Zebes Winter Solstice 2013

[DSO]

MShaktoolT
[spoiler]


Possibly the best So Little of the series. Something for everyone! Very recommended for grapple haters! Fantastic remixes of classic tunes! Will nominate for worst hack 2014. [/spoiler]

Will add others once I've recovered enough to play them.

[Jordan5]

So i just played Vis and Quote's hack (the updated version)... wow that was interesting :O_o:

I thought what I had was short but it only took me 13 minutes and about 10 were fighting the final boss. I'm pretty sure i never used grapple either, just missiles.

I guess i'll update my thoughts on this later when i've played the others so i have something to compare this to.

[Vismund Cygnus]

So i just played Vis and Quote's hack (the updated version)... wow that was interesting :O_o:

I thought what I had was short but it only took me 13 minutes and about 10 were fighting the final boss. I'm pretty sure i never used grapple either, just missiles.

I guess i'll update my thoughts on this later when i've played the others so i have something to compare this to.

Well. I think I may know why that's the case. Did you by some chance bomb your way through those things blocking the door? I was unaware that the vulnerability pointer for bombs hadn't been changed on those, because you aren't supposed to be able to kill those. . .at all.
*Vismund glares at Quote58
Regardless, I've fixed the patch. Thank you for pointing that out to me. You may want to replay it, assuming that's what happened.
If not, PM me what you did, I wanna fix this.

[Jordan5]

Yeah that's what I did, between that and the final boss I probably spent one or two minutes on the rest of the hack :lol:
I'll definitely play through it properly now though, the level design is good so It's fun to explore around :^_^:

[Mon732]

Haha I know how you feel Grime. The best thing to do there is hold aim up then try and catch the grapple blocks on the underside.

[Vismund Cygnus]

Sooooooooooo. . . . . . . . . .
Wat is happening with this?
Do we all win? What's the prize? IS IT COOKIES?

Really though, it's been like a week, and we don't know what's happening with judging, how it's being judged, etc.
Pls explain.
<3, Vismund.

[Quote58]

Oh hey you're right.
idk if 8bit wants to do it or if should though. If I don't hear from him about it soon I'll get things set up.
[spoiler=delicious cookies][/spoiler]

[Quietus]

I have to admit, those cookies do look pretty delicious. :^_^:

[jk16bit-palmy-]

Oh hey you're right.
idk if 8bit wants to do it or if should though. If I don't hear from him about it soon I'll get things set up.
[spoiler=delicious cookies][/spoiler]

Well, since i don't have Mod Priv's, I can only voice what i'd like to do. _{Just make me a Mod for this board *cough cough}

Judging should be by the community, so Quote, Put a Poll up for Best/Worst(overall, Design, Visuals etc...) and see what everyone thinks.

Prize for the Winner is/could-be to be Noted as "ZWS Contest Winner" in the "Hacks" Section of the metconst main siteand a 2 Year Tolken to XboxLive Gold (would that work, mods?)

[Lunaria]

Some reflections on my own work, that being Ice returns:

While not planned to be a very large hack, it's still only around half the planned size in raw rooms... I was considering not having a release for the contest since everything was just simply so much behind schedule on my end.

I approached Metaquarius since I wanted to use Serries for the hack idea I had, it took some pushing from my end before he accepted, but in the end he more than delivered. Sadly, the reason the boss battle turned to shit was due to my own incompetence. Serries was to be balanced to die from 15 missiles, which I believe may not actually be accurate based on the videos I have seen of the fight. This would be fine and dandy but it's quite easy to miss Serries and you only have an error rate of missing 5 missiles if you got all possible expansions before the fight. You can use charge beam but it does less damage than missiles. (Though I do want to ram something hard into the head of people who complain the boss takes forever as they spam charge without even using their missiles...) The reason for 15 missiles was what a judged to be a decent length of the battle, of course, I did not take much time to actually test this.

The hack was supposed to have a full line of e-tanks available for players to find as well as up to either 40 or 50 missiles. This was the plan in order to balance exploration with further support for the boss battle. However, I realise now that even that many e-tanks may not be enough... I honestly don't consider that Serries deal too much damage, rather, I think the boss fight if fundamentally flawed. It moves extremely fast and from random locations and you're expected to dodge it all really fast, this is also an fact that becomes even harder in super metroid which has a box view where as fusion has more of a wide view making you see more. The end result is just that players will sit in the blind spots in the water and shot it when it passes by, I know for a fact that this was my main method of fighting it in fusion!

For the graphical look of the game I wanted something new, I used one of the old stone tile sets I made for the aboveground and the plan was to draw a new set of ice tiles for the frozen area... I was inspired, so to speak, to make something based on the ice area in La-Mulana. It has a certain look, stone and ice overlaying it at places as well as ice pillars and columns. It has a very fancy look and I tried forever trying to draw something that captured that look... and I failed, horribly. Everything was just and I was actually looking around to find any good ripped ice tileset, but I could not find any good one anywhere. So in the end someone convinced me to just draw something, which I did. The final tileset is supposed to look like a bunch of large chunks of ice flakes. To be honest, I think this looks more like ice then the tileset I used in Ice metal but from my understanding most people think it look like junk, and I don't blame them. It lacks a bit in tile variation though, and I give it that.


In the end, for the final release there are quite a few things I want to do:

1. Make sure there's a missile refill after you jump down in the water from above due to all the pillars of ice you shoot with missiles.
2. Introduce the mechanic of momentum. You kept your momentum after landing yet I saw many players simply shine spark as if they didn't realise you could do this.
3. Make some small changes to current rooms in order to make them more refined. (Hello grapple into wall damage?)
4. Add more rooms in order to actually put the rest of the items in!
5. Re-balance all damage in the hack.
6. Fix so you start with 99 energy, maybe.
7. Make sure the boss fight actually feels epic and not a draw out fucking mess of constant death. (Also, no more blind spots! :portal: )
8. Actually put in some references to what this hack was SUPPOSED TO reference. This hack and my last contest hack actually have this in common.