Reply to Re: Crazy Old Tim Plays All the Rest of the D-Mods
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===2014===
2014 was the first full year in which I was an active community member in a long time. Seven D-Mods were released, at least if you count "Achievement Unlocked Edition" as a D-Mod, which I will if only because it gives me more to write about. 7 releases would have been a new low before 2013, but after a whole year with just one D-Mod it looks pretty good.
--
I haven't covered a D-Mod that I made myself since the 1998 topic, despite the fact that I released D-Mods in 1999 and 2000. I wrote about them all together in order to get it over with. This was a mistake, I now realize. It caused me to be too nice to my later mods. I gave the Dink Forever trilogy and "2001" roughly what they deserved, but taking the others in that early days context instead of their proper context made them look better than they were. I was especially too nice to "End of the World," a bug-ridden, incoherent, tragically unfun mess about which the only positive thing that may be said is that it's somewhat more functional than my 1998 releases. I can't believe I used the word "fun" in that writeup without preceding it with the words "not at all." What I was actually having fun with was the novelty of playing Dink Smallwood again, still pretty fresh at that point. I really do think the core gameplay is pretty good. Good thing, right?
A bigger mistake was excusing myself from writing about "All Out Brawl," the biggest insult I perpetrated upon the community. I justified it to myself by observing, correctly, that there's not much to say about it, but that's no excuse. If even one person wasted their time downloading this shameful crap, it's only fair that I subject myself to it one more time. I nabbed it from the Internet Wayback Machine's archive of Mike Snyder's site. Let's take a very brief look.
NaN: All Out Brawl Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: August 19, 1998
From the readme: "reviewers take note: this was NOT MEANT to be good.
it's just for people who like more FIGHTING an less talking."
Well, at least we can tell from the first sentence that this project turned out as intended. Fighting fans are bound to be disappointed, however.
There are fifteen screens, arranged in a bizarre pattern. This functions as a sort of maze, since none of them have got any borders to tell you where you can and cannot go. All of the screens have the same background. They look like this:
I probably put more thought into stamping those rock tiles than anything else in this D-Mod.
There's nothing to motivate you to actually fight the enemies scattered in no meaningful way across these screens. The enemies include slimes, pillbugs, boncas and slayers. There are megapotions and gold hearts to find, but directly engaging the slayers is still a pretty bad idea. If you really wanted to kill everything for some reason, you might be able to manage it by starting some slayer fights... except that there's one screen with a slayer by itself. Hm.
On a certain screen, there's a "town news" poster that you can examine. I tried to clumsily attach it to a castle corner sprite, but that sprite has been given the slayer script, so it instantly transmogrifies into a slayer who can't move because of hardness. If you examine the poster, it says "THE END!" and Dink exclaims, "what? NOOO!" This is the only text, and it's taken directly from "Dink Forever." The game doesn't stop or anything, you're just told it's the end.
"All Out Brawl" is the worst D-Mod ever released. I gave this matter serious thought before coming to this conclusion. Its only serious rivals in this category are "Land of Transforming Ducks," "Goblin Castle" and "[Alphabet]," and it's not hard for me to recommend the first and third of those over it, as they at least register as not-terribly-funny jokes. That leaves "Goblin Castle" as the only other D-Mod even in the same neighborhood of pointlessness, and I think it wins by default because it has proper dialogue, even if almost none of it displays. Yes, "All Out Brawl" is the worst D-Mod ever. The DFMAOB is too good for it. Come to think of it, I guess 2010's "Quest in the Icelands" will remain the last DFMAOB winner, and don't any of you DARE release something in the next week or so just to prove me wrong. I'm onto you people.
I had completely forgotten, but "Brawl" comes with what I laughably called a "demo" of "2001: A Dink Oddyssey," which was released a few days later. The demo is, predictably, just an unfinished version with the ending missing and even more bugs than the final... but I did notice something odd. My original, terrible MS Paint graphics didn't work when I played the final "Oddyssey," but here they work for some reason. Gaze upon them, but only if you have a strong stomach.
I... what was I GOING for?
Oh, little eyebot. I shouldn't even have saved you in MS Paint.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
I had also forgotten that Martridge explains that World War III broke out when "someone made fun of saddam's mustache, i think." That's about as close as I got to successfully telling a joke in any of my 1998 D-Mods. Not saying much, obviously.
...Yeah, okay, we're done here. Moving on.
343: Malachi the Jerk Authors: Tim Maurer, Leprochaun Release Date: February 2, 2014
"Tuesday strikes again."
REPUTATION NOTE: This D-Mod is one of the select group with a score of 9.0 or better (9.2) on The Dink Network.
Well, technically. That is the score that displays on the page, but it might not actually represent community consensus. There was another review that gave it a good score (8.4) that was nonetheless low enough to take it out of the 9.0+ category, but it was pulled down for some reason. Honestly, I thought the author justified his opinions reasonably well. He didn't seem to like the D-Mod much despite saying it was generally high-quality, so I was kind of surprised the score was as high as it was. But I don't really think it should have been pulled down, even though reading it makes me feel icy spines prickle inside my chest every single time as I realize how many of its biting criticisms are accurate. I could put it back up myself, but I don't wanna step on any toes.
Getting the (Coconut) monkey off my back
One day in early August of 2013, I was going through some old CDs and I found my copy of Dink Smallwood. In the past, when I'd think of those days a shadow would come over my thoughts and I could only think of regrets - sounds pretty dramatic, I know, but my brain just works like that. Even when I returned briefly in 2006, I was soon overcome by such thoughts and had to leave. But this time, over a decade after leaving, I thought back to the fun I had instead. I smiled. I said out loud, "I wonder how the Dink Network is doing." I have since lost my copy of the game, but if I'd never had it, I wouldn't have come back when I did. It speaks to the value of a physical object as a tie to our memories. That's worth the $20 (closer to $30 if you account for inflation!) I paid for that disc.
The first post I made upon returning was in the same topic as the last post I'd made back in 2006. I dumped what little I had written for an aborted D-Mod project from that year. It was a decent idea, but far less than even half-baked. In posting my old script, I hoped to bury my ambitions of redeeming myself with a "comeback D-Mod" for good. Many attempts had proven I just wasn't any good at it, I concluded.
Soon, I came up with the idea to play and write about all the D-Mods. If anybody who wasn't active on the forum at the time wants to see the genesis of that idea and the early reactions to its proposal, it can be found here.
As I started writing about D-Mods, though, I started having ideas for D-Mods I might make. It also occurred to me that people might take my opinions on D-Mods more seriously if I demonstrated myself to be a capable D-Mod author. So I decided to have another go at it after all, but I moved slowly, intent on getting it right. It would be weeks between this decision and opening the editor. I brainstormed, read all the tutorials, and watched every one of Robj's tutorial videos before I did anything.
