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November 20th 2014, 10:33 PM
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CocoMonkey
Bard He/Him United States
Please Cindy, say the whole name each time. 
--Crazy Old Tim Plays All the DMODs--

Directory
1998 | HTML version
1999 | HTML version
2000 | HTML version
2001 | Article version
2002 | Article version
2003
2004
2005
2007
2008-2009
2010
2011-2015

After eight years of impressively consistent output, DMOD authors finally slowed down a bit in 2006. For the first time, less than twenty DMODs were released in a year - 17, by my count, nearly half of which were entries for the Failure Contest. Despite the dip in DMOD production, I still consider this to be a big - no, huge - year for the Dink community. I will explain why in the first installment of a series I'm going to call...

**The DMOD Drought Diaries**
~Chapter 1: Reign of the Release Candidates (Early 2006)~

After "Once a Hero" came out on the final day of 2005, there were no more DMODs released for a while. The next DMOD, "The Quest," came out on March 26, 2006. That's a gap of 85 days - nearly three months.

That may not seem like much now. There was a considerably longer gap in 2014 between the releases of "Bored of the Rings" (April 1) and "Dink Smallwood: Achievement Unlocked Edition" (September 2), and 2014's frequency of releases looks like a renaissance compared to the previous year. You might wonder why I've chosen to call so much attention to this gap in releases after ignoring any that have come before.

For the answer, look back to 1998. I'm not quite sure when "Milli Vanilli" came out, but I do know that Mike Snyder's "Scar of David," released on March 22nd, was the second DMOD. The third, Mike's "Dink's Doppleganger," was released on June 6th. That's a gap of 76 days, and until 2006, this remained the record for the longest DMOD drought! That's impressive both in terms of the community's activity in the intervening years and in terms of making me wonder what the Hell was going on with "Scar of David" coming out so damn early. Mike Snyder's mystical powers confuse and frighten me.

Anyway, I've decided that every time the drought record is broken, I'm going to take a little look at what Dink community was up to in the mean time. This will be a seven-part series. If you guessed that parts six and seven are going to be on either side of "Moon Child," you really know your recent Dink history.

The early 2006 drought coincided with the release of Dink Smallwood version 1.08, the first new version since 1.07 Beta 3 came out way back in December of 2001 and still the latest version of the main "fork" of the game. Public beta testing began in late 2005, but in January, the first release candidate was... er... released. People kept finding bugs, so there were several release candidates. Release Candidate 7, which came out on February 25, ended up being the final release of Dink 1.08, and on March 10 there was an official release with Seth Robinson's approval.

1.08 was a big update - all of the previous releases were minor tweaks in comparison. Dan "Redink1" Walma (with some assistance from Talmadge Bradley) made a new version of Dink with lots of useful new features. The previous updates to the game had been light on features - the biggest one I can think of is the ability to call scripts when the player presses a certain key on the keyboard, introduced in 1.06. 1.08 had so many fantastic new features that I couldn't list them all, but I do want to hit some of the highlights.

*loopmidi - DMODs released before Dink 1.08 very rarely looped MIDI songs. Even the few DMODs that had looped music generally only did so on certain special screens, such as boss fights. This was because MIDI files could only be looped by waiting the amount of seconds that were in the track and then playing the MIDI again. Without looping, the music would frequently cut out, leaving players with an awkward silence. With this new function, MIDIs will loop automatically throughout the game.

*show_console - The console is a new feature that allows you to type DinkC commands within the game itself and have them execute instantly. This is incredibly useful for development, debugging and super-advanced cheating.

*dnotalk and dnomagic - With 1.08, it's finally possible to change those moldy old default sayings for talking to nothing and trying to cast magic without a spell equipped. Frankly, I can't understand why everybody hasn't done this since. A couple of older DMODs used a "blank" initial magic to work around the default no-magic sayings, but no DMOD ever worked around the "talking to nothing" messages. "Dink's World" had alternate text, but only if you used the redink.exe engine, which had the same feature.

*compare_weapon - FINALLY, somebody can tell the difference between you punching them and chopping them with a sword. This was a frustrating limitation that frequently prevented "hit" reactions from making any sense (for example, Dink would chop at a sign and proclaim, "Ow! My Knuckles!"). Some older DMODs found ways to work around this, but it's great to be able to check directly to see what the player has equipped. 1.08 works this into the original game; the bow seller has a new line of dialogue if you shoot him with the bow.

*True Color mode - speaks for itself. I use this all the time.

*external - When calling external scripts, you can now pass values to them using new psuedo-variables like &arg1.

*clear_editor_info - Remember how much trouble "Catacombs" had to go through to reset stored information about editor sprites? Now, you can do it all with one command. This is also useful for testing during development.

