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dragging in another offsite stream: have you ever thought "mega man x is too easy, it needs more precise jumps and spikes and lava everywhere"? Here's Smite playing through Smite has some real platforming skills and learns really quickly. I haven't watched all of it, but he does apparently beat it eventually and there is some hilarious poo poo like what Flame Mammoth now does.
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Apr 4, 2017 21:12
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FPzero posted:
One of the things I noticed in the vids is what seems like a bunch of those half-buried blocks, I don't know if this mod uses them more than others or if it's just me seeing things.
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Apr 4, 2017 22:02
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Hemingway To Go! posted:there is some hilarious poo poo like what Flame Mammoth now does. About 1 hour in, for people that don't feel like watching the whole thing. I actually kind of dig it--it's well telegraphed (outside from the inevitable first surprise kill) and it seems like even if you get stunned you have a chance to recover.
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Apr 4, 2017 22:18
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I'd be far more inclined to try that MMX hack if the damage you took and the damage the bosses took wasn't far increased and far decreased, respectively.
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Apr 4, 2017 22:24
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fritz posted:One of the things I noticed in the vids is what seems like a bunch of those half-buried blocks, I don't know if this mod uses them more than others or if it's just me seeing things. Yeah, no, it's not just you. I'm kinda wondering what the point of them is myself, considering that you can't really hit any of the item blocks. I mean, it'd be neat if there was a secret passage hidden beneath one of the blocks you can spinjump and destroy, but apparently I'm the only one who thinks that's a cool idea because I haven't seen anyone pull it off in all the levels with the half-blocks.
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Apr 5, 2017 03:14
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fritz posted:One of the things I noticed in the vids is what seems like a bunch of those half-buried blocks, I don't know if this mod uses them more than others or if it's just me seeing things. Oh yeah! And some of them are the blocks you can break with spinjumps if you're big, so I keep assuming there's secrets down there and you guys never check them out. 
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Apr 5, 2017 03:14
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No it's just a lovely aesthetic thing people do because it's easy and requires no thought. I wish it would die.
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Apr 5, 2017 06:08
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That's...a surprisingly strong opinion, but fair enough; I don't mind it when it's meshed in with the visual themes of the level (like, say, having half-sunk blocks around ruined structures), but I'll admit it's kind of superfluous most of the time.
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Apr 5, 2017 09:34
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I always figured it could just serve as a convenient way of marking spots where you're supposed to jump or duck or something similar.
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Apr 5, 2017 12:02
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Carpator Diei posted:I always figured it could just serve as a convenient way of marking spots where you're supposed to jump or duck or something similar. Isn't that what coins are for?
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Apr 5, 2017 12:14
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Shady Amish Terror posted:That's...a surprisingly strong opinion, but fair enough; I don't mind it when it's meshed in with the visual themes of the level (like, say, having half-sunk blocks around ruined structures), but I'll admit it's kind of superfluous most of the time. This is not the first hack to overuse the design en masse.
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Apr 5, 2017 17:50
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Cerebral Bore posted:Isn't that what coins are for? This lets you keep a permanent marker. Several levels have had Mario fetch a spring or p-switch and come back to a certain spot later.
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Apr 5, 2017 17:52
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get that OUT of my face posted:I'd be far more inclined to try that MMX hack if the damage you took and the damage the bosses took wasn't far increased and far decreased, respectively. You want it to not be tediously punishing and unfun? What kind of ROM hack is that 
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Apr 5, 2017 18:43
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Mak0rz posted:You want it to not be tediously punishing and unfun? What kind of ROM hack is that
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Apr 5, 2017 18:59
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get that OUT of my face posted:As Smite said, this guy put a lot of effort into manipulating stuff in MMX. He just used it for evil.The ROM hacker mentality was discussed a bit in the Pokemon Uranium thread. I'm no psychologist but I feel it stems from elitism and egotism. It probably bears noting that it's a lot easier to make a hard hack than a fun hack. All you need to do is define a narrow path through the level and punish any deviations with failure. That's a pretty easy concept to grasp. Whereas making a fun hack requires a much deeper understanding of what makes games engaging and rewarding. And since plenty of people do find such "pointlessly hard" hacks entertaining, it's pretty tempting to just cater to that crowd.
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Apr 5, 2017 19:06
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get that OUT of my face posted:The ROM hacker mentality was discussed a bit in the Pokemon Uranium thread. Do you have a link to this? It's a big thread.
