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353: Shadows of Death (Unfinished) Author: DinkKiller Release Date: January 12, 2015
"I thought you were a noble hero. A real man."
"Depends on what day of the week it is. Today is not your lucky day."
Back at the start of this topic, I said, "There is still time for you to get your new D-Mod written up if you hurry." I thought I was joking, really, but DinkKiller took me up on it by releasing this unfinished version of his long-incubating sequel to his 2009 D-Mod "Dink and the Bonca."
When you play an unfinished D-Mod, the best-case scenario is that it's like a normal D-Mod (though maybe a bit less polished) until it comes to a stop after a certain major plot event and is nice enough to tell you that you've reached the end. In other words, the best-case scenario for an unfinished D-Mod is a demo, but without pretending it's ever going to be finished. Unfortunately, even the "finished" portion of "Shadows of Death" is pretty unfinished. NPCs are left unscripted. Houses are un-enterable. Treasure chests are empty. The worst part was that there are some buildings you can enter, but they're set to warp you to a nonexistent screen. The copy of screen 2 they send you to can't be escaped; all you can do is load a save. Really, all he had to do was turn off the warps on the map and the biggest problem would have been fixed... well, the biggest problem apart from the ending not working, but I'll get to that.
Odd things can happen if you don't do things in the order the D-Mod expects you to.
At the start of "Shadows of Death," Dink finally learns who's been trying to kill him. It's that jerk Luke, who appears in "Dink and the Bonca" but not in this game. Martridge teleports Dink to yet another beach, which of course causes him to lose his stats and stuff again. You know, I'm not sure if the rapid movement is worth the trouble. Anyway, in the Kingdom of Astaelith, Dink has some typical D-Mod times. He has to help some people by going into a cave full of monsters so that they'll fix a bridge for him.
Seems like a reasonable job to me. What kind of a job is "adventurer," huh?
If you saw the development threads, you may know that this D-Mod was supposed to involve some kind of moral choice system. When the second town you come to is attacked by knights working for Luke and his allies, you get to decide whether or not to help them. If you choose not to, you get to skip the battle and watch a cutscene of the town being destroyed. On the other hand, you'll also miss out on a reward of some cash and a longsword and lose access to a healing fountain and a weapon shop, so you'll probably want to help them out.
I dunno. It was my day off?
The last fully playable section features a clever puzzle. It's a cave with several levels, and you have to push rocks into holes on the upper levels so that they'll drop into the lake on the base level and form a bridge. It's kind of like the Seafoam Islands in the original Pokémon. It's not as simple as just pushing the rocks into the holes, however. You have to solve some simple puzzles to reach them, including pushing some other rocks around and solving a very easy math-based riddle. Then you have to push the rocks around carefully to get them into the right position. The rocks move a set amount when you push them, and they'll stop if you push them into a hard object. It works well, and I know it's not easy to do this sort of thing in Dink, so I was impressed with that part of the game.
Dink sets up the puzzle.
Unfortunately, there's a bug that prevents you from progressing just before you get to the message saying you've reached the end of the "finished" part of the game. When you try to leave the cave, the game fades down and nothing else happens. This is because a touch procedure is being constantly triggered. I went into the script and added the line "sp_touch_damage(¤t_sprite, 0)," and that fixed it, triggering a cutscene and then the end message. It took me 49 minutes to reach it, which is still quite a bit longer than the finished "Dink and the Bonca."
After the message, you can wander around an unfinished desert. It's part of a much larger, even more unfinished section that is mostly inaccessible and includes a snowy area. There's one scripted NPC to find in the desert, but he sets up a quest to which there is no resolution (the ending text warns you about this).
It's just as well, really. I dunno about this guy.
I'd also like to take a moment to acknowledge a good use of one of my favorite 1.08 features, the dnotalk and dnomagic scripts. There are whole new sets of default text here, and they're pretty amusing, especially the "no magic" text.
Heh.
I understand running out of motivation and wanting to release what you've done, but I do think it's a bit of a shame that "Shadows of Death" was released in this state. It could have used a little cleaning up to make the "finished" portion playable without incident. It wouldn't have taken that much work - I'm not asking for a high level of polish, just some smoothing down of the roughest edges.