There's a bunch more, but you get the point. 1.08 has lots of useful new features for DMOD developers and expands what it's possible to do with the engine even further. Of course, quite a few people had dreams of even more powerful options, but there's only so much you can do without totally breaking compatibility with old DMODs (or, for that matter, without eventually turning it into such a different game that you might as well just start a new one from scratch). As it is, a large number of older DMODs received updates in 2006 in order to fix bugs that turned up when playing them on 1.08.

Other events during this period:

On January 18, gamehampe (author of "Unfinished Business" and "Castle Killers") released WinDinkEdit Plus, adding some new features and fixes to the popular editor by WC and Gary Hertel.

Wesley McElwee returned to the community and released an update for "Friends Beyond 1," also on January 18.

Beuc revived the Dink Smallwood Solutions.

--

230: The Quest Author: Anders Tilly (Srednar) Release Date: March 26, 2006
"You know, you really suck at adventure games."

It's kind of funny that this is the DMOD that ended the first significant drought, because this is pretty far from my expectations of what a DMOD generally is. It seems constructed to make the game do silly things and troll the player. It certainly isn't that new for a DMOD to be based around jokes and references, break the fourth wall, and not take itself seriously, but this one is REALLY out there. It is the anti-DMOD.

The maps are very empty, and the tiling is bad in some places. Dink can walk straight through most of the houses, which make up most of the (seemingly) solid objects you encounter. This is clearly less a case of incompetence and more a case of apathy on the part of the author.


Yeah, he doesn't care.

The only screen with any decoration features one tree and one rock. Upon entering this screen, Dink declares, "This is an unimportant area, made solely to connect the island. I suggest you leave." If you examine the tree, or rock, he explains, "This is an insignificant piece of decoration that's not needed for the main storyline. Ignore it." That's certainly direct. This game seems to be in open contempt of many of the conventions of games in general.

The escape menu we know so well has been totally wrecked. The gamepad setup and restart game options are gone. The "Help" option just tells you that you're on your own. A "Fetch me a badger" option increments a counter and tells you that you have n number of badgers (you end up needing a certain amount of these badgers to pass a certain point). The quit option makes you confirm your choice to quit the game five times.


Now, that's just rude.

Any object or NPC that isn't here to advance the game is here to toss out jokes, references or both. There's a girl who's only there so that you can select from a long list of pick-up lines. There's a black guy, so Dink can make offensive racist jokes that I won't repeat (the guy takes it in stride). There's a statue that plays randomly selected .wavs from The Simpsons. There's a guy who contradicts you like in the Argument sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus. There's a lot of yo momma jokes, which are worked into a "battle" where you have to come up with comebacks, a reference to the insult swordfighting from the Monkey Island series.


Yo momma so fat, she has serious health problems. I'm worried about her.

The gameplay is mainly made up of quizzes and puzzles. Near the start, you have to answer some math problems and a few questions about the German military during World War II. If you answer any question wrong, you'll have to load your save. I think that it's poor design to require outside knowledge, but I'm pretty sure the author wouldn't care what I think. There's a third quiz, but all of the answers to it are "Sweden." The puzzles include some very nicely implemented versions of a "lights out" style puzzle and Concentration, as well as a shell-game puzzle with knights. They move way too fast to follow on the last round, but it's the same every time, so I only had to lose once.


You examine the barrels to try to match the contents. It works quite smoothly.

I was sure that this was going to be a non-combat DMOD, but there are three screens of combat at the end. The first two screens are straightforward enough - a big pillbug that turns into smaller pillbugs when you kill it and a bunch of quickly multiplying slimes. The third screen, however, throws out all the rules of Dink Smallwood. At first, you're just fighting a wizard who casts a variety of spells. It's annoying when he uses his "summon pillbug" spell right after freezing you with a "paralyze" spell, but he's still pretty manageable. When you damage him a certain amount, however, things get weird.


What the Hell is going on?

Explosions are everywhere. Dozens of pillbugs stream into being and swarm you. You'd succumb to the damage pretty quickly, but Dink's health keeps spontaneously refilling for some reason. Dink is frozen and unfrozen every second or so; some of the times that he can move, his speed is set to slow. I was reduced to thrashing about, madly punching, wondering what game I was even playing anymore. This wasn't Dink Smallwood as I know it. This game makes no sense. A game is supposed to be an entertaining friend. This game is a duplicitous stranger, leading me along and then pulling the floor out from under me.

Anyway, somehow I muddled through and got to the big bad guy. After a typical ominous villain speech, he kills Dink, except that I wasn't frozen for some reason, so I could still walk around. Whoops!

"The Quest" is pretty funny in its way. Play it if you're sick of DMODs.


Look, there's a secret Bubble Bobble screen!