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Apr 5, 2017 19:37
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:It probably bears noting that it's a lot easier to make a hard hack than a fun hack. All you need to do is define a narrow path through the level and punish any deviations with failure. That's a pretty easy concept to grasp. Whereas making a fun hack requires a much deeper understanding of what makes games engaging and rewarding. It's not just the design end, either. Romhacking is hard! Many games have few or no editing resources, and even where they exist they're generally not terribly intuitive or user-friendly. Often due to technical limitations they're only really capable of editing a subset of what the game can do, which is usually a subset of what it looks like the game can do because a bunch of stuff will be hardcoded (they certainly weren't written with modding in mind.) If you want to go beyond that, welp, guess you're learning how to write assembly code by hand. Pasting spikes and pits everywhere is easy, getting a game to do something new and interesting is tough. Granted, this doesn't explain stuff like Rockman CX, but in theory at least some bullshit hardmode hacks might have had loftier intentions that got scuttled for technical reasons.
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Apr 5, 2017 19:37
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I appreciate Rockman CX existing, because it is all one very large, very lovingly-crafted joke, but I have no intention of even trying to play it. And, yeah, game design is hard, modding is often not easy, and a lot of people underestimate both those facts. Plus, you always need people unfamiliar with your hack to test it in order to really get a feel for what is or isn't working, and that's a difficult step most people can't or don't bother with. It's oft been reported that the author of a romhack ended up leaving in something arbitrary, terrible, and bullshit just because THEY knew what to do and could easily overcome the obstacle since they designed it, but everyone else is clueless because it has no sign-posting at all or requires knowledge or skills that can only be gained by tedium and repeated failures. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Apr 5, 2017 |
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Apr 5, 2017 21:19
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It also stems from just romhacking the game. Basically, if you're dedicated enough to romhack a game you -probably- know a lot about the game. I'm pretty bad at Mario but I can still breeze through SMW like it's practically nothing... So naturally you're going to make something more difficult than the original product. It was an issue we had originally with Awful Emblem actually, where since I hadn't actually looked at the maps or anything being the portrait artist I was actually going in blind. It took me whining about it to get it toned down a bit. Even if you don't try to your end product is probably going to be harder just because you're so familiar with the source material so making things "interesting" tends towards difficult. SMW has mostly gotten over it though, thankfully, mostly because it's been around for so long (and partially because of massive pushback after SMWCP). You can make interesting enough setups with the custom sprites and blocks you don't need to rely on making things hard to make them interesting anymore, and the people that want to make/play those can simply label their hacks as kaizo/pit hacks and there's sections for them on SMWC.
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Apr 5, 2017 22:00
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It's taken me 10 years to have my grasp on what makes a good Mario level. This stuff is not easy in the slightest. Straight White Shark is completely correct in that it's very easy to make a hard level, but it's very hard to make a good level. When we built levels we were constantly testing, building, examining, rebuilding and retesting what we do. Tyty made a level for VLDCX this year and with a week to go before the deadline we completely scrapped the core level ideas and rebuilt about 75% of the level from scratch with new ideas. Design is an iterative process, even with romhacking or general modding. Throwing your work away sucks, but sometimes it's necessary to achieve a fun level.
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Apr 5, 2017 22:15
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On that subject, I gotta say, The 100s Challenge was the first level in VLDCIX I've seen which I can look back on and think "yeah, you could tell me that was a hidden level in SMW I'd never seen before and I'd probably believe you."
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Apr 6, 2017 00:29
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Incidentally, I don't think it's been mentioned yet, but there's an SA LP of Seiken Densetsu 3 hardtype going on right now. Except that they're playing on the "normal" difficulty so it's mostly just a rebalance and bugfix hack.
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Apr 6, 2017 01:24
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 Yellow is the worst color to work with. It's only acceptable on its light shades, otherwise you have to start adding orange for dark stuff. Dark yellow is an awful color.
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Apr 6, 2017 20:28
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 FF6 Rando Part 9 - Maybe I'm Going to Use Runic Maybe I won't! Maybe I'll just slowly start to hate GENDO. Maybe Dem and Feyer are gonna start hating me cause I might have maybe missed a chest in the Magitek Factory! Who knows! Watch the video so you can find out! Don't mind me, I'm just gonna pull up an old quote from like two months ago or so: oldskool posted:Decided to (try to) play along and, uh, good luck I'm kinda curious what you ran into! I figured I would have seen it by now, but there hasn't been anything mind blowingly hard in the path of progress yet. VVV I argue that, uh, that is not in the path of progress. Merely a distraction! VVV liquidypoo fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Apr 6, 2017 |
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Apr 6, 2017 23:11
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liquidypoo posted:I'm kinda curious what you ran into! I figured I would have seen it by now, but there hasn't been anything mind blowingly hard in the path of progress yet. Are you playing the same game I am? Or the same game you showed video footage of to us? Rando Roundup 6-9
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Apr 6, 2017 23:21
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The overworld in VLDC9 is insanely charming and must have taken a ridiculous amount of work to do. So many little touches!