I had several ideas. They included a remake of the NES RPG Dragon Warrior that I ended up making later, a mod with a constantly changing world called "Channel Surfing" (I still think this one is a neat idea), a combat-focused game similar to the Gladiator minigame from "FIAT," and a "Pit of 100 trials" as seen in the Paper Mario Series. I settled on an idea for an Epic called Dark and Cloudy Day and started writing. I became fairly attached to this idea for a darker epic that would feature prominent relationships between Dink and other playable characters. With the story, I intended to break the fourth wall in a dramatic context rather than the comedic context we're all used to. What would it mean to the characters when they discovered their world isn't real? This theme ended up seeping into "Malachi" a bit. We're so accustomed to fourth wall-breaking humor around here that I've seen the fourth wall-breaking scene with Grardlegar the bonca referred to as a "joke." I didn't intend it as humor at all, not even when Dink starts talking to the narrator. It's intended as an examination of what it would mean to be self-aware as a character in a game.
The scene with Grardlegar seemed to resonate with a lot of players.
I sketched a loose design for "Dark and Cloudy Day" and even started writing dialogue, but as it started picking up steam, I got cold feet. Would I really be able to make an epic? So many people start them and give up. It seemed presumptuous to try. I was too in love with "Dark and Cloudy Day" at the time to want to give up on it, but I decided to make a smaller D-Mod first with a less serious concept. This became "Malachi the Jerk." When I look back, I am amazed that I had the foresight to make this decision and the guts to abandon a project I was excited about. Both qualities are pretty uncharacteristic of me.
"A tale of irritation and futility, of frustration piled on top of frustration"
"Frustration" was an early working title for my new D-Mod project. It was replaced by "Malachi the Jerk" early on when I realized that the working title would make it seem like the game was going to be frustrating due to difficulty, which wasn't what I was going for at all. Instead, frustration was one of the major themes of the story - to see how much of it could get heaped upon Dink and how far he could be pushed. My initial thought was that you could get a lot of comedy out of this concept, and I think I did get some laughs out of it. But I also wanted Dink's character to have an arc in this story. My early notes identify the Dink of "Malachi" as a guy who's been made more introspective and moody and a bit more mature by time and experience. This Dink's glory from his original quest quickly faded as he had no more opportunities to be a hero. When Malachi tricks him and steals his stuff, it does more than piss him off. It really gets to him. Malachi steals the last of Dink's pride, and Dink resents Malachi for making him feel like he's nothing. Dink is plagued by self-doubt and begins to question things he's done in the past.
Is Dink a hero, or just somebody who does whatever people tell him as long as they set it up as a quest?
Overall I'm proud of "Malachi the Jerk." I've gotten lots of positive feedback on it, and I'm happy to know I finally made something that people enjoy. At long last, I got what I wanted since 1998 - for people to think of me as somebody who made a good D-Mod. Looking back at it, even I'm impressed because I know how limited my own abilities are when it comes to game design. It almost seems a fluke that I managed to make something this good. Not that I think Malachi is one of the best D-Mods ever or anything (I don't), but my limitations are so severe that even to make something solidly good stretched me to horizons I didn't think I had. In subsequent attempts, I've had a damn hard time approaching the level of quality I achieved in this D-Mod. But there are still things about it that nag at me. I mean, although you could point out plenty of problems in the mapping and gameplay, I think they represent my best possible work. What doesn't is the story. I know I could have written a better story than the one in "Malachi the Jerk," which doesn't really know what kind of story it wants to tell. At times it's genuinely funny; at other times it manages to pull off some pathos or drama. But as a whole picture? It's a bit of a mess, frankly. Skull - I dunno why I've been bothering to dance around who wrote that pulled review - was right to sense this fractured identity, and the reason goes back to the origin of the idea.
"Malachi" was always hampered by the circumstances of its creation. I was torn. I made the smart decision to make a silly, funny D-Mod instead of my big, probably doomed epic, but I couldn't commit to this approach. As I began to work in earnest on the game, the sheer amount of work involved blew me away. It crushed my spirit, it obliterated my brain, it pulverized my resolve. I thought I knew it would be a lot of work, but I soon learned that I'd had no idea just what "a lot of work" really meant. One of the most frequent comments I've received on "Malachi" is that the "short" development time was impressive. It didn't feel short. For months I worked on "Malachi" as much as I could, and that was a lot since I'm unemployed. There were weeks where, if working on this D-Mod were a job, I would have gotten significant overtime pay. Actually, there were a lot of weeks like that. "Frustration" could as well have been the title of my life for those months.
Me, not long after starting this project.
I wept. I wept real tears over this silly D-Mod. I literally fell to the floor and sobbed over this s***. It was so difficult for me. I wanted so badly to get it right, to make it good, Hell, just to FINISH it. It felt like it would never be done. It takes so long for me to do this sort of thing. A very plain and simple map screen could easily take me an hour to put together. If there's a fence around it, figure two. I'm not exaggerating, I am just that slow at creating maps of any kind. For most of the project I couldn't see the finish line even though I'd planned the D-Mod's contents well in advance and had an easy-to-reference list of things I had left to do. My patience was taxed greatly. It's not hard for me to understand why so few announced projects ever see completion.
Needless to say, I knew within a couple of weeks of starting real development on "Malachi" that "Dark and Cloudy Day" was never going to happen. "Malachi" inevitably became my serious project, and the impulses that drove "DaCD" clashed with the throwaway origins of the D-Mod I was actually making. Suddenly Dink was doing a lot of soul-searching in a D-Mod that was mainly intended to make you laugh. The dialogue involved was mostly pretty good, I think, but a direction was hard to find. "Malachi" is a story about revenge, but what does it have to say about revenge? Points are made about how self-defeating it is to seek revenge, and yet Dink, even while having learned enough to know this is so, still goes through with it. What does that say? I can't even tell you. I strongly considered an ending where Dink just cuts his losses in order to maintain thematic consistency, but it felt wrong. It didn't seem like something Dink Smallwood would do, and the total downer that ending would be clashes even with the dark humor of "Malachi the Jerk."
Although it bugs me, ultimately this fractured thing is what "Malachi the Jerk" is always going to be. It's a thing pushed and pulled by the different desires that ruled its author's mind. It's not the end of the world. People still enjoyed it a lot; heck, some people loved it. It was still able, at least for some, to be funny AND to pull at the heartstrings. So maybe I shouldn't sweat it so much.
Oh flour, such adventures we'll have together!
"Behind-the-scenes craziness," by request
My concept sketch of the world map, drawn before I had mapped a single outside screen. The final map is very similar to this. The biggest change is the replacement of the "Throwing Axe Forest" with the Maze of Three Lands.
