Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim Plays All the Rest of the D-Mods
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===2013===
There will come a year with no D-Mods. We already know that 2015 is not that year, but realistically, it will probably be soon. Nothing lasts forever. Maybe that year will mark the end of D-Mods altogether, or maybe it will be a lull before they come back yet again before vanishing for good. Either way, it will come.
Yes, there will come a time when Dink will be no more. When ducks will run rampant, their heads steadfastly, blasphemously attached to their bodies in defiance of both reason and tradition. When barmaids will be able to do their jobs unsullied by rude, clumsy come-ons from a guy wearing green tights and a red bandana. When pillbugs will turn the land silver, their plated shells tragically unpunched. When sarcastic, fourth wall breaking remarks will go unsaid. When evil wizards will give up their schemes and go become lawyers, because what's even the point anymore? Such a time will come. But it hasn't come yet, and it might have, if not for one man - I'm not going to say a hero, because what's a hero? - but one man with an oddly-spelled username who stood up and said, "No. Not yet."
The Smallwood Throwback Contest was a success, but afterward, D-Modding stopped cold. 233 days passed between the contest's release day and Leprochaun's release of "Moon Child," breaking the record set in 2009 by more than a month. It may have seemed for a time that the throwback contest lowered the closing curtain on Dink, and I admit it would have been an interesting final act, ending by going back to the beginning.
One file released during this period that I'd like to call attention to is the Dink Script Improvement Pack by Thenewguy. This fixes some annoying problems that scripts from the original game have always had, especially the missiles. Anybody who's played a lot of Dink has probably noticed the problems with fireballs and other missiles: they'll hit things they should be ignoring, like text (for example, the damage numbers) or death or explosion animations. It's so annoying when this happens. This pack improves arrow placement and also allows you to shoot hellfire diagonally. I recommend it.
I wrote a "D-Mod Drought Diaries" after skimming through some forum posts of the time for material, but what I wrote just wasn't that interesting (my favorite part was the title "Moon Pregnancy," which - ugh - tells you a lot about the quality of the piece), so I erased it. I mean, it's the same thing every time - the community wasn't very active, and there was a little bit of fretting about it, but not very much. I also listed the new files you could see yourself in the news archive, and had nothing of interest to say about them. I'm thinking that entire recurring segment wasn't such a hot idea. Let's just get down to business, shall we?
342: Moon Child Author: Leprochaun Release Date: March 23, 2013
"Moon Pigs, Cuddle, Rare, Artists, Playing, love, people, oink."
Leprochaun actually made a dev thread for "Moon Child" way back in February 2012. He hadn't posted about it in several months by the time it actually came out, however, so it must have been quite a surprise. Generally you assume the projects in those old threads are dead, right?
Oh, the moon.
My screenshot to text ratio is gonna suck here, but I mean, look at this intro screen! Wow!
"Moon Child" sure is a strange one. I've tossed the "weirdest D-Mod" designation around a few times. I dunno which one is actually the weirdest, but this has got to be up there. It's like a bunch of strange little ideas were put into a blender and then somebody took the lid off while it was still on. There isn't a lot of structure to it. With a few exceptions, the various things you can do or encounter in "Moon Child" bear little relation to one another. Just about any object could turn out to be something that talks, or Dink will at least have something to say about it (there are a surprising number of "push" comments in this one, too). Hidden passages are everywhere, but they mostly lead to an odd scene and/or character that doesn't seem to accomplish anything. Dink goes around crawling into all the holes he sees because he's got "nothing better to do."
I guess it is, compared to my other features.
As I've discussed before, Dink has been portrayed in many different ways. Generally speaking, though, although he can be rude, thoughtless and even selfish, I think he generally intends to do the right thing and feels an obligation to help others who really need it. Not in THIS D-Mod, boyo. This Dink is callous, spiteful and cruel, but above all apathetic. He does not care. In fact, this may be the only context in which I've ever felt confident in using a certain clichéd bit of hyperbole literally: I honestly believe that he couldn't care less about anything and everything. "Not my problem" is his mantra. He cares not for helping people unless a half-considered whim strikes him, and on another whim he'll actively spread suffering and death regardless of innocence or guilt. Dink encounters all sorts of bizarre and fantastic things in this quest, but without a single exception, everything he sees bores him thoroughly. Quite a bit of it also seems to make him vaguely annoyed. I honestly think this Dink would welcome death, or at least not care about it, but the thought of suicide bores him too much to even seriously consider it.
