Reply to Re: Crazy old Tim plays all the DMODs
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Haha. You're awesome, Robj. Thanks for the cookie.
I'm having a hard time focusing on the packing I ought to be doing. Bad for me, good for you guys if you're enjoying this as much as you say you are. You know, I'm glad that for the first time ever I'm contributing something positive to this community, because I've had more than my share of swings at it before and come up shorter than a particularly short elf in a community of elves that is known even among elves for having lower than average height. Imagine that the other elves pick on this particular elf and call him "Shorty." But actually they're being kind of nice by pretending that he's even worthy of their ridicule and oh God I can't do this.
You know what? Even listening to me talk about how bad my DMODs are wouldn't be worth your time. We're better off pretending they don't exist - yeah, that's the ticket. I mean, it's not like they were ever relevant anyway. So why don't we just move on and...
As I typed, I thought I heard a slight tapping at the door. Leaning back, I craned my head to look out the window, but there didn't seem to be anyone there. I shrugged, thinking it must have been my imagination. As soon as I returned my attention to my writing, however, the tapping continued, louder - a pounding now. It sounded familiar somehow. Groaning (I hate being interrupted), I got up and opened my door. I still didn't see anybody. Swearing oaths to various deities combined with various breakfast items ("Jesus H. Christ nailed to a crucifix-shaped Belgian Waffle with Blueberry Syrup"), I returned to my computer. The pounding began anew almost immediately.
I began to feel ill; an unease boiled nervously around the walls of my stomach. I'd never been the sanest guy around. Had I finally lost what few marbles I'd had? "There's nothing out there," I told myself, and I set resolutely to ignoring the strangely-familiar pounding even as it became louder and louder. My head started swimming laps around the room, and it wasn't making good time, either.
I was just about to start writing about Dinkzilla when the door burst open. A stranger barged into my room.
I looked up and did a double take just like a cartoon character. I had several failed attempts at speaking, then finally managed a weak, "Who are you?" The intruder didn't dignify that with a reply. He knew that I knew.
It was Dink Smallwood. This was, of course, impossible, but there it was. It took me a moment to recognize him with an actual face, but there was no mistaking it. He was even wearing that same dumb red cloth tied inexplicably to his shoulder.
"Okay," I thought to myself, "Obviously you're dreaming. We're way past the bounds of hallucination at this point." My brain was not buying it. I began to whimper.
Dink stood in the door and looked at me, swept a quick look around the room, checked a scroll of paper that he was carrying, and looked at me again. I swallowed what felt like a baseball filled with razor blades.
"Maurer? Timothy William Maurer?" he said.
"Yes?" I squeaked. Maybe if I was lucky I'd just have a fatal aneurysm right at this very moment.
"Well, it's about time I found you," he growled. I backed into the wall and immediately broke out into a fit of sobbing and wailing like the wuss that I am. It wasn't even a little bit dignified. Snot ran down my face. He took a step back.
"Good grief, man," Dink said to me, "Get ahold of yourself. This is just embarrassing."
I closed my eyes, breathed heavily, and with all I was worth, summoned back most of my composure. "You're right," I said, "I'm sorry."
"Good," he said, and kicked me very hard in the kneecap. I went down like a sack of potatoes with the bottom cut out.
As I lay on the floor moaning (I was pretty sure something was broken), I saw him look at what I'd written. "Trying to weasel your way out of it, huh? I thought so. That's why I came here." He picked me up and put me in front of my computer. "Do you have any idea how much it sucked being put into your crappy mods, or how bad you made me look? Play them, and don't you dare hold back. It's the least you can do."
--My own crappy DMODs--
[NOTE TO FUTURE READERS: This was written before I made "Malachi the Jerk." Statements about "all my DMODs" are not meant to apply to that one.]
The above didn't happen, obviously, but it might as well have, because doing this is like pulling teeth. Let's get it out of the way: All of the DMODs I ever made sucked. "Terrible" is frankly too good of a word for the ones I made in 1998; only the later ones rise to the level of "terrible," because you really aren't doing something like Dink Forever any justice unless you break out the hyperbole. "Abysmal" and "worst DMODs of all time" are a good start.
By the way, i'm going to cover all of my stuff at once. I'm not ordinarily going to jump around chronologically like this, but I need to get this out of the way like ripping off a bandage and express my regrets so I can move on and talk about real DMODs.
If you want to play any of my DMODs, here is some advice: Don't. If you still want to, then play Zink, be stunned by how bad it is, and don't be thrown off if you enjoy parts of it a little. Remember: it's only downhill from there. Don't say I didn't warn you.
014: Dink Smallwood Forever Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: August 6, 1998
The good news is that these DMODs simply don't work. Anytime you hit anything, they crash.
The bad news is that I figured out how to fix them. Want to hear something funny? It isn't my fault, it's Mike Snyder's! I used his DMOD skeleton to make my first four (if you twist my arm, five, but I'll get to that) DMODs. It was not Skeleton B, which came out about a month afterward. Skeleton B fixed a problem with the skeleton's main.c - it was missing the global variable &missle_source (misspelled just like that). For some reason, this didn't cause a crash on hit back then, but it does in 1.07, 1.08, FreeDink, and Dink Smallwood HD. Some other DMODs from back then have been patched to fix this already, and I think even these would have been if they weren't "lost" DMODs. All you have to do to fix this problem is add that variable or simply copy the main.c from Skeleton B and paste it into the story folder. Don't do this!
I am completely serious and not even a little bit joking, people: you won't get ironic enjoyment out of these. I'll break format and tell you that I just played the first four DMODs here in a row, and it was such an unpleasant experience that it caused me physical pain, emotional distress, and other things you could sue somebody for. If Dink really were getting his revenge by making me play these, he'd have enjoyed a hearty laugh as I stumbled madly through my own creations, crying out "Why?" and sweating profusely.
All right, let's get down to business: Dink Smallwood forever is an atrocity. Being 12 was no excuse for this. Some people were nice to me back then, and after playing these, I really don't know how they managed it. I, for my part, acted like a whiny, entitled brat who screamed about the slightest criticism.
Ugh, I keep getting sidetracked. You've got to understand, it's so hard for me to talk about these. Fine: Dink Smallwood Forever starts like this, which is actually quite appropriate. You'll notice there are no walls on this screen, but the only way you can go is down. You can enter a house, which contains Dink's "wife" Dot and his pet pig Oinky, the latter of whom is the one with plot significance here (at least as much as there is a plot, which isn't much at all). You can get a bunch of powerups you don't need, including hearts that leave hardness behind. There are some enemies you don't have to fight. Eventually you may find Oinky again. He talks to you, telling you utter nonsense that I suppose I thought passed as a plot, and then is killed by someone unseen. This is our plot hook, everybody! Alternatively, you can walk all the way past all of this and straight to the end, since there's nothing to stop you. Even better, a little ways after the start there's a screen that's supposed to be inaccessible but isn't (I didn't place obstacles correctly) that warps you right to the finish! I recommend this route.