As I've said, getting this right was important to me. I also mentioned my limitations. As I've discussed before, my brain doesn't work so well with visual and spatial matters. I can't catch anything that's thrown at me, even a really easy pitch that you alert me to in advance - I just can't track where it's going to end up. I forget faces, even of people I know well and see often - if I've just met you once or twice, you can forget about me recognizing you. I get lost in my hometown even though I stick to the main roads as much as I can. This has made it hard for me to design levels or maps for games throughout my life. In this case, I tried to compensate by planning ahead. I was trying hard to avoid the sort of map design that made "Zink" so awful, where the map is just a big hallway laid out from left to right. I succeeded only partially. "Malachi" twists and turns, but with a few small exceptions - the marks of my poor effort to try and design against my awful, broken instincts - it's still a hallway, or more of a snaking tube. Oh well, at least it still feels like a world, which is better than my other work.
This is a plan for the shape of the map I made early on by copying and pasting red map squares from a WinDinkEdit screenshot. Colored boxes have been drawn around the various planned areas.
Here's a screenshot of the final map. It's fairly similar to the plan. In particular, the beach is still exactly twelve screens long, just as planned at the start.
I also planned out some more specific areas before mapping them out in the editor. The segment of the game I put the most effort into was the Dungeon of Pointlessness, right after the intro. Here, I feel I managed to break out of my "linear hallway" default a little bit by creating forked paths.
"Boxes" concept drawing of the Dungeon of Pointlessness. Most of this is planning the left "stairways" paths so that the "floors" all make actual sense as different levels you could really move between, with the exception of one deliberately nonsensical stairway that leads you back to the initial floor. You can see the other paths marked out here as well.
I didn't trust myself to invent a maze, so for the Mudwalk maze, I used a website that generates mazes.
I took the image from the maze generator site and drew lines over it to represent the screens. This layout is almost identical to the actual maze in the D-Mod.
The map in "Malachi the Jerk" might seem weak or mediocre at best (ignoring Leprochaun's embellishments for the moment - we're just talking about the basic shape that I designed, here). But it actually represents a very high level for me. I've made some small efforts toward further D-Mod development since then, and even the level of map design I achieved in "Malachi" has seemed to be an impossibly high target to hit.
But the planning I did for the map is nothing compared to the advance planning I did for the story and game design. I have two text documents that haven't been modified since the first time I opened the map editor for "Malachi" that lay out every area, character and event in the story. The only major change is, again, the "throwing axe forest" (which was originally going to have another encounter with Malachi that was cut) getting replaced by the easier-to-make Maze of Three Lands, which is filler if I'm honest. I realized I wasn't going to be able to pull off my forest plan, but it felt like the game would be too short and the end too sudden if I didn't put something there. The Maze area does still have some of my planned "throwing axe forest" elements in it, like a death fakeout with the load/restart/quit box.
Dink is briefly fooled into thinking he's falling to his death on this screen, but the abyss turns out to be an illusion.
I had forgotten how specific these early documents were. For example, every step of the fetch quest was already pre-planned, and I'd already come up with the locations for all of the Legendary Loaves. I also went ahead and wrote the dialogue for several major scenes, although some lines were changed when I actually went to script those parts.
I think that planning everything in advance gives you a big advantage. I think that a lot of projects are never finished because people don't know when to stop and the scope keeps changing. "Malachi" ended up being a much bigger project than I'd expected, but it wasn't because the scope ever changed; the scope stayed exactly the same. No, the reason I nearly bit off more than I could chew was that I'm bad at estimating the size of projects.
Leprochaun: responsible for making things not look like ass
Boy, did I luck out when Leprochaun agreed to help me. Even luckier, it happened very early on. I was in the #Dinksmallwood IRC channel (does anybody ever go there anymore?) moaning about how hard mapping was and how much I hated doing it, and he mused that he could decorate my screens. He seemed confident that he could decorate 300 screens (Malachi actually ended up having just 254) very quickly. I don't think it ended up being quite as easy as he thought. Still, his early commitment freed me from my sad efforts to decorate screens. Shortly after finishing the Dungeon of Pointlessness, I started leaving my screens pretty much blank apart from the important objects needed to play the game, which allowed me to get my map screens done in a... gosh, "reasonable" is a stretch here... let's say "non-obscene" amount of time. I had seen screenshots of Lep's map work and it was gorgeous, so I knew my D-Mod's appearance would end up in good hands.
Here are some comparisons. Alpha screens are on top. I wanted to put them side to side, but the forum isn't wide enough.
From drab to fab!
On some screens, Leprochaun did more than add decoration. See how he completely redesigned my sad little bush rows into a more reasonable set of paths.
Even on screens where I hadn't totally given up on decoration in my version, he still added more.
I sent Leprochaun a version of the D-Mod that was done up through the start of the "Malachi's house" dungeon (all the screens were laid out, you just couldn't play any farther than that yet) in mid-December of 2013. I didn't give him a lot of instruction, honestly. As I worked to finish up a feature-complete version of the game, I actually kept a list of changes I'd made in the editor so that I could make them again when I got Leprochaun's work back.
I may not be the easiest guy to work with. My anxiety about finishing the D-Mod was already through the roof, but it was pushed even higher by having it taken out of my hands. There was a period where there was nothing for me to do but wait. I bugged Leprochaun a lot, although I did try to keep ahold of myself. Eventually he ran out of steam and sent me what he had. Some screens went untouched, including most indoor screens - Lep remarked to me that there are fewer sprites you can plausibly decorate a house with than there are outdoor sprites, and he's got a point there. The "Malachi's House" dungeon stayed as it was, and boy, it shows. Some "Maze of Three Lands" screens went undecorated, although he went back and touched up those for the 1.2 release on Valentine's Day.
Leprochaun went a lot farther than I'd imagined he would. That guy really goes nuts with the sprites and treats a screen like a picture he's painting. He complained to me repeatedly about the inability to place even more sprites than he had done.
This screen, like several others, is at the sprite limit.
He even did something totally unexpected and included new scripts. A few of these were for decorative elements, using scripts to loop parts of animations in unusual ways to create visual effects like one of those bendy poles appearing to blow in the wind. He also wrote some silly dialogue scripts, like the talking rock and Brian the Shell.
This is all Leprochaun. I love this joke, by the way.
"I've seen less interesting things, but not often."
Knowing that there were many D-Mods and that they were in many ways similar, I tried to customize "Malachi the Jerk" in many small ways in order to make it stand out. I used quite a few graphics that weren't in the original game. Iplaydink's graphics packs added to the variety of all-purpose decoration in the D-Mod, and I used the wasps as a frequent enemy. I made the wasps "fly" over low hardness - I was surprised they didn't do that in the demonstration script, honestly.