Life is so boring.
So Dink goes to the moon to help out the Moon Child, a person (?) who looks like a little girl but only due to eternal (or at least greatly extended) youth. She wants Dink to kill a giant moon pig. She wants this because she's evil, which she attempts to disguise from Dink, but she's wasting her time doing that. It couldn't possibly matter any less to him whether she's evil or not. You say kill a pig, he figures he might as well. Nothing better to do. Whatever.
The moon is a very blue place. Many sprites have been tinted blue, a nice touch which gives this D-Mod a distinct look and an otherworldly feel. There's a lot going on visually on many screens. Leprochaun is the kind of mapper who runs up against the 99-sprite-per-screen limit a lot. I know because I've worked with him that he really enjoys mapping and designing scenes that not only look interesting, but also have things going on in them, places where things have happened rather than a lifeless landscape.
Being on the moon doesn't impress Dink, but then, nothing does. Actually, I think this line right here might be the most interested he ever gets in this D-Mod.
This screen doesn't do anything at all. It's just here because he wanted to fill another screen with stuff.
Lep is another author who uses some sprites in ways they weren't originally intended. Not all of his visual experiments quite work, but most do.
Daaaang. It's a shame this screen is too late to single-handedly win the Carnage Contest. 8 DDCs out of 5.
The people on the moon are various degrees of off their rockers. I mean, none of them are really on their rockers, but some of them couldn't even tell you where their rockers are. Some of their rockers might not even be in the same universe as them. I'm saying that mental problems seem to be both severe and common on the moon. A handful of the many bizarre utterances the people throw at Dink are references to an Internet thing called "asdfmovie," which I went and watched some of. It's a series of extremely short, odd gags. I wouldn't quite say that "Moon Child" is quite the D-Mod equivalent of asdfmovie, but they've definitely got things in common. The two of them would be drinking buddies. They'd go bowling.
OKAY. I NEVER FOUND A WAY TO STEAL YOUR GOLD HEART, THOUGH.
There are a lot of added graphics in this D-Mod by various authors. Making its first appearance in this D-Mod is the Avoca, a monster made by Iplaydink that looks like an avocado.
Just think of all the guacamole you could make! It might go well with... er... human flesh? Ew.
There's no combat required to beat the main game, which you can do in 15 minutes if you know what you're doing. It took me an hour and ten minutes just to beat the game. A walkthrough is by no means required. I did look it up once, on the very last puzzle, but I shouldn't have, as it turned out the solution was really simple and I'd have figured it out if I weren't so lazy. I did get stuck once, but it wasn't because I didn't know what to do, it was because I didn't recognize that a dead spikey was supposed to be a "button."
Um... well, that is one opinion.
You will need the guide, though, if you want to get all the secrets. After the ending, you go to a room full of "trophies" for doing various little optional things in the D-Mod. Some are miniature quests of sorts, but others just require you to see or talk to something. Really it's just a way of encouraging you to see all of the eclectic stuff in this D-Mod, but even if you get all of the trophies, there's still a lot more to see. There's a unique scripted object or event tucked into every... I was going to say corner, but I am frightened when I try to imagine a shape with that many corners. Anyway, you're given a score based on the number of trophies you collect; I only had 4000 out of 15000 on my first run. Examining the trophies gives you a totally arbitrary title that doesn't have anything to do with anything. I'm partial to the names for the "quests and distractions" in the guide, actually. One of them is a reference to my favorite Tom Lehrer song.
My parents will be so proud.