Amazingly, this is the second version of Dink Forever. I'm sure the first one was somehow worse. The only thing I specifically remember is that in this version, the savebots work. In the original, talking to them just had Dink say "that is a nice save," and the savebot would say "thankyou, human." Sic.
Oh, and here's something I forgot: I used to confuse left with right and east with west. Therefore, directions of that kind in this DMOD and others after it all the way up through End of the World have those kind of directions reversed whenever they're referred to; this was also true of walkthroughs I made of my own mods, some of which are still on Dink Solutions. You might think I was an exceptionally stupid child, but I got good grades. Don't ask me.
If you think my writing chops and sense of humor might have saved this from being a totally dismal time, let me assure you that neither of these traits existed back then. Here is an example of my idea of humor at the time. Kill me.
There are only a handful of screens, hardness errors are everywhere, tiling is ugly as sin, the map makes no sense, I used "say" instead of "say_stop" just about everywhere, so you'll have to just stand and wait if you want to see the conversations, some scripts are attached to the wrong things, there's no music except for the scene in which Oinky is killed, and everything is generally irrepressibly bad and a rotten waste of your time. Here are some better ways to use your time than playing Dink Forever:
*Play Solitaire with a deck that's missing random cards.
*Draw a picture with the wrong end of a pencil.
*Get a real pet pig and name it Oinky.
*Get drunk.
*Masturbate.
*Play any DMOD with a rating of over 1.0 on Dink Network.
*Sing off-key.
*Have a philosophical debate with your cat.
*Sit completely motionless just to see how long you can.
*Read the worst book I've ever seen in my life, "Fifty Shades of Gray."
*Think about how glad you are you're not playing Dink Forever.
And so on. I guess my favorite part was how Dink says "Let's wrestle!" if you punch Oinky, sort of like my favorite part of getting beaten up is the feeling of relief when they stop. You get no such relief, however, because I kept going.
By the way, it ends like this, which, again, feels strangely appropriate. You have to quit manually, though; this is, I'd say, the only way to win. You can win faster by not playing.
015: Dink Smallwood Unlimited Author: Tim Maurer Release Date:
August 15, 1998
Part two of the riveting Dink Smallwood Forever trilogy! I assure you I did not spend the majority of the intervening days working on this. In fact, odds are I knocked it out in a single afternoon.
You know what another good fantasy is? Imagining going back and time, slapping my younger self, and physically preventing him from uploading these DMODs. This gave me a pleasant fuzzy sensation that got me through the hard times.
This one definitely isn't better than the original. It starts out on a screen that is supposed to be an intro, but really isn't because I couldn't figure out how to script anything. The dragons "threatening" you are basically statues, you can walk offscreen any time you like, and the text makes no sense anyway. I wrote this stuff and I can't even figure out what I was trying to get at.
After leaving the first screen, you find yourself in "heaven" (That is, the Windows 95 clouds background). There you can go around and talk to various dead characters, including Oinky, who doesn't talk anymore. Again, my favorite part is that punching him makes Dink say "(Sob) We used to wrestle..." This should give you an idea of how enjoyable an experience the mod is in general.
Soon you'll blunder into "heck" (this isn't the ludicrous swear filter at work, it really is called "heck"), which looks like this, but bear in mind that that flame background does not animate. Also, Jack there is the only one of the three figures with a script attached. You'll go past a number of giant monsters who can't move out of their own map-placed hardness; this is, one assumes, their eternal punishment. You can show mercy on them and kill them, or cruelly ignore them and walk past. You'll inexplicably "return to life," and the DMOD ends. Next.
016: Infinite Dink Smallwood Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: August 19, 1998
I can't imagine what I hoped to gain by continuing to submit these to the Smallweb. I guess I probably hoped that people would admire and praise me. I really must not have understood how those things worked.
Here's the only part of the Dink Smallwood Forever trilogy where you have to do anything. I don't think this stops it from being by far the worst of the three, though. The map is the worst yet - you can only go straight up, and it's the tiniest map so far. You fight some more giant enemies; they still can't move, but some of them *can* attack you, and this makes advancing pretty much impossible because they're too strong. If you do manage to get past them, however, you reach a screen with a savebot and some numbers and can't go any further.
There was supposed to be a "boss" at the top. He's Oinky's killer, a farmer. He makes some evil quips at you ("I'LL HAVE DINK STEAKS COME MORNIN, YUM") and nothing happens because Dink says a few things that I guess he thinks are magic spells (Dink's clearly mentally unstable) and the farmer "dies," or at least says that he does, which was good enough for me at the time. I remember seeing this actually work at least once, but it doesn't here. It doesn't really make any difference. Next.
All Out Brawl
I made this between the Dink Forever series and the following DMOD. I didn't play it now because it really isn't a DMOD. A DMOD has to have scripts, right? Well, this one just has a handful of terribly designed screens with enemies that you don't have to fight wandering (correctly, wonder of wonders) around. At the end, there's a thing to examine that says "The end" or something like that. That's all there is.
Even at the time, I wasn't deluded enough to think that this was acceptable. I even included a text file saying, I think, that this wasn't supposed to be good. Why did I release it, then? Frankly, I can't even begin to guess at my motives. If you want to call this a DMOD, then it's the worst one ever. Actually, there was a DMOD on the old Dink Network briefly that just booted up, said, "Bye," and exited, but you might even find that better than this by virtue of being slightly amusing.
017: 2001: A Dink Oddyssey Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: August 23, 1998
While I was playing this one, I took a break to watch some ants crawl up my wall. This was an altogether more entertaining experience.
This DMOD comes with a text file that calls it "my best work." I literally wanted to cry when I read this. It also contains this song parody of the theme from "The Beverly Hillbillies," a show that I'm pretty sure I never watched:
well, once upon a time there was a man named dink,
always feedin' pigs, then he starts to think,
"yep, an adventurer, that's what i want to be",
so he packed up all his bags
and he moved to terris. see?
next thing you know there's this real evil guy,
name's bishop nelson had a face that made you cry
dink kicked his butt..........crap.
uh
uh
uh
uh
uh
nevermind.
questions? comments? keep them to yourself.
That song parody doesn't scan, isn't funny, and is the best thing included with this DMOD. What's sad is that you probably think I'm kidding.
So, if you haven't left your house to find and murder me yet, let's talk about the title. I have, to this day, never read 2001: A Space Odyssey or seen the movie based on it. I just liked the title, though apparently not enough to spell it correctly. I think I got the spelling from Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, which is spelled like I just spelled it there - still not the way I spelled the title of this DMOD.