Knowing that graphics weren't my thing, I customized text wherever possible. I changed the savebot script, the escape script, and the death script - things people usually don't mess with. When I learned about dnotalk.c and dnomagic.c, I was excited. I immediately wrote whole new sets of default text. I had no idea at the time I was only the THIRD author to use this feature from friggin' 2006 to actually change these formerly set-in-stone texts. Did people just never learn about this, or what?
Not everything could be new and different. I didn't know at the time that BOTH of the well jokes I made with the well near the start were already made in "Moon Child!" Seriously, two D-Mods in a row that use "Well well well" and "I'm not feeling well" jokes in a row. It's damn eerie.
There's a lot of text in "Malachi the Jerk." I knew that my ability to write gobs of text was the main thing I had to offer, so I focused on it. It turns out that "lots of text" isn't for everybody, but the great majority of feedback I've received on this was positive. I hid some text away in crazy places people aren't likely to see it. There's a special scene for ignoring the only NPC in the first dungeon for the entire length of said dungeon. There's a new dialogue exchange for every single step of the fetch quest if you go back to Armando the Sorcerer and talk to him about it (I bet nobody did this). I hid a whole gameplay segment and secret ending behind LOSING a certain boss fight! It turns out that you can put anything you want in dinfo.c (the death script). I thought it would be really neat to have the player die by ordinary means and then shift control to the enemy who just killed them without even fading down or anything in between. Unfortunately, most players probably never see this.
I always liked this line.
I put effort into making sure the conversion to the bonca character is thorough, too. The text color when you pick up gold is changed, and if you never picked up the powerups in the Mudwalk, the bonca character has different things to say about collecting them.
I also tried to fix some things I've long seen as minor problems with Dink Smallwood or at least most D-Mods that I've played. Really little things mostly, like making sure the game doesn't let you read books by examining the back of a bookshelf. The big thing I changed was to add a respec system. "Malachi the Jerk" keeps track of where you put your points at level up. Once per level, you can take them all back and put them whereever you want. It's not necessary to ever bother with this, but it's a feature I've wished I've had in several D-Mods that I've played.
I also attempted to vary gameplay a little bit. The mudwalk slows you down, making you be extra careful when fighting enemies. There's the arena, which imposes random handicaps on you each round like the Battle Square from Final Fantasy VII. I love logic puzzles, so I included a fairly simple one near the end of the game that you must solve to continue. I included hidden collectibles that you ultimately need to reach the real ending (the bread) in a nod to "Quest for Cheese" and its pixy poops.
I had to make these tiles by pasting the mud tiles onto James Perley's autumn grass tiles.
The arena has an end boss who is a special guest from Dink's past!
Hidden in the game is a trip to a version of "Dink Forever," my terrible first D-Mod, with added snarky comments by Dink on how lousy it all is. There's also a screen from "2001: A Dink Oddyssey," featuring the Rainbow Trout because that character is the only thing I ever remember anybody specifically saying they liked about one of my 1998 D-Mods. There you go, Rainbow Trout fans. This section also has a tree added to screen 143 in honor of Robj's very important update to the hype thread for the upcoming "The Dark Avilan". There was much discussion there of screen 143s requiring trees; I'll be disappointed if I don't see more onefortytrees as I go through the rest of the D-Mods.
You also get to fight Coconut Monkey and try to stop him before he can make more terrible worlds like "Dink Forever."
"I'll punch right through that goddamn rock if I have to!"
Hey, let's talk about the big long fetch quest in the middle of my D-Mod. It has fifteen steps!
Dink is an errand b**** of renowned proportions, but even he has his limits.
Unsurprisingly, some players found this annoying. This was my intention. Not because I like making bad games or annoying people, but because I'm interested in video games' ability to provoke emotion in players in ways that no other medium possibly could.
As I said, this is a game about frustration. As Dink has more and more frustration piled upon him, it's important that the player suffer some of it too, so that they get a real feeling in their gut of what he's going through. They should feel just how fed up Dink is. They should REALLY hate Malachi. The fetch quest is a means of achieving this. I did try not to push too far, though. My fetch quest required you to walk through the entire mudwalk three times at one point, but I decided that was too much and added the ability to skip to the end.
The real capper is the fake-out at the end of it where Armando says he doesn't want the thing Dink's been questing for anymore. Poor Dink! Poor player.
And then there's the bit at the end where you have to punch a rock two hundred times. You're not allowed to use acid rain or the herb boots to get around this - you have to hit the rock two hundred times and - and boy, this is the part that stings - you have to do it while Malachi mocks you the entire time.
arrrrrrrrgggggggghhhh
You're all going to think I'm crazy, but I'm really proud of this part. I know the game is thematically kind of all over the place, but this is the closest I think it gets to really knowing exactly what it wants to be and just nailing it.
Malachi is at his most hateable here. He's a bully, and the worst kind of bully - the kind who intellectualizes his cruelty, the kind who tries to convince you he's doing you a favor by rubbing your face in the mud, because how else are you going to learn? There's some truth in some of the things he says, but ultimately he's full of it. He's really just a selfish prick, and the fact that he's so arrogant as to lecture Dink is truly galling. Dink loses it, and if I've done things right, the player should be able to sympathize by this point. He takes out all that built-up frustration by hitting an object that should be impossible to break. But he can't back down now - he's done, he's just totally done with this. So he channels all his hatred and anger and weariness into punch after punch. And slowly, impossibly, cracks begin to appear. He's breaking through. If only we all could, all of us who endure such torment.
I noticed a few depth dot problems while playing this again, and had quite a few ideas for improvements I could make. I had originally thought I did a good job with the difficulty balance, but this time I noticed that most enemies were easier than I intended. On the other hand, some of the feedback I got said the game was really hard, so I'm torn about making it harder. Maybe I should compromise by making a hard mode with tougher enemies; we'll see how much work I feel like doing. Either way, I'll probably work on a version 1.4 once COTPATD is all wrapped up.
I know you all can't wait. By the way, that weird little garden is one decorative element I did come up with.
I learned a lot making this D-Mod. I learned that DinkC and the Dink engine can never be trusted to act the way you expect. I got lots of help on the forums in fixing obscure and strange bugs, but some things I ended up having to work around. I had pillars on the arena screen made with create_sprite, but if you threw hellfire at them it exploded forever. Why? Who the Hell knows? I had one map screen in particular that just started refusing to accept new scripted objects. I was doing nothing wrong, they just wouldn't work. I just had to give that one up to the Dink Gods and not try to do anything that displeased them.
There's more that I could say about "Malachi," but this is already by far the longest writeup in the project. I never got around to summarizing this D-Mod like most of the others, so I hope this isn't too confusing a read for anybody who never got around to playing it. If you want to hear even more of my thoughts on "Malachi," you should really check out the Let's Play by Robj that I co-commentated on. Speaking of which - Robj, pretty please upload more of that? I'd love to see it again, doing that was just so much fun.
