The Dink Network

I'm called Tim. I've been playing Dink since it came out, when I was a young, dumb kid.

timthreethreethree@gmail.com
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==2015==

There's no time like the present. As of right now, there are four D-Mods out this year, which is neat when you consider that it's still January. Sigh... okay, fine, FIVE D-Mods. What's that? Six? Goddamn it. You know what, I'm calling it here. No more D-Mods will be accepted. Otherwise Skorn or anybody can just keep putting out crappy D-Mods just to make me write about them. Too bad this means I'll have to end on the likes of "Dink and the Chins," whatever that's about.

--The Silent Protagonist Contest--

The Silent Protagonist Contest was announced on October 6th, 2014. It was the first contest to be announced by redink1 since 2006's Failure Contest. Entries were required to have a protagonist who never speaks outside of the intro and ending. Workarounds like showing their thoughts or having a voice in their head were also disallowed. The idea was to have a game with a true silent protagonist like an oldschool RPG. Entries were also limited to no more than 60 screens. The announcement said that "[t]he spirit of the contest would be to create a standard Dink-style D-Mod," but only one of the entries ended up being that type of D-Mod.

Three entries were received by the original deadline of January 4th, 2015, so the deadline wasn't extended at all. How about that? The winner was decided in an unusual way - the entrants themselves voted. Since we couldn't vote for our own entries, there were only two possible arrangements of votes - a three-way tie, or 2-1-0. The latter case occurred. Let's start with the one that got 0 votes.

350: Dinkgon Warrior Authors: Tim Maurer, MsDink Release Date: January 5, 2015
"We were hoping you could take care of it so that the real hero doesn't have to bother."

By this point, I had made a silent decision that I wouldn't make any more D-Mods. The last idea I'd really been into was a complete and utter disaster when I announced it, so I ended up shelving the work I'd done on it for good. But when Dan announced the contest, I thought, Hell, I had to do something. If the second contest in a row failed to happen, I didn't want it to be because I couldn't be bothered to make anything for it.

I couldn't come up with any new ideas, so I went back to the list I'd made when I was brainstorming before I started "Malachi the Jerk" and found my old idea to remake the 1989 NES RPG Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest in Japan; newer releases go by that name outside of Japan as well). I hadn't originally intended for Dink to be silent when I came up with that idea - instead, I was going to have him crack wise about the setting and the RPG tropes - but having him stay silent seemed to make a lot of sense. It made it truer to the original.

I talked to MsDink about doing the map work. At first she agreed to do all of the map work, but she ended up having a whole lot of stuff happen in real life, and her role became more like Leprochaun's in "Malachi the Jerk," with the addition of making some new graphics as well. Actually, with everything she had going on, I'm impressed that she managed to help me out on this project at all. I've been very fortunate to have two of the community's best mappers clean up my mapping messes. My initial map for "Dinkgon Warrior" was a submarine wreck. I had become too lazy even to map as well as I did in my initial version of "Malachi the Jerk," which is saying a lot. Here are some comparison screenshots (original on top, final on bottom):



The title screen. MsDink said early on that she'd make it, but I had one ready juuuust in case. Not that I didn't think she'd make one, but you never know.



Can you BELIEVE my version of the throne room? Dear god.



The best thing I can say about my attempt at the castle garden is that MsDink could at least see what I was going for. Her version is gorgeous, of course.



MsDink made my avatar a bedsheet like she did for various authors in "Furball!" That was sweet of her.

I worked long hours on this D-Mod and finished a fully playable version (pending MsDink's contribution) around Halloween. I was fortunate that the formulas used by Dragon Warrior have been fully documented. Thus, I was able to port the whole battle system over to Dink and have it work exactly as it does in the NES game (barring a case or two where the systems handle rounding differently). At first, I used a simplified version of the battle system, but as I worked on it, I realized that it wasn't too much trouble to go ahead and implement every feature. I was even able to approximate the same experience curve as Dragon Warrior by having an experience multiplier that changes depending on your current level. The turn-based combat system is all contained within one script, including the stats for each of the 17 enemies. It's too bad that DinkC won't store and retrieve text strings, because I couldn't reproduce the battle messages that say things like "The Slime attacks!" without having an entirely separate version of those lines for each enemy, which is nuts. You can sort of store strings by representing letters with numbers, but it won't do you any good, since you still wouldn't be able to put the result into a line of text.


A fierce battle of stats against stats! Text flying at you as fast as you can handle!

This D-Mod is different from a typical Dink game in many ways. There's no inventory screen, and the item slot is just used for medicinal herbs. Magic is used as MP, and you have a maximum MP stat that you can view in the escape menu along with your equipment. Dying sends you back to the castle with half of your gold removed instead of forcing you to load a save. At level up you're assigned stat increases (several at once). In Dragon Warrior, your stat growth pattern depends upon your name, so I gave you the one you'd get if you entered your name as "Dink." And of course, there's the turn-based battles.