I'm suffering so that you don't have to, folks. Heed my warning.
There's more text in this one, but it just results in an even worse and less compelling story than "Dink has a pet pig, it dies, and he looks for his killer." If you sit around and wait for the say statements, as all the statements I made about Dink Forever's problems are still true here, you'll find that it's about how the human race nearly died out in a nuclear war. Aliens put the brains of the survivors into "eyebots," which are represented by a single, terrible MSPaint bitmap I made. It gets even dumber from there, but I zoned out. Can you believe this drivel? Even back then, I'm certain I was capable of writing better than this.
Monsters you don't have to fight, boss you don't have to fight, ending. At least this one actually exits the program. I still say that, like nuclear war, the only way to win is not to play.
018: The End of the World Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: March 29, 1999
After releasing "2001," the sense finally penetrated my brain that I was not doing a good thing by releasing these terrible DMODs. I finally came to the realization that I was earning the scorn heaped upon me by making things that sucked. Therefore, I stopped making DMODs for a while and, when I started again, put some actual effort into the next one. I intended it to be my redemption for what had come before. If you've ever played "End of the World," that ought to give you pause, because this is a very bad DMOD. Excepting the four above and maybe Dinkopolis, this is the worst of the 18 DMODs I've looked at so far.
My 1998 "efforts" may be explained (though not excused) by the fact that I really wasn't trying very hard, but that doesn't apply here. I really cared about getting this right so that my reputation would improve. This is where my actual lack of skill became so apparent. Here are the facts:
1) I'd never coded anything in my life. Want to have a good laugh? At the time I went around telling people at school that I "programmed video games" in reference to these DMODs. In fact I had no idea what I was doing in regards to scripting or the editor, and it showed. I've noticed that for the most part, the DMODs that are very good are by real programmers (Snyder, Walma, Hertel, etc.). I was not a programmer by any stretch of the term.
2) I had no design sense. I still don't. I've been diagnosed with severe visual learning disabilities. I can't remember faces even when I see them often, I can't memorize my way around the town I've lived in all my life, I can't draw so much as a stick figure, and I can't design levels. Even though I have played so many great video games in my life and know exactly how great level/map design works, I can't design things that make any visual sense at all. This has stymied me every time I've tried to make games (Klik 'n' Play, LittleBigPlanet, you name it).
3) I had no patience and no critical eye. I was always in a rush to see things done and released. I allowed bugs to exist, failed to think things through, and decided I was done far too soon.
Of those three factors, I'm afraid that the third is the only one that has improved in the past fifteen years, and while I could probably improve at programming if I gave it an awful lot of time and effort, I don't think there's anything at all I can do about point 2. If I may be completely sincere for a moment, I want everybody to know how much this frustrates me. I wanted so badly to release something good. Even now, I'd love to close the door on my regrets by making a really spiffy DMOD that makes everybody say "hey, that Tim guy actually released a good DMOD in the end, even if it did take him fifteen years," but I can't. I just can't. It kills me inside. I don't expect you to feel sorry for me, mind you; I'm just trying to make you understand where I'm coming from.
End of the World is much, much better than my prior DMODs, but it still doesn't reach the point where all the pejoratives you can direct at it aren't pretty much fair. It's terrible, boring, and not worth your time. What's worse, by the time I came out with it the standards had gotten higher. Maybe if I'd released this instead of Dink Forever, it wouldn't have looked so bad, but by this point Prophecy of the Ancients existed.
Speaking of that, Gary Hertel ran one of the prominent Dink sites at the time. On his news page, he said regarding my announcement of EotW that it was "supposed to be better than his other mods, but I wouldn't hold my breath." This was certainly fair to say, but at the time I got mad and sent an angry email to him. He responded and told me that he had changed the post just to be nice, but warned me that I had a lot to learn about life and that I couldn't expect people to bend over backwards for me all the time. Uncharacteristically - and let's give the kid a big hand, folks, he was finally starting to figure out just how much of his crappy life had been his own fault - I realized immediately that he was right and felt sorry for what I'd said. Remember that the next time you think you won't bother trying to tell some kid what they're doing wrong because they won't listen.
When I was almost done with EotW, I sent an early version to Gary first, telling him I was sorry and that I really wanted his opinion. He exploded at me, saying that he couldn't believe I would even consider releasing something so buggy and poorly designed. I apologized further and asked for more advice, but he just said that he was sorry for getting mad, no doubt realizing that there was no hope of getting through to me in a way that would make me actually get good at this. I think that probably the nicest thing he could have done would be to tell me not to release it, emphasizing that it wouldn't help my reputation in the long run and that I just wasn't good at this and ought to move on. I probably wouldn't have taken that advice at the time, though.
Now that I'm mired in my past and feel like crap (if I ought to suffer for what I made, it's happening right now), I guess I should actually discuss End of the World. Unlike the DMODs above, this one actually functions. It has a story-variable based push rock that works, a bomb rock that works, and a series of battles that are challenging but not unreasonably so and that you actually must win to advance, and this can actually be kind of fun thanks mostly to a good combat system made by RTSoft. It has a "jukebox" item that lets you pick which MIDI you want to listen to, which is a neat idea that I hadn't seen at the time and actually came up with. It has a story that, while it still doesn't make sense (The world will end thanks to giant tree roots. This turns out to be a dream that Dink's been trapped in by an evil wizard, kind of like Dinkopolis), is at least coherent, which is a big improvement. I put borders on the screens so that you don't walk right into the edge of them, even if the borders look terrible. The concept of a village populated by signs, though terribly executed here, is slightly amusing given Dink's propensity for hitting them. And would you look at that, I am out of positive things to say. I probably went farther than I should have, to be honest.
Let's beat the crap out of this thing. It has stunningly bad map design that is ugly, makes no sense, and is riddled with hardness errors. An item that you're told not to use is supposed to turn Dink into a duck, and the line I wrote ("I guess curiosity killed the QUACK. Quack? Quack!") might have been worth a smile if he actually had, but he turns into an arrow instead. Instead of shrinking Dink when the plot calls for it, there's a fourth-wall breaking note telling you I couldn't get that to work*. The pillbugs early on are impossible to fight unless you talk to the giant woman. I still hadn't learned to make NPCs move around. Milder says he'll only raise your stats once, but does it as many times as you like. The original graphics suck. The bombs you buy after the first one don't work. The final area has literally everything cause you touch damage, which was intentional but makes no sense. Finally, I made myself the final boss in a derivative and lame way and gave myself way too many (1000!) hit points. Another effort squandered.