I end the writeup the same way I ended the D-Mod: with the truth. *folds arms*
2014 was the first full year in which I was an active community member in a long time. Seven D-Mods were released, at least if you count "Achievement Unlocked Edition" as a D-Mod, which I will if only because it gives me more to write about. 7 releases would have been a new low before 2013, but after a whole year with just one D-Mod it looks pretty good.
--
I haven't covered a D-Mod that I made myself since the 1998 topic, despite the fact that I released D-Mods in 1999 and 2000. I wrote about them all together in order to get it over with. This was a mistake, I now realize. It caused me to be too nice to my later mods. I gave the Dink Forever trilogy and "2001" roughly what they deserved, but taking the others in that early days context instead of their proper context made them look better than they were. I was especially too nice to "End of the World," a bug-ridden, incoherent, tragically unfun mess about which the only positive thing that may be said is that it's somewhat more functional than my 1998 releases. I can't believe I used the word "fun" in that writeup without preceding it with the words "not at all." What I was actually having fun with was the novelty of playing Dink Smallwood again, still pretty fresh at that point. I really do think the core gameplay is pretty good. Good thing, right?
A bigger mistake was excusing myself from writing about "All Out Brawl," the biggest insult I perpetrated upon the community. I justified it to myself by observing, correctly, that there's not much to say about it, but that's no excuse. If even one person wasted their time downloading this shameful crap, it's only fair that I subject myself to it one more time. I nabbed it from the Internet Wayback Machine's archive of Mike Snyder's site. Let's take a very brief look.
NaN: All Out Brawl Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: August 19, 1998
From the readme: "reviewers take note: this was NOT MEANT to be good.
it's just for people who like more FIGHTING an less talking."
Well, at least we can tell from the first sentence that this project turned out as intended. Fighting fans are bound to be disappointed, however.
There are fifteen screens, arranged in a bizarre pattern. This functions as a sort of maze, since none of them have got any borders to tell you where you can and cannot go. All of the screens have the same background. They look like this:
I probably put more thought into stamping those rock tiles than anything else in this D-Mod.
There's nothing to motivate you to actually fight the enemies scattered in no meaningful way across these screens. The enemies include slimes, pillbugs, boncas and slayers. There are megapotions and gold hearts to find, but directly engaging the slayers is still a pretty bad idea. If you really wanted to kill everything for some reason, you might be able to manage it by starting some slayer fights... except that there's one screen with a slayer by itself. Hm.
On a certain screen, there's a "town news" poster that you can examine. I tried to clumsily attach it to a castle corner sprite, but that sprite has been given the slayer script, so it instantly transmogrifies into a slayer who can't move because of hardness. If you examine the poster, it says "THE END!" and Dink exclaims, "what? NOOO!" This is the only text, and it's taken directly from "Dink Forever." The game doesn't stop or anything, you're just told it's the end.
"All Out Brawl" is the worst D-Mod ever released. I gave this matter serious thought before coming to this conclusion. Its only serious rivals in this category are "Land of Transforming Ducks," "Goblin Castle" and "[Alphabet]," and it's not hard for me to recommend the first and third of those over it, as they at least register as not-terribly-funny jokes. That leaves "Goblin Castle" as the only other D-Mod even in the same neighborhood of pointlessness, and I think it wins by default because it has proper dialogue, even if almost none of it displays. Yes, "All Out Brawl" is the worst D-Mod ever. The DFMAOB is too good for it. Come to think of it, I guess 2010's "Quest in the Icelands" will remain the last DFMAOB winner, and don't any of you DARE release something in the next week or so just to prove me wrong. I'm onto you people.
I had completely forgotten, but "Brawl" comes with what I laughably called a "demo" of "2001: A Dink Oddyssey," which was released a few days later. The demo is, predictably, just an unfinished version with the ending missing and even more bugs than the final... but I did notice something odd. My original, terrible MS Paint graphics didn't work when I played the final "Oddyssey," but here they work for some reason. Gaze upon them, but only if you have a strong stomach.
I... what was I GOING for?
Oh, little eyebot. I shouldn't even have saved you in MS Paint.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
I had also forgotten that Martridge explains that World War III broke out when "someone made fun of saddam's mustache, i think." That's about as close as I got to successfully telling a joke in any of my 1998 D-Mods. Not saying much, obviously.
...Yeah, okay, we're done here. Moving on.
343: Malachi the Jerk Authors: Tim Maurer, Leprochaun Release Date: February 2, 2014
"Tuesday strikes again."
REPUTATION NOTE: This D-Mod is one of the select group with a score of 9.0 or better (9.2) on The Dink Network.
Well, technically. That is the score that displays on the page, but it might not actually represent community consensus. There was another review that gave it a good score (8.4) that was nonetheless low enough to take it out of the 9.0+ category, but it was pulled down for some reason. Honestly, I thought the author justified his opinions reasonably well. He didn't seem to like the D-Mod much despite saying it was generally high-quality, so I was kind of surprised the score was as high as it was. But I don't really think it should have been pulled down, even though reading it makes me feel icy spines prickle inside my chest every single time as I realize how many of its biting criticisms are accurate. I could put it back up myself, but I don't wanna step on any toes.
Getting the (Coconut) monkey off my back
One day in early August of 2013, I was going through some old CDs and I found my copy of Dink Smallwood. In the past, when I'd think of those days a shadow would come over my thoughts and I could only think of regrets - sounds pretty dramatic, I know, but my brain just works like that. Even when I returned briefly in 2006, I was soon overcome by such thoughts and had to leave. But this time, over a decade after leaving, I thought back to the fun I had instead. I smiled. I said out loud, "I wonder how the Dink Network is doing." I have since lost my copy of the game, but if I'd never had it, I wouldn't have come back when I did. It speaks to the value of a physical object as a tie to our memories. That's worth the $20 (closer to $30 if you account for inflation!) I paid for that disc.
The first post I made upon returning was in the same topic as the last post I'd made back in 2006. I dumped what little I had written for an aborted D-Mod project from that year. It was a decent idea, but far less than even half-baked. In posting my old script, I hoped to bury my ambitions of redeeming myself with a "comeback D-Mod" for good. Many attempts had proven I just wasn't any good at it, I concluded.
Soon, I came up with the idea to play and write about all the D-Mods. If anybody who wasn't active on the forum at the time wants to see the genesis of that idea and the early reactions to its proposal, it can be found here.
As I started writing about D-Mods, though, I started having ideas for D-Mods I might make. It also occurred to me that people might take my opinions on D-Mods more seriously if I demonstrated myself to be a capable D-Mod author. So I decided to have another go at it after all, but I moved slowly, intent on getting it right. It would be weeks between this decision and opening the editor. I brainstormed, read all the tutorials, and watched every one of Robj's tutorial videos before I did anything.