I went back and played the game again to try and get all the points with the walkthrough's help, but I was prevented from doing so by the fact that the game crashed every time I entered the screen where you're supposed to duel a goblin. I did manage to beat the optional boss, Larry the crazy old guy who has a ton of HP and constantly casts annoying spells at you. I managed to beat him with the help of an item that restores your HP as much as you want (it's a bag of vegetables. Dink says "Yuck," and I agree, but they ARE good for you), but I never got to see the trophy because the game also crashed when I tried to re-enter the screen where you fight Larry after winning. Sad face. I also found a hardness error in the southeast part of the map. I've noticed that otherwise polished D-Mods often have hardness errors that occur when you switch screens while walking along an edge; these kinds of errors are pretty much impossible to spot in the map editor. I'm looking at the place where I know it is in the editor right now and I can only see it if I move a sprite out of the way. You have to be careful around corners of screens.
Dink fights the fearsome Larry the Wizard Guy.
Its disjointed nature confused me at first, but I learned to relax and take "Moon Child" on its own terms. It's just a bunch of things that happen, many of which are dryly humorous and most of which are creative. I do recommend checking this one out. I don't think there's any other D-Mod quite like it.
--
There we are. I've covered all 342 D-Mods that existed back when I said I'd play all the D-Mods back in August 2013, about seventeen months ago. And they said it couldn't be done. Or something to that effect. I think Leprochaun implied that I'd get sick of it. I've managed.
I'm not quite done yet, of course, because 11 D-Mods have come out since I started. I've already played most of 'em, some quite recently. Heck, I made three of them. I sure know how to make more work for myself, huh?
"Moon Child" remained the last D-Mod for a long time, though. 315 days passed between its release and that of "Malachi the Jerk," obliterating the record gap that ended when "Moon Child" came out. This means that it isn't just the only D-Mod that came out in 2013; it's the only D-Mod that came out in a period of about a year and a half. At this point it might have seemed that Dink was finally dying, but it never did. People stuck around, and that meant that the seed for more D-Mods was still there. Do you think I would have started COTPATD or "Malachi" if I came on here and saw that nobody had posted in the forum in a week? I doubt it. Whatever keeps this place together, it's remarkably strong.
Obviously, "Malachi the Jerk" is up next. I could pretty much write a book about it. Should I attempt to restrain myself and treat it more like the other D-Mods I've covered, or are you guys up for an extensive behind the scenes look at MtJ with scans of my original notes and other craziness? Let me know.
There will come a year with no D-Mods. We already know that 2015 is not that year, but realistically, it will probably be soon. Nothing lasts forever. Maybe that year will mark the end of D-Mods altogether, or maybe it will be a lull before they come back yet again before vanishing for good. Either way, it will come.
Yes, there will come a time when Dink will be no more. When ducks will run rampant, their heads steadfastly, blasphemously attached to their bodies in defiance of both reason and tradition. When barmaids will be able to do their jobs unsullied by rude, clumsy come-ons from a guy wearing green tights and a red bandana. When pillbugs will turn the land silver, their plated shells tragically unpunched. When sarcastic, fourth wall breaking remarks will go unsaid. When evil wizards will give up their schemes and go become lawyers, because what's even the point anymore? Such a time will come. But it hasn't come yet, and it might have, if not for one man - I'm not going to say a hero, because what's a hero? - but one man with an oddly-spelled username who stood up and said, "No. Not yet."
The Smallwood Throwback Contest was a success, but afterward, D-Modding stopped cold. 233 days passed between the contest's release day and Leprochaun's release of "Moon Child," breaking the record set in 2009 by more than a month. It may have seemed for a time that the throwback contest lowered the closing curtain on Dink, and I admit it would have been an interesting final act, ending by going back to the beginning.
One file released during this period that I'd like to call attention to is the Dink Script Improvement Pack by Thenewguy. This fixes some annoying problems that scripts from the original game have always had, especially the missiles. Anybody who's played a lot of Dink has probably noticed the problems with fireballs and other missiles: they'll hit things they should be ignoring, like text (for example, the damage numbers) or death or explosion animations. It's so annoying when this happens. This pack improves arrow placement and also allows you to shoot hellfire diagonally. I recommend it.
I wrote a "D-Mod Drought Diaries" after skimming through some forum posts of the time for material, but what I wrote just wasn't that interesting (my favorite part was the title "Moon Pregnancy," which - ugh - tells you a lot about the quality of the piece), so I erased it. I mean, it's the same thing every time - the community wasn't very active, and there was a little bit of fretting about it, but not very much. I also listed the new files you could see yourself in the news archive, and had nothing of interest to say about them. I'm thinking that entire recurring segment wasn't such a hot idea. Let's just get down to business, shall we?