*I'm not sure if the engine allows you to do this, but even if it doesn't, I could have replaced Dink with another Dink sprite and shrank that and it would have looked fine.
On July 14, 1999, I announced that I was leaving the Dink community. If I were smart, I'd have stuck to this, but I came back on June 7, 2000 and announced "The Tragic Death of Link Smallwood," which became Zink Smallwood because of a conflict with something made by Jveenhof.
019: The Tragic Death of Zink Smallwood Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: June 15, 2000
I enjoyed myself a little bit while playing this one. It's a still an execrable DMOD with countless problems; the difference is that when I tried to be funny here, I actually kind of was. While I wouldn't recommend that you play this one either, doing so might not be a TOTAL waste of your time.
If you've played this, you've probably wondered why the hell you start with 100 in every stat. Sadly, this was unintentional. When I updated this mod to fix spelling and 1.08 compatibility on May 13, 2006, at which point I was 20 and should have known better, I left a few lines in start.c that I used for testing. If you want a better experience, you should remove them (leaving yourself some magic points because you need to use Hellfire), but it's almost just as well since the actual gameplay here is dull as dishwater and not even as fun as parts of End of the World.
The story picks up at the end of the last mod and involves a twin brother of Dink's who dies in a cutscene with actual moving parts that actually worked properly, a big step for me. I always had to hide Dink behind something, though, which is bizarre, as I found dink_can_walk_off_screen in just a few minutes of browsing the DinkC reference before I started this project. Anyway, it turns out to be a plot by an evil wizard. Sic 'im, but you'll have to solve a few more people's problems first.
Well, I guess it's time for some more faint praise. This was in many ways my best DMOD. The map design is as good as it ever got from me, as the maps make basic visual sense and look kind of like a Dink sort of world. They have some hardness errors, but not constantly all over the place like even End of the World. It is a fairly witty mod, poking fun at RPG conventions (Dink complains about how everyone wants him to do something before they'll help him - "WHAT DO I LOOK LIKE, AN ERRAND BOY?" before quickly agreeing to do his assigned task anyway) and my own tired plot contrivances (if you punch a good wizard, Dink explains, "I'm having so much trouble with wizards lately, I figure, why not just kill 'em all?"), among other things. It's a fairly innocuous little romp that is unlikely to make you hate me for making it.
And now, to bring the hammer down. The whole map is laid out on a horizontal line and is almost never taller than three screens - even for me, this is embarrassing map design and it feels terrible. The one new graphic is more MSPaint crap from me. The plot is utter nonsense. The quests are extremely simplistic and uninteresting. I STILL hadn't figured out that NPCs should move around a bit. The latest version comes with a save file, something I never did pay any attention to. Do I need to go on? My limitations, including number three from the End of the World discussion, were still in place, and as a comeback it was wholly inadequate, which I realized even at the time.
To that end, I announced on June 20th that I would be making a DMOD called Crossroads and made a website promoting it with several pages talking about its planned features. This was my first really ambitious project. I planned minigames, areas, quests, you name it. I received a lot of positive feedback and people actually got kind of excited.
020: Crossroads (Unfinished) Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: July 13, 2000
On the date above, I released an interactive trailer for Crossroads. I would like to repeat that: I called it a trailer, not a demo. It consisted entirely of a long intro cutscene (like 8 minutes!) with a little insult-swordfighting minigame in it based on Monkey Island. As a trailer, it was the only thing I released to ever be totally adequate. It won Download of the Month against actual competition. It was definitely the high point of my Dink hobby. Almost immediately afterward, I ran into my old limitations, crumbled in the face of the first real expectations I'd ever earned, and gave up.
On June 28, 2001, almost a year after releasing the trailer, I sent what little I had of Crossroads to redink1. I titled it "Crossroads Mess," explaining that I had given up and that this was a jumbled mess that should in no way be considered a complete DMOD. This was, I now realize, a big mistake. The "Mess" version contains VERY litle new content over the trailer. It's still essentially an intro movie and not much else, and what is there even I considered to be unfinished; I had planned to clean it up before I gave up on the project. At least the trailer ended in a pretty cool and promising little commercial for the full DMOD I had planned, whereas the version now on TDN just sort of stops happening in a buggy unfinished area. Furthermore, it lacks my explanation that it's just an "I give up" sort of mess, so people expect it to be a real DMOD. I feel regret about this. People should be saying "it's a shame this was never finished" instead of "this DMOD sucks." Oh well.
The intro movie is kind of entertaining the first time you watch it, telling a rambling crazy story about Dink defeating the "Idol of No Hands" (PC Gamer's Coconut Monkey, also a way of me indirectly acknowledging that I'd tormented the character with bad DMODs) with the help of Oinky II, who first appeared in Zink, and then deciding to go on vacation. It also has some decent-looking "Dink riding a bonca" graphics that I made in a very simple way (I had planned to use them for a bonca-riding minigame).
Unfortnately, even before you get to the buggy ending, there are problems with the intro movie. The insult swordfighting doesn't quite work correctly - I thought I remembered it doing so in the trailer version. Also, I have a really awful-looking pig carrying a sword walk animation that jitters and slides. At any rate, it was unneccesary; I could have had a script call the ordinary pig sprite and a still sword sprite and had them move together and it would have looked fine. Ah, my regrets...
So there you have it. After being a snot-nosed punk who made crap almost on purpose, I tried three well-meaning times but never came close to making a good DMOD. I still have ideas, though. I had one just now - I really mean it, JUST now. It's called Channel Surfing.
In channel surfing, an unseen figure keeps "changing channels." As Dink goes through the same basic quest, the style of DMOD keeps changing between serious, wacky, the original game, horror, Dink Forever, Alternate Hero, and so on. The plot eventually catches up to this fact with Dink seeking out a way to talk directly to the channel-changer to stop this from happening, kind of like Will Farrel's character in Stranger Than Fiction. I'm sure this idea requires lots of fancy scripting and precise editor work that I couldn't ever pull off, as well as good graphical work in order to really be satisfying. If anybody wants it, though, they can have it if they give me credit.
At any rate, if I have ever offended, I am sorry, and I hope these articles make up for it. Cheers.
Edit: Whups, forgot to add some notes about my later interactions with the Dink community.
On January 1st, 2001, I asked for my 1998 DMODs to be removed, making them "lost" DMODs. It actually succeeded in keeping most of the community from ever finding them, oddly enough.
On April 1st, 2004, redink1 re-uploaded a crazy old scan I made of my mad ravings on some legal pad as an April Fool's joke. It's still up on this site.
In mid-2006 I stopped by on a nostalgia trip. I reviewed a couple of DMODs and had a fairly clever idea for one of my own. I even wrote a little script, but when I got into the editor I realized I couldn't make a good map even knowing how my maps had been bad, and decided to let sleeping dogs lie.
