ugly, amazing, and tedious. I very much wanted to play the game for everything that it was worth, not for what I was getting. Comparing beta 1.5 to the current 1.16 version, I would say that you had about 5% of the experience that you do now without accounting for mods of any kind, content or server.

There were four main problems I kept running into. The first one was simple: there wasn't enough variety in the blocks of the game to let me make the builds I actually wanted. That was also simple to fix: install mods that had a variety of blocks to play with.

The second problem was one I didn't find a good answer to, at first. Building anything was slow, tedious, and boring. It wasn't the building itself that was slow, but the gathering of resources. Creative mode was not a good solution either, as anything I built felt like it was just a free floating construct instead of a castle that had any meaning.

The third problem was with Minecraft's combat. Everything was too simple, and too obnoxious at the same time. I had resolved to solve that problem after I had worked on the second, but found a great alternative later. A combination of mods that encouraged exploration and the Little Maid Mob gave combat a more strategic element, one that had me working as a commander of an army storming a castle instead of a lone idiot waving around a sharp stick. The Magic Maiden modpack was my favorite way to play purely because of the maids and the dungeons.

The fourth problem resolved itself over time. I came to learn that Minecraft wasn't a game that lent itself very well to goals. I guess this was more of a problem that kept me wondering why the heck I kept playing a "game" that had no real win condition. This isn't something that beating the dragon fixed, as you just went right back into the world afterwards. The problem resolved itself by becoming irrelevant, and I carried on.

The second problem is the main motivation behind Tinkers Construct. I wanted to improve the game in such a way that it made it fun for me to play. I wanted to dig out an entire quarry or a mineshaft by hand, but a single diamond pickaxe with no enchantments was unacceptable. I could feel something deep inside my mind gnawing at the prospect of building a castle in a real way... the right way. Something that didn't stink of horribly horrible horribleness despite the lovely castle I was living in.

My first attempts were rather bad, I'll admit, and there were a lot of times I felt like I could keep doing better than I was already doing. That single minded push to make this thing better was so much better motivation than I could possibly describe here. It wasn't a consuming motivation either; things came in, code went out, I evaluated and shared with the internet, and it started over again. The feeling of building something was fun, but it didn't scratch that itch.

I don't think the itch was really scratched until I had finally built the Smeltery and everything that it represented. Mod version 1.3.0 was when I felt like I had made something worthwhile. I was proud, I was happy, and most importantly the itch had been scratched. No longer would I have to spend buckets of time gathering resources for a castle. I could spend what was the right amount: one bucket of time on resources, five buckets of time on building. The balance was perfect, the progression was sound, and the feel of Minecraft was right. All was finally right in the world.

My motivation for improving the mod dropped pretty quickly after that. There was still a lot left to do, however, and Minecraft itself could still be improved. I would say that version 1.7 was where the game felt 50% complete compared to how it is today. Unfortunately, Mojang broke the game in half underneath the waves and I wasn't done with the work I wanted to do... but the game was done with me. I'd had enough, and I still haven't been able to motivate myself to work on Minecraft again.

If I did want to work on something like Tinkers Construct again, I think the following would have to be present:
1. The experience is fun and memorable
2. The experience is fundamentally flawed in a way that is disappointing or maddening
3. The act of solving a problem with the experience itself is a worthwhile endeavor.

Drawing out the potential in a game is usually the goal here, but I have been known to do this for some other things. It's like I want to see the good in the world, and if that good doesn't exist in the creative work I'm looking at then I want to make it myself.

I definitely don't want to make Tinkers Construct again. Let's make something else instead, and let's do it from a different perspective. There are so many older games that I look at and think "I want to play a better version of this game". It's easy to say that a game hasn't aged well, but it's a lot harder to say why it hasn't. You can point at technology, at being a product of its time, or just made from a team that didn't have enough skill to pull it off. 

To that I say: I will do better. Let's get started.