342: Moon Child Author: Leprochaun Release Date: March 23, 2013
"Moon Pigs, Cuddle, Rare, Artists, Playing, love, people, oink."
Leprochaun actually made a dev thread for "Moon Child" way back in February 2012. He hadn't posted about it in several months by the time it actually came out, however, so it must have been quite a surprise. Generally you assume the projects in those old threads are dead, right?
Oh, the moon.
My screenshot to text ratio is gonna suck here, but I mean, look at this intro screen! Wow!
"Moon Child" sure is a strange one. I've tossed the "weirdest D-Mod" designation around a few times. I dunno which one is actually the weirdest, but this has got to be up there. It's like a bunch of strange little ideas were put into a blender and then somebody took the lid off while it was still on. There isn't a lot of structure to it. With a few exceptions, the various things you can do or encounter in "Moon Child" bear little relation to one another. Just about any object could turn out to be something that talks, or Dink will at least have something to say about it (there are a surprising number of "push" comments in this one, too). Hidden passages are everywhere, but they mostly lead to an odd scene and/or character that doesn't seem to accomplish anything. Dink goes around crawling into all the holes he sees because he's got "nothing better to do."
I guess it is, compared to my other features.
As I've discussed before, Dink has been portrayed in many different ways. Generally speaking, though, although he can be rude, thoughtless and even selfish, I think he generally intends to do the right thing and feels an obligation to help others who really need it. Not in THIS D-Mod, boyo. This Dink is callous, spiteful and cruel, but above all apathetic. He does not care. In fact, this may be the only context in which I've ever felt confident in using a certain clichéd bit of hyperbole literally: I honestly believe that he couldn't care less about anything and everything. "Not my problem" is his mantra. He cares not for helping people unless a half-considered whim strikes him, and on another whim he'll actively spread suffering and death regardless of innocence or guilt. Dink encounters all sorts of bizarre and fantastic things in this quest, but without a single exception, everything he sees bores him thoroughly. Quite a bit of it also seems to make him vaguely annoyed. I honestly think this Dink would welcome death, or at least not care about it, but the thought of suicide bores him too much to even seriously consider it.
Life is so boring.
So Dink goes to the moon to help out the Moon Child, a person (?) who looks like a little girl but only due to eternal (or at least greatly extended) youth. She wants Dink to kill a giant moon pig. She wants this because she's evil, which she attempts to disguise from Dink, but she's wasting her time doing that. It couldn't possibly matter any less to him whether she's evil or not. You say kill a pig, he figures he might as well. Nothing better to do. Whatever.
The moon is a very blue place. Many sprites have been tinted blue, a nice touch which gives this D-Mod a distinct look and an otherworldly feel. There's a lot going on visually on many screens. Leprochaun is the kind of mapper who runs up against the 99-sprite-per-screen limit a lot. I know because I've worked with him that he really enjoys mapping and designing scenes that not only look interesting, but also have things going on in them, places where things have happened rather than a lifeless landscape.
Being on the moon doesn't impress Dink, but then, nothing does. Actually, I think this line right here might be the most interested he ever gets in this D-Mod.
This screen doesn't do anything at all. It's just here because he wanted to fill another screen with stuff.
Lep is another author who uses some sprites in ways they weren't originally intended. Not all of his visual experiments quite work, but most do.
Daaaang. It's a shame this screen is too late to single-handedly win the Carnage Contest. 8 DDCs out of 5.
The people on the moon are various degrees of off their rockers. I mean, none of them are really on their rockers, but some of them couldn't even tell you where their rockers are. Some of their rockers might not even be in the same universe as them. I'm saying that mental problems seem to be both severe and common on the moon. A handful of the many bizarre utterances the people throw at Dink are references to an Internet thing called "asdfmovie," which I went and watched some of. It's a series of extremely short, odd gags. I wouldn't quite say that "Moon Child" is quite the D-Mod equivalent of asdfmovie, but they've definitely got things in common. The two of them would be drinking buddies. They'd go bowling.