I'm having a hard time focusing on the packing I ought to be doing. Bad for me, good for you guys if you're enjoying this as much as you say you are. You know, I'm glad that for the first time ever I'm contributing something positive to this community, because I've had more than my share of swings at it before and come up shorter than a particularly short elf in a community of elves that is known even among elves for having lower than average height. Imagine that the other elves pick on this particular elf and call him "Shorty." But actually they're being kind of nice by pretending that he's even worthy of their ridicule and oh God I can't do this.
You know what? Even listening to me talk about how bad my DMODs are wouldn't be worth your time. We're better off pretending they don't exist - yeah, that's the ticket. I mean, it's not like they were ever relevant anyway. So why don't we just move on and...
As I typed, I thought I heard a slight tapping at the door. Leaning back, I craned my head to look out the window, but there didn't seem to be anyone there. I shrugged, thinking it must have been my imagination. As soon as I returned my attention to my writing, however, the tapping continued, louder - a pounding now. It sounded familiar somehow. Groaning (I hate being interrupted), I got up and opened my door. I still didn't see anybody. Swearing oaths to various deities combined with various breakfast items ("Jesus H. Christ nailed to a crucifix-shaped Belgian Waffle with Blueberry Syrup"), I returned to my computer. The pounding began anew almost immediately.
I began to feel ill; an unease boiled nervously around the walls of my stomach. I'd never been the sanest guy around. Had I finally lost what few marbles I'd had? "There's nothing out there," I told myself, and I set resolutely to ignoring the strangely-familiar pounding even as it became louder and louder. My head started swimming laps around the room, and it wasn't making good time, either.
I was just about to start writing about Dinkzilla when the door burst open. A stranger barged into my room.
I looked up and did a double take just like a cartoon character. I had several failed attempts at speaking, then finally managed a weak, "Who are you?" The intruder didn't dignify that with a reply. He knew that I knew.
It was Dink Smallwood. This was, of course, impossible, but there it was. It took me a moment to recognize him with an actual face, but there was no mistaking it. He was even wearing that same dumb red cloth tied inexplicably to his shoulder.
"Okay," I thought to myself, "Obviously you're dreaming. We're way past the bounds of hallucination at this point." My brain was not buying it. I began to whimper.
Dink stood in the door and looked at me, swept a quick look around the room, checked a scroll of paper that he was carrying, and looked at me again. I swallowed what felt like a baseball filled with razor blades.
"Maurer? Timothy William Maurer?" he said.
"Yes?" I squeaked. Maybe if I was lucky I'd just have a fatal aneurysm right at this very moment.
"Well, it's about time I found you," he growled. I backed into the wall and immediately broke out into a fit of sobbing and wailing like the wuss that I am. It wasn't even a little bit dignified. Snot ran down my face. He took a step back.
"Good grief, man," Dink said to me, "Get ahold of yourself. This is just embarrassing."
I closed my eyes, breathed heavily, and with all I was worth, summoned back most of my composure. "You're right," I said, "I'm sorry."
"Good," he said, and kicked me very hard in the kneecap. I went down like a sack of potatoes with the bottom cut out.
As I lay on the floor moaning (I was pretty sure something was broken), I saw him look at what I'd written. "Trying to weasel your way out of it, huh? I thought so. That's why I came here." He picked me up and put me in front of my computer. "Do you have any idea how much it sucked being put into your crappy mods, or how bad you made me look? Play them, and don't you dare hold back. It's the least you can do."
--My own crappy DMODs--
[NOTE TO FUTURE READERS: This was written before I made "Malachi the Jerk." Statements about "all my DMODs" are not meant to apply to that one.]
The above didn't happen, obviously, but it might as well have, because doing this is like pulling teeth. Let's get it out of the way: All of the DMODs I ever made sucked. "Terrible" is frankly too good of a word for the ones I made in 1998; only the later ones rise to the level of "terrible," because you really aren't doing something like Dink Forever any justice unless you break out the hyperbole. "Abysmal" and "worst DMODs of all time" are a good start.
By the way, i'm going to cover all of my stuff at once. I'm not ordinarily going to jump around chronologically like this, but I need to get this out of the way like ripping off a bandage and express my regrets so I can move on and talk about real DMODs.
If you want to play any of my DMODs, here is some advice: Don't. If you still want to, then play Zink, be stunned by how bad it is, and don't be thrown off if you enjoy parts of it a little. Remember: it's only downhill from there. Don't say I didn't warn you.
014: Dink Smallwood Forever Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: August 6, 1998
The good news is that these DMODs simply don't work. Anytime you hit anything, they crash.
The bad news is that I figured out how to fix them. Want to hear something funny? It isn't my fault, it's Mike Snyder's! I used his DMOD skeleton to make my first four (if you twist my arm, five, but I'll get to that) DMODs. It was not Skeleton B, which came out about a month afterward. Skeleton B fixed a problem with the skeleton's main.c - it was missing the global variable &missle_source (misspelled just like that). For some reason, this didn't cause a crash on hit back then, but it does in 1.07, 1.08, FreeDink, and Dink Smallwood HD. Some other DMODs from back then have been patched to fix this already, and I think even these would have been if they weren't "lost" DMODs. All you have to do to fix this problem is add that variable or simply copy the main.c from Skeleton B and paste it into the story folder. Don't do this!
I am completely serious and not even a little bit joking, people: you won't get ironic enjoyment out of these. I'll break format and tell you that I just played the first four DMODs here in a row, and it was such an unpleasant experience that it caused me physical pain, emotional distress, and other things you could sue somebody for. If Dink really were getting his revenge by making me play these, he'd have enjoyed a hearty laugh as I stumbled madly through my own creations, crying out "Why?" and sweating profusely.
All right, let's get down to business: Dink Smallwood forever is an atrocity. Being 12 was no excuse for this. Some people were nice to me back then, and after playing these, I really don't know how they managed it. I, for my part, acted like a whiny, entitled brat who screamed about the slightest criticism.
Ugh, I keep getting sidetracked. You've got to understand, it's so hard for me to talk about these. Fine: Dink Smallwood Forever starts like this, which is actually quite appropriate. You'll notice there are no walls on this screen, but the only way you can go is down. You can enter a house, which contains Dink's "wife" Dot and his pet pig Oinky, the latter of whom is the one with plot significance here (at least as much as there is a plot, which isn't much at all). You can get a bunch of powerups you don't need, including hearts that leave hardness behind. There are some enemies you don't have to fight. Eventually you may find Oinky again. He talks to you, telling you utter nonsense that I suppose I thought passed as a plot, and then is killed by someone unseen. This is our plot hook, everybody! Alternatively, you can walk all the way past all of this and straight to the end, since there's nothing to stop you. Even better, a little ways after the start there's a screen that's supposed to be inaccessible but isn't (I didn't place obstacles correctly) that warps you right to the finish! I recommend this route.