I had several ideas. They included a remake of the NES RPG Dragon Warrior that I ended up making later, a mod with a constantly changing world called "Channel Surfing" (I still think this one is a neat idea), a combat-focused game similar to the Gladiator minigame from "FIAT," and a "Pit of 100 trials" as seen in the Paper Mario Series. I settled on an idea for an Epic called Dark and Cloudy Day and started writing. I became fairly attached to this idea for a darker epic that would feature prominent relationships between Dink and other playable characters. With the story, I intended to break the fourth wall in a dramatic context rather than the comedic context we're all used to. What would it mean to the characters when they discovered their world isn't real? This theme ended up seeping into "Malachi" a bit. We're so accustomed to fourth wall-breaking humor around here that I've seen the fourth wall-breaking scene with Grardlegar the bonca referred to as a "joke." I didn't intend it as humor at all, not even when Dink starts talking to the narrator. It's intended as an examination of what it would mean to be self-aware as a character in a game.
The scene with Grardlegar seemed to resonate with a lot of players.
I sketched a loose design for "Dark and Cloudy Day" and even started writing dialogue, but as it started picking up steam, I got cold feet. Would I really be able to make an epic? So many people start them and give up. It seemed presumptuous to try. I was too in love with "Dark and Cloudy Day" at the time to want to give up on it, but I decided to make a smaller D-Mod first with a less serious concept. This became "Malachi the Jerk." When I look back, I am amazed that I had the foresight to make this decision and the guts to abandon a project I was excited about. Both qualities are pretty uncharacteristic of me.
"A tale of irritation and futility, of frustration piled on top of frustration"
"Frustration" was an early working title for my new D-Mod project. It was replaced by "Malachi the Jerk" early on when I realized that the working title would make it seem like the game was going to be frustrating due to difficulty, which wasn't what I was going for at all. Instead, frustration was one of the major themes of the story - to see how much of it could get heaped upon Dink and how far he could be pushed. My initial thought was that you could get a lot of comedy out of this concept, and I think I did get some laughs out of it. But I also wanted Dink's character to have an arc in this story. My early notes identify the Dink of "Malachi" as a guy who's been made more introspective and moody and a bit more mature by time and experience. This Dink's glory from his original quest quickly faded as he had no more opportunities to be a hero. When Malachi tricks him and steals his stuff, it does more than piss him off. It really gets to him. Malachi steals the last of Dink's pride, and Dink resents Malachi for making him feel like he's nothing. Dink is plagued by self-doubt and begins to question things he's done in the past.
Is Dink a hero, or just somebody who does whatever people tell him as long as they set it up as a quest?
Overall I'm proud of "Malachi the Jerk." I've gotten lots of positive feedback on it, and I'm happy to know I finally made something that people enjoy. At long last, I got what I wanted since 1998 - for people to think of me as somebody who made a good D-Mod. Looking back at it, even I'm impressed because I know how limited my own abilities are when it comes to game design. It almost seems a fluke that I managed to make something this good. Not that I think Malachi is one of the best D-Mods ever or anything (I don't), but my limitations are so severe that even to make something solidly good stretched me to horizons I didn't think I had. In subsequent attempts, I've had a damn hard time approaching the level of quality I achieved in this D-Mod. But there are still things about it that nag at me. I mean, although you could point out plenty of problems in the mapping and gameplay, I think they represent my best possible work. What doesn't is the story. I know I could have written a better story than the one in "Malachi the Jerk," which doesn't really know what kind of story it wants to tell. At times it's genuinely funny; at other times it manages to pull off some pathos or drama. But as a whole picture? It's a bit of a mess, frankly. Skull - I dunno why I've been bothering to dance around who wrote that pulled review - was right to sense this fractured identity, and the reason goes back to the origin of the idea.
"Malachi" was always hampered by the circumstances of its creation. I was torn. I made the smart decision to make a silly, funny D-Mod instead of my big, probably doomed epic, but I couldn't commit to this approach. As I began to work in earnest on the game, the sheer amount of work involved blew me away. It crushed my spirit, it obliterated my brain, it pulverized my resolve. I thought I knew it would be a lot of work, but I soon learned that I'd had no idea just what "a lot of work" really meant. One of the most frequent comments I've received on "Malachi" is that the "short" development time was impressive. It didn't feel short. For months I worked on "Malachi" as much as I could, and that was a lot since I'm unemployed. There were weeks where, if working on this D-Mod were a job, I would have gotten significant overtime pay. Actually, there were a lot of weeks like that. "Frustration" could as well have been the title of my life for those months.
Me, not long after starting this project.
I wept. I wept real tears over this silly D-Mod. I literally fell to the floor and sobbed over this s***. It was so difficult for me. I wanted so badly to get it right, to make it good, Hell, just to FINISH it. It felt like it would never be done. It takes so long for me to do this sort of thing. A very plain and simple map screen could easily take me an hour to put together. If there's a fence around it, figure two. I'm not exaggerating, I am just that slow at creating maps of any kind. For most of the project I couldn't see the finish line even though I'd planned the D-Mod's contents well in advance and had an easy-to-reference list of things I had left to do. My patience was taxed greatly. It's not hard for me to understand why so few announced projects ever see completion.
Needless to say, I knew within a couple of weeks of starting real development on "Malachi" that "Dark and Cloudy Day" was never going to happen. "Malachi" inevitably became my serious project, and the impulses that drove "DaCD" clashed with the throwaway origins of the D-Mod I was actually making. Suddenly Dink was doing a lot of soul-searching in a D-Mod that was mainly intended to make you laugh. The dialogue involved was mostly pretty good, I think, but a direction was hard to find. "Malachi" is a story about revenge, but what does it have to say about revenge? Points are made about how self-defeating it is to seek revenge, and yet Dink, even while having learned enough to know this is so, still goes through with it. What does that say? I can't even tell you. I strongly considered an ending where Dink just cuts his losses in order to maintain thematic consistency, but it felt wrong. It didn't seem like something Dink Smallwood would do, and the total downer that ending would be clashes even with the dark humor of "Malachi the Jerk."
Although it bugs me, ultimately this fractured thing is what "Malachi the Jerk" is always going to be. It's a thing pushed and pulled by the different desires that ruled its author's mind. It's not the end of the world. People still enjoyed it a lot; heck, some people loved it. It was still able, at least for some, to be funny AND to pull at the heartstrings. So maybe I shouldn't sweat it so much.
Oh flour, such adventures we'll have together!
"Behind-the-scenes craziness," by request
My concept sketch of the world map, drawn before I had mapped a single outside screen. The final map is very similar to this. The biggest change is the replacement of the "Throwing Axe Forest" with the Maze of Three Lands.