OKAY. I NEVER FOUND A WAY TO STEAL YOUR GOLD HEART, THOUGH.
There are a lot of added graphics in this D-Mod by various authors. Making its first appearance in this D-Mod is the Avoca, a monster made by Iplaydink that looks like an avocado.
Just think of all the guacamole you could make! It might go well with... er... human flesh? Ew.
There's no combat required to beat the main game, which you can do in 15 minutes if you know what you're doing. It took me an hour and ten minutes just to beat the game. A walkthrough is by no means required. I did look it up once, on the very last puzzle, but I shouldn't have, as it turned out the solution was really simple and I'd have figured it out if I weren't so lazy. I did get stuck once, but it wasn't because I didn't know what to do, it was because I didn't recognize that a dead spikey was supposed to be a "button."
Um... well, that is one opinion.
You will need the guide, though, if you want to get all the secrets. After the ending, you go to a room full of "trophies" for doing various little optional things in the D-Mod. Some are miniature quests of sorts, but others just require you to see or talk to something. Really it's just a way of encouraging you to see all of the eclectic stuff in this D-Mod, but even if you get all of the trophies, there's still a lot more to see. There's a unique scripted object or event tucked into every... I was going to say corner, but I am frightened when I try to imagine a shape with that many corners. Anyway, you're given a score based on the number of trophies you collect; I only had 4000 out of 15000 on my first run. Examining the trophies gives you a totally arbitrary title that doesn't have anything to do with anything. I'm partial to the names for the "quests and distractions" in the guide, actually. One of them is a reference to my favorite Tom Lehrer song.
My parents will be so proud.
I went back and played the game again to try and get all the points with the walkthrough's help, but I was prevented from doing so by the fact that the game crashed every time I entered the screen where you're supposed to duel a goblin. I did manage to beat the optional boss, Larry the crazy old guy who has a ton of HP and constantly casts annoying spells at you. I managed to beat him with the help of an item that restores your HP as much as you want (it's a bag of vegetables. Dink says "Yuck," and I agree, but they ARE good for you), but I never got to see the trophy because the game also crashed when I tried to re-enter the screen where you fight Larry after winning. Sad face. I also found a hardness error in the southeast part of the map. I've noticed that otherwise polished D-Mods often have hardness errors that occur when you switch screens while walking along an edge; these kinds of errors are pretty much impossible to spot in the map editor. I'm looking at the place where I know it is in the editor right now and I can only see it if I move a sprite out of the way. You have to be careful around corners of screens.
Dink fights the fearsome Larry the Wizard Guy.
Its disjointed nature confused me at first, but I learned to relax and take "Moon Child" on its own terms. It's just a bunch of things that happen, many of which are dryly humorous and most of which are creative. I do recommend checking this one out. I don't think there's any other D-Mod quite like it.
--
There we are. I've covered all 342 D-Mods that existed back when I said I'd play all the D-Mods back in August 2013, about seventeen months ago. And they said it couldn't be done. Or something to that effect. I think Leprochaun implied that I'd get sick of it. I've managed.
I'm not quite done yet, of course, because 11 D-Mods have come out since I started. I've already played most of 'em, some quite recently. Heck, I made three of them. I sure know how to make more work for myself, huh?
"Moon Child" remained the last D-Mod for a long time, though. 315 days passed between its release and that of "Malachi the Jerk," obliterating the record gap that ended when "Moon Child" came out. This means that it isn't just the only D-Mod that came out in 2013; it's the only D-Mod that came out in a period of about a year and a half. At this point it might have seemed that Dink was finally dying, but it never did. People stuck around, and that meant that the seed for more D-Mods was still there. Do you think I would have started COTPATD or "Malachi" if I came on here and saw that nobody had posted in the forum in a week? I doubt it. Whatever keeps this place together, it's remarkably strong.
Obviously, "Malachi the Jerk" is up next. I could pretty much write a book about it. Should I attempt to restrain myself and treat it more like the other D-Mods I've covered, or are you guys up for an extensive behind the scenes look at MtJ with scans of my original notes and other craziness? Let me know.