Amazingly, this is the second version of Dink Forever. I'm sure the first one was somehow worse. The only thing I specifically remember is that in this version, the savebots work. In the original, talking to them just had Dink say "that is a nice save," and the savebot would say "thankyou, human." Sic.
Oh, and here's something I forgot: I used to confuse left with right and east with west. Therefore, directions of that kind in this DMOD and others after it all the way up through End of the World have those kind of directions reversed whenever they're referred to; this was also true of walkthroughs I made of my own mods, some of which are still on Dink Solutions. You might think I was an exceptionally stupid child, but I got good grades. Don't ask me.
If you think my writing chops and sense of humor might have saved this from being a totally dismal time, let me assure you that neither of these traits existed back then. Here is an example of my idea of humor at the time. Kill me.
There are only a handful of screens, hardness errors are everywhere, tiling is ugly as sin, the map makes no sense, I used "say" instead of "say_stop" just about everywhere, so you'll have to just stand and wait if you want to see the conversations, some scripts are attached to the wrong things, there's no music except for the scene in which Oinky is killed, and everything is generally irrepressibly bad and a rotten waste of your time. Here are some better ways to use your time than playing Dink Forever:
*Play Solitaire with a deck that's missing random cards.
*Draw a picture with the wrong end of a pencil.
*Get a real pet pig and name it Oinky.
*Get drunk.
*Masturbate.
*Play any DMOD with a rating of over 1.0 on Dink Network.
*Sing off-key.
*Have a philosophical debate with your cat.
*Sit completely motionless just to see how long you can.
*Read the worst book I've ever seen in my life, "Fifty Shades of Gray."
*Think about how glad you are you're not playing Dink Forever.
And so on. I guess my favorite part was how Dink says "Let's wrestle!" if you punch Oinky, sort of like my favorite part of getting beaten up is the feeling of relief when they stop. You get no such relief, however, because I kept going.
By the way, it ends like this, which, again, feels strangely appropriate. You have to quit manually, though; this is, I'd say, the only way to win. You can win faster by not playing.
015: Dink Smallwood Unlimited Author: Tim Maurer Release Date:
August 15, 1998
Part two of the riveting Dink Smallwood Forever trilogy! I assure you I did not spend the majority of the intervening days working on this. In fact, odds are I knocked it out in a single afternoon.
You know what another good fantasy is? Imagining going back and time, slapping my younger self, and physically preventing him from uploading these DMODs. This gave me a pleasant fuzzy sensation that got me through the hard times.
This one definitely isn't better than the original. It starts out on a screen that is supposed to be an intro, but really isn't because I couldn't figure out how to script anything. The dragons "threatening" you are basically statues, you can walk offscreen any time you like, and the text makes no sense anyway. I wrote this stuff and I can't even figure out what I was trying to get at.
After leaving the first screen, you find yourself in "heaven" (That is, the Windows 95 clouds background). There you can go around and talk to various dead characters, including Oinky, who doesn't talk anymore. Again, my favorite part is that punching him makes Dink say "(Sob) We used to wrestle..." This should give you an idea of how enjoyable an experience the mod is in general.
Soon you'll blunder into "heck" (this isn't the ludicrous swear filter at work, it really is called "heck"), which looks like this, but bear in mind that that flame background does not animate. Also, Jack there is the only one of the three figures with a script attached. You'll go past a number of giant monsters who can't move out of their own map-placed hardness; this is, one assumes, their eternal punishment. You can show mercy on them and kill them, or cruelly ignore them and walk past. You'll inexplicably "return to life," and the DMOD ends. Next.
016: Infinite Dink Smallwood Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: August 19, 1998
I can't imagine what I hoped to gain by continuing to submit these to the Smallweb. I guess I probably hoped that people would admire and praise me. I really must not have understood how those things worked.
Here's the only part of the Dink Smallwood Forever trilogy where you have to do anything. I don't think this stops it from being by far the worst of the three, though. The map is the worst yet - you can only go straight up, and it's the tiniest map so far. You fight some more giant enemies; they still can't move, but some of them *can* attack you, and this makes advancing pretty much impossible because they're too strong. If you do manage to get past them, however, you reach a screen with a savebot and some numbers and can't go any further.
There was supposed to be a "boss" at the top. He's Oinky's killer, a farmer. He makes some evil quips at you ("I'LL HAVE DINK STEAKS COME MORNIN, YUM") and nothing happens because Dink says a few things that I guess he thinks are magic spells (Dink's clearly mentally unstable) and the farmer "dies," or at least says that he does, which was good enough for me at the time. I remember seeing this actually work at least once, but it doesn't here. It doesn't really make any difference. Next.
All Out Brawl
I made this between the Dink Forever series and the following DMOD. I didn't play it now because it really isn't a DMOD. A DMOD has to have scripts, right? Well, this one just has a handful of terribly designed screens with enemies that you don't have to fight wandering (correctly, wonder of wonders) around. At the end, there's a thing to examine that says "The end" or something like that. That's all there is.
Even at the time, I wasn't deluded enough to think that this was acceptable. I even included a text file saying, I think, that this wasn't supposed to be good. Why did I release it, then? Frankly, I can't even begin to guess at my motives. If you want to call this a DMOD, then it's the worst one ever. Actually, there was a DMOD on the old Dink Network briefly that just booted up, said, "Bye," and exited, but you might even find that better than this by virtue of being slightly amusing.
017: 2001: A Dink Oddyssey Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: August 23, 1998
While I was playing this one, I took a break to watch some ants crawl up my wall. This was an altogether more entertaining experience.
This DMOD comes with a text file that calls it "my best work." I literally wanted to cry when I read this. It also contains this song parody of the theme from "The Beverly Hillbillies," a show that I'm pretty sure I never watched:
well, once upon a time there was a man named dink,
always feedin' pigs, then he starts to think,
"yep, an adventurer, that's what i want to be",
so he packed up all his bags
and he moved to terris. see?
next thing you know there's this real evil guy,
name's bishop nelson had a face that made you cry
dink kicked his butt..........crap.
uh
uh
uh
uh
uh
nevermind.
questions? comments? keep them to yourself.
That song parody doesn't scan, isn't funny, and is the best thing included with this DMOD. What's sad is that you probably think I'm kidding.
So, if you haven't left your house to find and murder me yet, let's talk about the title. I have, to this day, never read 2001: A Space Odyssey or seen the movie based on it. I just liked the title, though apparently not enough to spell it correctly. I think I got the spelling from Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, which is spelled like I just spelled it there - still not the way I spelled the title of this DMOD.