As I've said, getting this right was important to me. I also mentioned my limitations. As I've discussed before, my brain doesn't work so well with visual and spatial matters. I can't catch anything that's thrown at me, even a really easy pitch that you alert me to in advance - I just can't track where it's going to end up. I forget faces, even of people I know well and see often - if I've just met you once or twice, you can forget about me recognizing you. I get lost in my hometown even though I stick to the main roads as much as I can. This has made it hard for me to design levels or maps for games throughout my life. In this case, I tried to compensate by planning ahead. I was trying hard to avoid the sort of map design that made "Zink" so awful, where the map is just a big hallway laid out from left to right. I succeeded only partially. "Malachi" twists and turns, but with a few small exceptions - the marks of my poor effort to try and design against my awful, broken instincts - it's still a hallway, or more of a snaking tube. Oh well, at least it still feels like a world, which is better than my other work.
This is a plan for the shape of the map I made early on by copying and pasting red map squares from a WinDinkEdit screenshot. Colored boxes have been drawn around the various planned areas.
Here's a screenshot of the final map. It's fairly similar to the plan. In particular, the beach is still exactly twelve screens long, just as planned at the start.
I also planned out some more specific areas before mapping them out in the editor. The segment of the game I put the most effort into was the Dungeon of Pointlessness, right after the intro. Here, I feel I managed to break out of my "linear hallway" default a little bit by creating forked paths.
"Boxes" concept drawing of the Dungeon of Pointlessness. Most of this is planning the left "stairways" paths so that the "floors" all make actual sense as different levels you could really move between, with the exception of one deliberately nonsensical stairway that leads you back to the initial floor. You can see the other paths marked out here as well.
I didn't trust myself to invent a maze, so for the Mudwalk maze, I used a website that generates mazes.
I took the image from the maze generator site and drew lines over it to represent the screens. This layout is almost identical to the actual maze in the D-Mod.
The map in "Malachi the Jerk" might seem weak or mediocre at best (ignoring Leprochaun's embellishments for the moment - we're just talking about the basic shape that I designed, here). But it actually represents a very high level for me. I've made some small efforts toward further D-Mod development since then, and even the level of map design I achieved in "Malachi" has seemed to be an impossibly high target to hit.
But the planning I did for the map is nothing compared to the advance planning I did for the story and game design. I have two text documents that haven't been modified since the first time I opened the map editor for "Malachi" that lay out every area, character and event in the story. The only major change is, again, the "throwing axe forest" (which was originally going to have another encounter with Malachi that was cut) getting replaced by the easier-to-make Maze of Three Lands, which is filler if I'm honest. I realized I wasn't going to be able to pull off my forest plan, but it felt like the game would be too short and the end too sudden if I didn't put something there. The Maze area does still have some of my planned "throwing axe forest" elements in it, like a death fakeout with the load/restart/quit box.
Dink is briefly fooled into thinking he's falling to his death on this screen, but the abyss turns out to be an illusion.
I had forgotten how specific these early documents were. For example, every step of the fetch quest was already pre-planned, and I'd already come up with the locations for all of the Legendary Loaves. I also went ahead and wrote the dialogue for several major scenes, although some lines were changed when I actually went to script those parts.
I think that planning everything in advance gives you a big advantage. I think that a lot of projects are never finished because people don't know when to stop and the scope keeps changing. "Malachi" ended up being a much bigger project than I'd expected, but it wasn't because the scope ever changed; the scope stayed exactly the same. No, the reason I nearly bit off more than I could chew was that I'm bad at estimating the size of projects.
Leprochaun: responsible for making things not look like ass
Boy, did I luck out when Leprochaun agreed to help me. Even luckier, it happened very early on. I was in the #Dinksmallwood IRC channel (does anybody ever go there anymore?) moaning about how hard mapping was and how much I hated doing it, and he mused that he could decorate my screens. He seemed confident that he could decorate 300 screens (Malachi actually ended up having just 254) very quickly. I don't think it ended up being quite as easy as he thought. Still, his early commitment freed me from my sad efforts to decorate screens. Shortly after finishing the Dungeon of Pointlessness, I started leaving my screens pretty much blank apart from the important objects needed to play the game, which allowed me to get my map screens done in a... gosh, "reasonable" is a stretch here... let's say "non-obscene" amount of time. I had seen screenshots of Lep's map work and it was gorgeous, so I knew my D-Mod's appearance would end up in good hands.
Here are some comparisons. Alpha screens are on top. I wanted to put them side to side, but the forum isn't wide enough.
From drab to fab!
On some screens, Leprochaun did more than add decoration. See how he completely redesigned my sad little bush rows into a more reasonable set of paths.
Even on screens where I hadn't totally given up on decoration in my version, he still added more.
I sent Leprochaun a version of the D-Mod that was done up through the start of the "Malachi's house" dungeon (all the screens were laid out, you just couldn't play any farther than that yet) in mid-December of 2013. I didn't give him a lot of instruction, honestly. As I worked to finish up a feature-complete version of the game, I actually kept a list of changes I'd made in the editor so that I could make them again when I got Leprochaun's work back.
I may not be the easiest guy to work with. My anxiety about finishing the D-Mod was already through the roof, but it was pushed even higher by having it taken out of my hands. There was a period where there was nothing for me to do but wait. I bugged Leprochaun a lot, although I did try to keep ahold of myself. Eventually he ran out of steam and sent me what he had. Some screens went untouched, including most indoor screens - Lep remarked to me that there are fewer sprites you can plausibly decorate a house with than there are outdoor sprites, and he's got a point there. The "Malachi's House" dungeon stayed as it was, and boy, it shows. Some "Maze of Three Lands" screens went undecorated, although he went back and touched up those for the 1.2 release on Valentine's Day.
Leprochaun went a lot farther than I'd imagined he would. That guy really goes nuts with the sprites and treats a screen like a picture he's painting. He complained to me repeatedly about the inability to place even more sprites than he had done.
This screen, like several others, is at the sprite limit.
He even did something totally unexpected and included new scripts. A few of these were for decorative elements, using scripts to loop parts of animations in unusual ways to create visual effects like one of those bendy poles appearing to blow in the wind. He also wrote some silly dialogue scripts, like the talking rock and Brian the Shell.
This is all Leprochaun. I love this joke, by the way.
"I've seen less interesting things, but not often."
Knowing that there were many D-Mods and that they were in many ways similar, I tried to customize "Malachi the Jerk" in many small ways in order to make it stand out. I used quite a few graphics that weren't in the original game. Iplaydink's graphics packs added to the variety of all-purpose decoration in the D-Mod, and I used the wasps as a frequent enemy. I made the wasps "fly" over low hardness - I was surprised they didn't do that in the demonstration script, honestly.
Knowing that graphics weren't my thing, I customized text wherever possible. I changed the savebot script, the escape script, and the death script - things people usually don't mess with. When I learned about dnotalk.c and dnomagic.c, I was excited. I immediately wrote whole new sets of default text. I had no idea at the time I was only the THIRD author to use this feature from friggin' 2006 to actually change these formerly set-in-stone texts. Did people just never learn about this, or what?