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Apr 7, 2017 00:54
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 Part 2: The Hardest Fight in the Game  The fight against Botwoon is pretty unfair. In vanilla Super Metroid, the bottom-left corner is a pretty easily-discovered safe zone, where the only way Botwoon can hurt you is with his five-shot spread. Here there's no safe zone, and dodging requires either morphballing or jumping up to a small platform, depending on Botwoon's movement patterns. This gets seriously hard in the later stages of the fight! And even if you find both energy tanks before this fight, you'll die on the sixth hit, making this a very tight damage race. About the only saving grace is that you can exit the fight at any time by bombing the floor, and there's a refill right next to the fight, so if you're playing on console, you probably won't be dying over and over again. On the other hand, turning off Bombs so you can hold a charge shot while in morphball can be quite helpful...and also makes it that much harder to retreat if things go poorly. I died a lot here, is what I'm saying. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Apr 7, 2017 |
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Apr 7, 2017 00:57
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someone awful. posted:The overworld in VLDC9 is insanely charming and must have taken a ridiculous amount of work to do. So many little touches! That is something I'm curious to know about. What goes into the process of editing the overworld?
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Apr 7, 2017 00:58
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Early Botwoon fights are never a good idea because he's so difficult to manage in terms of difficulty. There's almost no safe space even in his vanilla arena. At the time Eris came out, I don't think SMILE, the editor for Super Metroid, was capable of heavily modifying the damage that his segments do to the player, only the damage his head did. So it looks like DMantra decided to have a short, but dangerous fight. Still, I'm not sure I agree with the idea of a short boss gauntlet, though you could always return to the save point after fighting Spore Spawn.
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Apr 7, 2017 02:17
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FPzero posted:
The only time I have seen yellow really work as a color is as a crazy contrast. Dick Tracy is probably the best example where yellow really works.
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Apr 7, 2017 02:51
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Yellow is the worst loving color
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Apr 7, 2017 03:31
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liquidypoo posted:I'm kinda curious what you ran into! I figured I would have seen it by now, but there hasn't been anything mind blowingly hard in the path of progress yet. The period without Chichi where you have no reliable way to heal wrecked me because the sprite changes hosed with my ability to remember what part of the game I was in & I forgot it was coming  So yeah, the part of the game where you had 99 Tonics I tried to get through with about 5.This also coincided with a bit where I kept forgetting to savestate and then Crusadering myself into oblivion. The third progress hurdle is something Feyerbrand mentioned in the roundup: anybody who doesn't have magic in one of their 4 slots can't cast spells, which sucks when you end up in an area that casts Imp and you haven't stocked up on green cherries. Or when you do a bunch of esper grinding only to realize that you taught a bunch of people spells they can't cast. So tl;dr: don't go into this randomizer expecting to play exactly like you always do because it doesn't work e: also regular Dice in this randomizer do a respectable amount of damage if you spec Gendo out to be a physical attacker (Hyper Wrist & Genji Glove for 2x Dice until you get the Offering tears things up) StupidSexyMothman fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Apr 7, 2017 |
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Apr 7, 2017 03:43
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FPzero posted:
I liked the muted palette in that last level you played.
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Apr 7, 2017 04:06
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FPzero posted:Early Botwoon fights are never a good idea because he's so difficult to manage in terms of difficulty. There's almost no safe space even in his vanilla arena. At the time Eris came out, I don't think SMILE, the editor for Super Metroid, was capable of heavily modifying the damage that his segments do to the player, only the damage his head did. So it looks like DMantra decided to have a short, but dangerous fight. Still, I'm not sure I agree with the idea of a short boss gauntlet, though you could always return to the save point after fighting Spore Spawn. In principle I think the fight was more fair in 2009, as it was moved later in the item sequence, and thus you have more gear by this point (including one rather critical upgrade that I'm not mentioning because I do think it's spoiler-worthy). 2012 gave you a little more room to stand; I'm pretty sure that the floor I spent most of the time standing on was 1 tile higher in 2009, for example. But there are still plenty of ways Botwoon can nail you in that fight without giving you much of any recourse. In Vanilla, Botwoon is free -- just stand in the bottom-left corner and the only thing he can hit you with is his projectile, and he stops using that halfway through the fight! Fortunately he never stops using the spit attack in Eris, because it's the best time to get a favorable damage trade out of him. You really want to save those missiles for after he speeds up though, because there's realistically no way you can dodge high-speed Botwoon in the space available. If you spend the missiles early, you'll be trying to close out the fight with Charge Beam; not a pleasant prospect.