I'm suffering so that you don't have to, folks. Heed my warning.
There's more text in this one, but it just results in an even worse and less compelling story than "Dink has a pet pig, it dies, and he looks for his killer." If you sit around and wait for the say statements, as all the statements I made about Dink Forever's problems are still true here, you'll find that it's about how the human race nearly died out in a nuclear war. Aliens put the brains of the survivors into "eyebots," which are represented by a single, terrible MSPaint bitmap I made. It gets even dumber from there, but I zoned out. Can you believe this drivel? Even back then, I'm certain I was capable of writing better than this.
Monsters you don't have to fight, boss you don't have to fight, ending. At least this one actually exits the program. I still say that, like nuclear war, the only way to win is not to play.
018: The End of the World Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: March 29, 1999
After releasing "2001," the sense finally penetrated my brain that I was not doing a good thing by releasing these terrible DMODs. I finally came to the realization that I was earning the scorn heaped upon me by making things that sucked. Therefore, I stopped making DMODs for a while and, when I started again, put some actual effort into the next one. I intended it to be my redemption for what had come before. If you've ever played "End of the World," that ought to give you pause, because this is a very bad DMOD. Excepting the four above and maybe Dinkopolis, this is the worst of the 18 DMODs I've looked at so far.
My 1998 "efforts" may be explained (though not excused) by the fact that I really wasn't trying very hard, but that doesn't apply here. I really cared about getting this right so that my reputation would improve. This is where my actual lack of skill became so apparent. Here are the facts:
1) I'd never coded anything in my life. Want to have a good laugh? At the time I went around telling people at school that I "programmed video games" in reference to these DMODs. In fact I had no idea what I was doing in regards to scripting or the editor, and it showed. I've noticed that for the most part, the DMODs that are very good are by real programmers (Snyder, Walma, Hertel, etc.). I was not a programmer by any stretch of the term.
2) I had no design sense. I still don't. I've been diagnosed with severe visual learning disabilities. I can't remember faces even when I see them often, I can't memorize my way around the town I've lived in all my life, I can't draw so much as a stick figure, and I can't design levels. Even though I have played so many great video games in my life and know exactly how great level/map design works, I can't design things that make any visual sense at all. This has stymied me every time I've tried to make games (Klik 'n' Play, LittleBigPlanet, you name it).
3) I had no patience and no critical eye. I was always in a rush to see things done and released. I allowed bugs to exist, failed to think things through, and decided I was done far too soon.
Of those three factors, I'm afraid that the third is the only one that has improved in the past fifteen years, and while I could probably improve at programming if I gave it an awful lot of time and effort, I don't think there's anything at all I can do about point 2. If I may be completely sincere for a moment, I want everybody to know how much this frustrates me. I wanted so badly to release something good. Even now, I'd love to close the door on my regrets by making a really spiffy DMOD that makes everybody say "hey, that Tim guy actually released a good DMOD in the end, even if it did take him fifteen years," but I can't. I just can't. It kills me inside. I don't expect you to feel sorry for me, mind you; I'm just trying to make you understand where I'm coming from.
End of the World is much, much better than my prior DMODs, but it still doesn't reach the point where all the pejoratives you can direct at it aren't pretty much fair. It's terrible, boring, and not worth your time. What's worse, by the time I came out with it the standards had gotten higher. Maybe if I'd released this instead of Dink Forever, it wouldn't have looked so bad, but by this point Prophecy of the Ancients existed.
Speaking of that, Gary Hertel ran one of the prominent Dink sites at the time. On his news page, he said regarding my announcement of EotW that it was "supposed to be better than his other mods, but I wouldn't hold my breath." This was certainly fair to say, but at the time I got mad and sent an angry email to him. He responded and told me that he had changed the post just to be nice, but warned me that I had a lot to learn about life and that I couldn't expect people to bend over backwards for me all the time. Uncharacteristically - and let's give the kid a big hand, folks, he was finally starting to figure out just how much of his crappy life had been his own fault - I realized immediately that he was right and felt sorry for what I'd said. Remember that the next time you think you won't bother trying to tell some kid what they're doing wrong because they won't listen.
When I was almost done with EotW, I sent an early version to Gary first, telling him I was sorry and that I really wanted his opinion. He exploded at me, saying that he couldn't believe I would even consider releasing something so buggy and poorly designed. I apologized further and asked for more advice, but he just said that he was sorry for getting mad, no doubt realizing that there was no hope of getting through to me in a way that would make me actually get good at this. I think that probably the nicest thing he could have done would be to tell me not to release it, emphasizing that it wouldn't help my reputation in the long run and that I just wasn't good at this and ought to move on. I probably wouldn't have taken that advice at the time, though.
Now that I'm mired in my past and feel like crap (if I ought to suffer for what I made, it's happening right now), I guess I should actually discuss End of the World. Unlike the DMODs above, this one actually functions. It has a story-variable based push rock that works, a bomb rock that works, and a series of battles that are challenging but not unreasonably so and that you actually must win to advance, and this can actually be kind of fun thanks mostly to a good combat system made by RTSoft. It has a "jukebox" item that lets you pick which MIDI you want to listen to, which is a neat idea that I hadn't seen at the time and actually came up with. It has a story that, while it still doesn't make sense (The world will end thanks to giant tree roots. This turns out to be a dream that Dink's been trapped in by an evil wizard, kind of like Dinkopolis), is at least coherent, which is a big improvement. I put borders on the screens so that you don't walk right into the edge of them, even if the borders look terrible. The concept of a village populated by signs, though terribly executed here, is slightly amusing given Dink's propensity for hitting them. And would you look at that, I am out of positive things to say. I probably went farther than I should have, to be honest.
Let's beat the crap out of this thing. It has stunningly bad map design that is ugly, makes no sense, and is riddled with hardness errors. An item that you're told not to use is supposed to turn Dink into a duck, and the line I wrote ("I guess curiosity killed the QUACK. Quack? Quack!") might have been worth a smile if he actually had, but he turns into an arrow instead. Instead of shrinking Dink when the plot calls for it, there's a fourth-wall breaking note telling you I couldn't get that to work*. The pillbugs early on are impossible to fight unless you talk to the giant woman. I still hadn't learned to make NPCs move around. Milder says he'll only raise your stats once, but does it as many times as you like. The original graphics suck. The bombs you buy after the first one don't work. The final area has literally everything cause you touch damage, which was intentional but makes no sense. Finally, I made myself the final boss in a derivative and lame way and gave myself way too many (1000!) hit points. Another effort squandered.
*I'm not sure if the engine allows you to do this, but even if it doesn't, I could have replaced Dink with another Dink sprite and shrank that and it would have looked fine.