Not everything could be new and different. I didn't know at the time that BOTH of the well jokes I made with the well near the start were already made in "Moon Child!" Seriously, two D-Mods in a row that use "Well well well" and "I'm not feeling well" jokes in a row. It's damn eerie.
There's a lot of text in "Malachi the Jerk." I knew that my ability to write gobs of text was the main thing I had to offer, so I focused on it. It turns out that "lots of text" isn't for everybody, but the great majority of feedback I've received on this was positive. I hid some text away in crazy places people aren't likely to see it. There's a special scene for ignoring the only NPC in the first dungeon for the entire length of said dungeon. There's a new dialogue exchange for every single step of the fetch quest if you go back to Armando the Sorcerer and talk to him about it (I bet nobody did this). I hid a whole gameplay segment and secret ending behind LOSING a certain boss fight! It turns out that you can put anything you want in dinfo.c (the death script). I thought it would be really neat to have the player die by ordinary means and then shift control to the enemy who just killed them without even fading down or anything in between. Unfortunately, most players probably never see this.
I always liked this line.
I put effort into making sure the conversion to the bonca character is thorough, too. The text color when you pick up gold is changed, and if you never picked up the powerups in the Mudwalk, the bonca character has different things to say about collecting them.
I also tried to fix some things I've long seen as minor problems with Dink Smallwood or at least most D-Mods that I've played. Really little things mostly, like making sure the game doesn't let you read books by examining the back of a bookshelf. The big thing I changed was to add a respec system. "Malachi the Jerk" keeps track of where you put your points at level up. Once per level, you can take them all back and put them whereever you want. It's not necessary to ever bother with this, but it's a feature I've wished I've had in several D-Mods that I've played.
I also attempted to vary gameplay a little bit. The mudwalk slows you down, making you be extra careful when fighting enemies. There's the arena, which imposes random handicaps on you each round like the Battle Square from Final Fantasy VII. I love logic puzzles, so I included a fairly simple one near the end of the game that you must solve to continue. I included hidden collectibles that you ultimately need to reach the real ending (the bread) in a nod to "Quest for Cheese" and its pixy poops.
I had to make these tiles by pasting the mud tiles onto James Perley's autumn grass tiles.
The arena has an end boss who is a special guest from Dink's past!
Hidden in the game is a trip to a version of "Dink Forever," my terrible first D-Mod, with added snarky comments by Dink on how lousy it all is. There's also a screen from "2001: A Dink Oddyssey," featuring the Rainbow Trout because that character is the only thing I ever remember anybody specifically saying they liked about one of my 1998 D-Mods. There you go, Rainbow Trout fans. This section also has a tree added to screen 143 in honor of Robj's very important update to the hype thread for the upcoming "The Dark Avilan". There was much discussion there of screen 143s requiring trees; I'll be disappointed if I don't see more onefortytrees as I go through the rest of the D-Mods.
You also get to fight Coconut Monkey and try to stop him before he can make more terrible worlds like "Dink Forever."
"I'll punch right through that goddamn rock if I have to!"
Hey, let's talk about the big long fetch quest in the middle of my D-Mod. It has fifteen steps!
Dink is an errand b**** of renowned proportions, but even he has his limits.
Unsurprisingly, some players found this annoying. This was my intention. Not because I like making bad games or annoying people, but because I'm interested in video games' ability to provoke emotion in players in ways that no other medium possibly could.
As I said, this is a game about frustration. As Dink has more and more frustration piled upon him, it's important that the player suffer some of it too, so that they get a real feeling in their gut of what he's going through. They should feel just how fed up Dink is. They should REALLY hate Malachi. The fetch quest is a means of achieving this. I did try not to push too far, though. My fetch quest required you to walk through the entire mudwalk three times at one point, but I decided that was too much and added the ability to skip to the end.
The real capper is the fake-out at the end of it where Armando says he doesn't want the thing Dink's been questing for anymore. Poor Dink! Poor player.
And then there's the bit at the end where you have to punch a rock two hundred times. You're not allowed to use acid rain or the herb boots to get around this - you have to hit the rock two hundred times and - and boy, this is the part that stings - you have to do it while Malachi mocks you the entire time.
arrrrrrrrgggggggghhhh
You're all going to think I'm crazy, but I'm really proud of this part. I know the game is thematically kind of all over the place, but this is the closest I think it gets to really knowing exactly what it wants to be and just nailing it.
Malachi is at his most hateable here. He's a bully, and the worst kind of bully - the kind who intellectualizes his cruelty, the kind who tries to convince you he's doing you a favor by rubbing your face in the mud, because how else are you going to learn? There's some truth in some of the things he says, but ultimately he's full of it. He's really just a selfish prick, and the fact that he's so arrogant as to lecture Dink is truly galling. Dink loses it, and if I've done things right, the player should be able to sympathize by this point. He takes out all that built-up frustration by hitting an object that should be impossible to break. But he can't back down now - he's done, he's just totally done with this. So he channels all his hatred and anger and weariness into punch after punch. And slowly, impossibly, cracks begin to appear. He's breaking through. If only we all could, all of us who endure such torment.
I noticed a few depth dot problems while playing this again, and had quite a few ideas for improvements I could make. I had originally thought I did a good job with the difficulty balance, but this time I noticed that most enemies were easier than I intended. On the other hand, some of the feedback I got said the game was really hard, so I'm torn about making it harder. Maybe I should compromise by making a hard mode with tougher enemies; we'll see how much work I feel like doing. Either way, I'll probably work on a version 1.4 once COTPATD is all wrapped up.
I know you all can't wait. By the way, that weird little garden is one decorative element I did come up with.
I learned a lot making this D-Mod. I learned that DinkC and the Dink engine can never be trusted to act the way you expect. I got lots of help on the forums in fixing obscure and strange bugs, but some things I ended up having to work around. I had pillars on the arena screen made with create_sprite, but if you threw hellfire at them it exploded forever. Why? Who the Hell knows? I had one map screen in particular that just started refusing to accept new scripted objects. I was doing nothing wrong, they just wouldn't work. I just had to give that one up to the Dink Gods and not try to do anything that displeased them.
There's more that I could say about "Malachi," but this is already by far the longest writeup in the project. I never got around to summarizing this D-Mod like most of the others, so I hope this isn't too confusing a read for anybody who never got around to playing it. If you want to hear even more of my thoughts on "Malachi," you should really check out the Let's Play by Robj that I co-commentated on. Speaking of which - Robj, pretty please upload more of that? I'd love to see it again, doing that was just so much fun.
I end the writeup the same way I ended the D-Mod: with the truth. *folds arms*