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Apr 7, 2017 04:36
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:In principle I think the fight was more fair in 2009, as it was moved later in the item sequence, and thus you have more gear by this point (including one rather critical upgrade that I'm not mentioning because I do think it's spoiler-worthy). 2012 gave you a little more room to stand; I'm pretty sure that the floor I spent most of the time standing on was 1 tile higher in 2009, for example. But there are still plenty of ways Botwoon can nail you in that fight without giving you much of any recourse. Yeah, and I'm sure with a little more exploration you could also have more missiles and maybe another energy tank to tackle him with. For example, I know there's another missile in the room below Botwoon hidden below a bombable floor. I'm pretty sure you also have access to a few other areas after getting Grapple + Charge Beam so there's surely something to be found if you need additional weaponry. The exploration in Eris really shines, but the whole game could probably use a slight reduction in the damage Samus takes.
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Apr 7, 2017 05:03
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FPzero posted:
The squished Rex in the overworld after beating the last level was a nice touch, though.
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Apr 7, 2017 05:21
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As an idiot who scrapes by doing visual arts work, taking my opinion with a grain of salt...yellow is fine. Usually you don't want to make EVERYTHING yellow, of course, or you end up with the WHIZZARD daring you to enter his magical realm, as that level demonstrated. Like with any color, it's important to consider complements and contrast and the effect you're going for. If the effect they were going for was 'welcome to piss', they did succeed, admittedly. A desert theme usually benefits from light, neutral tints and tones, and bright yellow usually doesn't do the trick on its own. On the other hand, they could have replaced some of the shaded pallette with oranges and bright white and had a bitchin' gold desert Scrooge McDuck style, so there's that I guess.
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Apr 7, 2017 07:30
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It really seems like everything was made yellow to avoid digging into the palettes of everything else, but I don't think it worked.
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Apr 7, 2017 18:33
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FPzero posted:Yeah, and I'm sure with a little more exploration you could also have more missiles and maybe another energy tank to tackle him with. For example, I know there's another missile in the room below Botwoon hidden below a bombable floor. I'm pretty sure you also have access to a few other areas after getting Grapple + Charge Beam so there's surely something to be found if you need additional weaponry. Honestly from here on out things get much easier. The game starts handing out more energy tanks and better offense, and infinitely-spawning enemies are relatively common (and can easily be killed with Grapple), so you're unlikely to run out of health so long as you're willing to stop and farm for a bit. I think I'd be happy with the overall difficulty of Eris if you just started with 3 energy tanks instead of 0; 100 health just isn't very much in this game. Regarding getting more gear, you're right: I could have gotten Spazer before this fight, which would have made it easier. In addition to the added damage, Spazer has incredibly generous hitbox logic -- the beam won't despawn unless it either deals damage or all three beam segments get blocked. So hitting Botwoon with it instead of the basic charge beam would have been much easier. But getting the beam would have required a lot of backtracking as well as skipping a nearby item that's blocked by super missile blocks. Instead, I routed the run to minimize backtracking. This also means I don't pick up Ice beam at the absolute earliest point, but oh well.
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Apr 7, 2017 18:42
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Shady Amish Terror posted:As an idiot who scrapes by doing visual arts work, taking my opinion with a grain of salt...yellow is fine. I'm overly harsh on yellow just because I find it difficult to work with in its pure form. Add a tiny bit of orange and you're suddenly in an orange spectrum, add a bit of green, the green spectrum. Pure yellows are just hard to bring out in my head and when I see them on paper. I took a crack at fixing the palette of the level in Photoshop (meaning I wasn't able to modify anything ingame to look better so this is a pretty rough rework) and I think I came up with an infinitely better-looking level:  ->  Most of the yellows being used in here were pure RGB yellow (255,255,0). If I had access to the level files and wanted to spend time mucking around changing tiles and palettes this is probably the bare minimum of what I'd change. Deserts are usually more than just yellow sand, so I added a green cactus, made the sky and clouds have a slight orange tint, gave the mountains in the background some yellow-green and made that one rock below Mario darker as an example of how I would color all the big rocks in the dirt. I also lightened the general dirt colors a little bit just to get them away from using that RGB yellow. I think it came out much better.
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Apr 8, 2017 17:08
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