The battles in "Dinkgon Warrior" are less than exciting, I realize. You walk into the monsters on the map and then Dink and monster both just stand there as you go through an entirely text-based battle. There are sounds, but no animations. I considered having Dink and the enemies go through attack animations when they attack, but doing so would have slowed combat down a lot, and in testing I really found it more fun as it was. "Dinkgon Warrior" feels just like playing Dragon Warrior in terms of gameplay except that battles are much faster. I've played it through several times now and always had fun; it turned out just the way I had hoped. It has that same feeling as that game from my childhood: grinding methodically to upgrade your equipment, testing the limits as you push further and further form your safe haven, the tension as you push into a dungeon you might not yet be ready for, knowing that half your gold is at stake if you lose. It was exactly what I wanted it to be, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily going to appeal to other people. It's a very niche thing I've made here. Dragon Quest has never been very popular outside of Japan, and Dragon Warrior, the game that invented the JRPG, is slow and simple. Many people don't like grinding; although I tried to allow for this by including an option to play with the higher experience and gold rewards from the 2000 Game Boy Color remake, it's still plenty grindy either way. That's just what it is. I don't doubt that some players also found the fact that most screens lock every time you enter them extremely frustrating, but this was intended to recreate the slow progress across the map in Dragon Warrior thanks to random encounters. It also can't help that you rarely hear more than a couple of seconds of any given MIDI.


Caves are what this sort of game is all about, so I made room to include two of them. It wasn't easy to do with the screen limit.

"Dinkgon Warrior" was never going to have a wide appeal, so I certainly shouldn't have gotten upset when it came in last place in the contest. Unfortunately, I didn't take it well. At all. I sure am not proud of that, but I've linked to other people's dirty laundry, so here's mine. I have to apologize once again, particularly to Dan and Megadog, whose entries I showed disrespect for by freaking out about not getting any of the (two available!) votes. On a less awesome community, a fight probably would have happened, and it would have been my fault.

You know, I'm reminded of a lyric from a song I used to listen to back in high school. Anybody remember The Black Album? At least a few of you must; it was extremely popular.

No matter where you go, you are what you are player
And you can try to change, but that's just the top layer
Man, you was who you was when you got here

That lyric always rang true to me. People don't change, not at the core. They might seem to, but it's just the top layer. Behind it, we're still the same thing we always were. People don't change.

Here's what's beneath my top layer: my opinion of myself is unchangeably miserable, and I take even well-intentioned criticism extremely poorly. It was true back in 1998, as anybody who was around to see my histrionic rants well knows, and it's true now. It happens on a level beneath my conscious thoughts. I read or hear the words that tell me - often just in my own head! - that my work, and therefore, my lazy brain insists, I - am deficient, and I begin to spiral downward. A cold feeling seizes deep in my chest, and I become unstable. I actually have trouble breathing. If you've ever wondered why I haven't seriously gone into a real career in writing, there you go.

This explains, but certainly doesn't excuse my behavior. I have to try to do better in the future. At least on the top layer.

That's enough of that; I still have more to say about the D-Mod itself. I had fun with the dialogue, although there isn't a lot. Most of the lines the NPCs do have are based on dialogue from Dragon Warrior, so I got to make fun of absurd lines like "No, I'm not Princess Gwaelin" and "No, we have no tomatoes. We have no tomatoes today." I had special fun pointing out at length how creepy it would be for some chick you just met to throw herself at you the way the princess in this game does and demand your undying love immediately.


It's tough to be an NPC, okay?

The contest's 60-screen limitation had a big impact on this project. It made it impossible to remake the entire game, which I admit would have been a huge job. I scaled it back to end when you rescue the princess, which happens less than halfway through the original game. I had to seriously compress the map of even that segment to fit "Dinkgon Warrior" into its 57 screens. I did find room to include two dungeons, though. One of them is based on a totally optional dungeon from Dragon Warrior that had no significant reward, but I really needed a dungeon there to make this chopped-down version feel like a real game.


The map of "Dinkgon Warrior."

This was fun to make. I could see myself expanding this to cover the whole game if I had more help with mapping, and Leprochaun has offered to help. But even if most people found this to be tolerable, I can't imagine there'd be much demand for a much longer version of it.

I found a couple of bugs playing this just now. Looks like all three of my recent releases are going to have to get a patch at some point.

351: Silence Author: Megadog Release Date: January 5, 2015
"She never spoke. She couldn't find the words."