On July 14, 1999, I announced that I was leaving the Dink community. If I were smart, I'd have stuck to this, but I came back on June 7, 2000 and announced "The Tragic Death of Link Smallwood," which became Zink Smallwood because of a conflict with something made by Jveenhof.
019: The Tragic Death of Zink Smallwood Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: June 15, 2000
I enjoyed myself a little bit while playing this one. It's a still an execrable DMOD with countless problems; the difference is that when I tried to be funny here, I actually kind of was. While I wouldn't recommend that you play this one either, doing so might not be a TOTAL waste of your time.
If you've played this, you've probably wondered why the hell you start with 100 in every stat. Sadly, this was unintentional. When I updated this mod to fix spelling and 1.08 compatibility on May 13, 2006, at which point I was 20 and should have known better, I left a few lines in start.c that I used for testing. If you want a better experience, you should remove them (leaving yourself some magic points because you need to use Hellfire), but it's almost just as well since the actual gameplay here is dull as dishwater and not even as fun as parts of End of the World.
The story picks up at the end of the last mod and involves a twin brother of Dink's who dies in a cutscene with actual moving parts that actually worked properly, a big step for me. I always had to hide Dink behind something, though, which is bizarre, as I found dink_can_walk_off_screen in just a few minutes of browsing the DinkC reference before I started this project. Anyway, it turns out to be a plot by an evil wizard. Sic 'im, but you'll have to solve a few more people's problems first.
Well, I guess it's time for some more faint praise. This was in many ways my best DMOD. The map design is as good as it ever got from me, as the maps make basic visual sense and look kind of like a Dink sort of world. They have some hardness errors, but not constantly all over the place like even End of the World. It is a fairly witty mod, poking fun at RPG conventions (Dink complains about how everyone wants him to do something before they'll help him - "WHAT DO I LOOK LIKE, AN ERRAND BOY?" before quickly agreeing to do his assigned task anyway) and my own tired plot contrivances (if you punch a good wizard, Dink explains, "I'm having so much trouble with wizards lately, I figure, why not just kill 'em all?"), among other things. It's a fairly innocuous little romp that is unlikely to make you hate me for making it.
And now, to bring the hammer down. The whole map is laid out on a horizontal line and is almost never taller than three screens - even for me, this is embarrassing map design and it feels terrible. The one new graphic is more MSPaint crap from me. The plot is utter nonsense. The quests are extremely simplistic and uninteresting. I STILL hadn't figured out that NPCs should move around a bit. The latest version comes with a save file, something I never did pay any attention to. Do I need to go on? My limitations, including number three from the End of the World discussion, were still in place, and as a comeback it was wholly inadequate, which I realized even at the time.
To that end, I announced on June 20th that I would be making a DMOD called Crossroads and made a website promoting it with several pages talking about its planned features. This was my first really ambitious project. I planned minigames, areas, quests, you name it. I received a lot of positive feedback and people actually got kind of excited.
020: Crossroads (Unfinished) Author: Tim Maurer Release Date: July 13, 2000
On the date above, I released an interactive trailer for Crossroads. I would like to repeat that: I called it a trailer, not a demo. It consisted entirely of a long intro cutscene (like 8 minutes!) with a little insult-swordfighting minigame in it based on Monkey Island. As a trailer, it was the only thing I released to ever be totally adequate. It won Download of the Month against actual competition. It was definitely the high point of my Dink hobby. Almost immediately afterward, I ran into my old limitations, crumbled in the face of the first real expectations I'd ever earned, and gave up.
On June 28, 2001, almost a year after releasing the trailer, I sent what little I had of Crossroads to redink1. I titled it "Crossroads Mess," explaining that I had given up and that this was a jumbled mess that should in no way be considered a complete DMOD. This was, I now realize, a big mistake. The "Mess" version contains VERY litle new content over the trailer. It's still essentially an intro movie and not much else, and what is there even I considered to be unfinished; I had planned to clean it up before I gave up on the project. At least the trailer ended in a pretty cool and promising little commercial for the full DMOD I had planned, whereas the version now on TDN just sort of stops happening in a buggy unfinished area. Furthermore, it lacks my explanation that it's just an "I give up" sort of mess, so people expect it to be a real DMOD. I feel regret about this. People should be saying "it's a shame this was never finished" instead of "this DMOD sucks." Oh well.
The intro movie is kind of entertaining the first time you watch it, telling a rambling crazy story about Dink defeating the "Idol of No Hands" (PC Gamer's Coconut Monkey, also a way of me indirectly acknowledging that I'd tormented the character with bad DMODs) with the help of Oinky II, who first appeared in Zink, and then deciding to go on vacation. It also has some decent-looking "Dink riding a bonca" graphics that I made in a very simple way (I had planned to use them for a bonca-riding minigame).
Unfortnately, even before you get to the buggy ending, there are problems with the intro movie. The insult swordfighting doesn't quite work correctly - I thought I remembered it doing so in the trailer version. Also, I have a really awful-looking pig carrying a sword walk animation that jitters and slides. At any rate, it was unneccesary; I could have had a script call the ordinary pig sprite and a still sword sprite and had them move together and it would have looked fine. Ah, my regrets...
So there you have it. After being a snot-nosed punk who made crap almost on purpose, I tried three well-meaning times but never came close to making a good DMOD. I still have ideas, though. I had one just now - I really mean it, JUST now. It's called Channel Surfing.
In channel surfing, an unseen figure keeps "changing channels." As Dink goes through the same basic quest, the style of DMOD keeps changing between serious, wacky, the original game, horror, Dink Forever, Alternate Hero, and so on. The plot eventually catches up to this fact with Dink seeking out a way to talk directly to the channel-changer to stop this from happening, kind of like Will Farrel's character in Stranger Than Fiction. I'm sure this idea requires lots of fancy scripting and precise editor work that I couldn't ever pull off, as well as good graphical work in order to really be satisfying. If anybody wants it, though, they can have it if they give me credit.
At any rate, if I have ever offended, I am sorry, and I hope these articles make up for it. Cheers.
Edit: Whups, forgot to add some notes about my later interactions with the Dink community.
On January 1st, 2001, I asked for my 1998 DMODs to be removed, making them "lost" DMODs. It actually succeeded in keeping most of the community from ever finding them, oddly enough.
On April 1st, 2004, redink1 re-uploaded a crazy old scan I made of my mad ravings on some legal pad as an April Fool's joke. It's still up on this site.
In mid-2006 I stopped by on a nostalgia trip. I reviewed a couple of DMODs and had a fairly clever idea for one of my own. I even wrote a little script, but when I got into the editor I realized I couldn't make a good map even knowing how my maps had been bad, and decided to let sleeping dogs lie.