"Silence" is the story of a girl named Imogen who has permanently lost her voice. She lives in an insular community called Calbora that no one is allowed to enter or leave. When girls of Calbora reach the age of fifteen, they are mutilated in such a manner as to render them incapable of speech. The casual, haughty cruelty of the elders as they do this to Imogen in the intro is unnerving. What's really amazing about this society, though, is that the girls somehow don't know about this practice until the moment it's done to them. The only way this could be possible is if the girls under fifteen were kept totally isolated from any girls or women past their fifteenth birthday. The D-Mod doesn't outright state that this is done, but there's nothing to contradict it either.


There must be some kind of cult religion going on here. It's the only way I can rationalize this type of behavior.

Imogen manages to escape Calbora after her "procedure" due to excellent luck - someone has left a tunnel. We see earlier in the intro that her big sister Lilith managed to escape as well - I wonder why she didn't take Imogen with her, knowing what they were going to do to her?

Unfortunately, I didn't see any of this the first time I played the game. You see, the title screen has two start buttons.


Count 'em!

I clicked the one in the middle of the screen. It skips the intro and makes you start with the fireball and a stat boost, but at the time I assumed that was just how the D-Mod started. I was able to infer what happened in the intro from the rest of the story, but it seemed like an odd way to present things and obviously didn't have the same impact. The stat boost and fireball also had a big impact on the D-Mod apart from just making it easier. Imogen is intended to be portrayed as a frightened, inexperienced girl who has to learn the fireball spell later in order to defend herself (she starts with 0 in all stats). If you click the center button, the D-Mod seems to be about some kind of mute but fairly experienced mage. This harmed my first impression somewhat. I didn't find out about this until after I'd already beaten the D-Mod.

Imogen's run of good luck (she could use it after having the miserable luck of being born in Calbora) continues as she meets a man named Michael who's willing to help her. Even better, he immediately understands her situation because he's met her sister (although obviously he doesn't know that Imogen and the woman he met are sisters). It's a lucky thing that girls in Calbora are taught how to write (I wonder why? I have so many questions about this place). Imogen is soon able to go out looking for her sister and find information that leads her to find her nearby.

There are certain pitfalls in making a game about a character who's silent not because of RPG conventions, but because they're literally incapable of speech. When Ness, Crono or the Dragon Quest VIII guy talks to an NPC and the NPC immediately knows what they're on about, we just assume that they said something. It isn't a big deal; their muteness isn't a stated character trait. When your character is literally mute, you have to think about how they're communicating with the people who talk to them. Imogen mostly nods, shakes her head and points, which is a good start but you'd still think she'd have a lot of trouble being understood. Oddly, she doesn't. The D-Mod never outright has a character know something they couldn't possibly know without Imogen speaking to them (or writing something down - given that it's established that Calboran girls are taught to write, why doesn't she?), but Michael does deserve an "All-time Charades Champion" medal for getting "there's something that will help you with your mouth up on the cliffs" from Imogen pointing to her mouth and then toward cliffs that he can't even see because they're indoors. It would have made more sense if she had to go a bit further to get things across. This isn't a huge issue, but it did bug me a little bit.

A bigger problem is all of the talking Imogen does in this D-Mod. She says she doesn't have a map when you press the map button. She says "Yum!" when she eats food. She tells the save machine to die when she hits it, explains megapotions when she picks them up, and counts her gold out loud. Dnotalk and Dnomagic have been used to change the associated default messages, but everything else is intact, something I'd probably let slide if contest rules were the only problem, but Imogen is supposed to be totally incapable of speech. As such, it takes you right out of the story to see her saying all this stuff. It would be simple enough to edit all of these cases in an update (megadog, if you need any help just ask).


This is the only thing she can say any time she wants. That'd almost be worse than being mute.

The map is quite good. There isn't a lot of decoration, but the screens don't look too plain thanks to good use of tiles. Visually, everything makes sense. The map doesn't have the boxy or tunnel-like shapes that plague so many D-Mods, and the clifftop path is layered over the town below in such a way that the whole "world" makes sense and looks good as a unit. Megadog avoids common errors in his debut release such as bad tiling and hardness and depth dot problems. All 60 screens allowed by the contest rules are used. It's a nice little map.

Imogen ultimately finds Lilith (boy, she didn't get far in the years since her "procedure"), and Lilith has found a magic flower that can cure her injury. Unfortunately, she used it up right before Imogen got there! Poor Imogen is left silent at the end of this D-Mod. Actually, the last thing Imogen and Lilith do is buy a house. You have to pay for it, but you'll probably have enough money already unless you bought the throwing axe, which you don't need. The ending is a little abrupt as the author ran out of time and screens. I think it would have been slightly better to end right after the sisters meet or maybe right after they get back to town; having to go buy a house doesn't add much when that's the end of the D-Mod. The reunion is a strong story event to end on.


Way to hog the magic flowers, sis.

"Silence" is a solid effort for a first time author with a unique story for a D-Mod and a well-built map. The author is apparently working on a patch that should hopefully fix the issues I ran into, so it should be a pretty nice little D-Mod once it's all done.