354: Pokemon: Bible Version (Stupid) Author: Skorn Release Date: January 24, 2015
"Hyper Beam."
Previously on Crazy Old Tim Plays All the D-Mods: The Next Generation...
Locutus: From this time forward, you will service... us.
Tim: 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.
Riker: Mr. Worf... Fire.
And now, the conclusion.
Sorry about that. I couldn't resist. In fact, you might say that my resistance... was futile. OHHHH
Skorn says that he hadn't even seen the above statement when he released this. You know, I can actually believe that. I have access to the records of rejected submissions on the site, and like a third of them are Skorn's. He does this kind of crap all the time.
I like Pokémon. I'm far from its biggest fan, but I have spent a lot of time playing it. It's a really good series of games. Back in 1998 when it came out, I was obsessed with it. Even before I got Pokémon Blue Version and a Game Boy Color for Christmas that year, I played the game using an emulator. Actually, that was when I first learned about emulators. "You mean I can play all these games for free on my computer? What's the catch? 'Delete after 24 hours?' Uhhh... sure."
This, on the other hand, is not a good game. In fact, it isn't a game of any sort.
Derp.
It's really just the picture above with a Pokémon MIDI. The Gyarados is you. You turn into a different Gyarados, another copy of the Pope, or Dink Smallwood depending upon which direction you move. Do not download this. Do not install this. Do not play this.
355: Dink and the Chins (Stupid) Author: Skorn Release Date: January 26, 2015
"Wow ...unreal. My gosh!"
Well, this at least could be considered a game.
A bad one.
Dink finds himself amongst a world made of chins. You can collect lint instead of gold. If you collect 720 lint and bring it to a little girl, she'll make you incredibly powerful. I couldn't find that much lint, but fortunately a save with what you need is included. You can then defeat the boss.
Your chins have no power here!
Nothing happens when you defeat the boss. It just goes back to the title screen.
Or... maybe something did happen. Maybe something happened when I wasn't around to see it. Maybe the power of the chins was too much for Dink after all.
Dink Smallwood died. As had happened so many times before, he fell to his knees and planted his face into a rapidly-expanding pool of his own blood. But this time was different. When the player pressed the start button, Dink was still dead, for true death is a thing that cannot be undone. The player was confused. He checked the scripts - Skorn must have done this using save_exist. "That's actually pretty clever," he thought. "Maybe I won't give this the Award of Badness after all." But there was nothing to cause this in the scripts. He deleted all of the save files and tried again. Dink was still dead.
He tried to launch another D-Mod. Dink was dead there, too. The snarky hero, the former pig farmer, he was no more. The other characters in the intro to "Dink's Doppleganger" acted as if he were still there, but when the game started, he could do nothing. It was the same with every D-Mod he tried, except those that didn't star Dink at all - those still worked. But Dink himself was dead and gone. They had asked so much of him, pushed him into so many strange and awful situations. The chins were the last straw. The concept of Dink Smallwood had died.
Soon, everyone else noticed it too. It didn't seem the Dink Network would long survive - what was the point? And yet it did continue. In fact, it became more popular than ever as the bizarre story of the old PC game that suddenly stopped working for everybody spread like wildfire across the Internet. At first the story was spread by those who vaguely remembered playing the original game once, and then it hit the mainstream as people looked for an explanation and couldn't find one. This project was read thousands of times more than it had been previously as the only remaining documentation in many cases of what these games had been like. Eventually, someone found a workaround. They made a character that was like Dink, but not quite the same, and replaced him in all of the old D-Mods. But still... something had been lost.
Or... maybe that's not how it went. No, Dink can't die. We need him.
Dink lived on. "Dink and the Chins" was not the last D-Mod, or the second-to-last D-Mod, or the hundredth-to-last. Dink outlived the Dink Network; improbably, another community eventually replaced it. Who can say where the new interest came from? Dink persisted on and on, getting into new adventures and endless permutations of his old ones. He slayed boncas, he had bridges repaired, he assisted some wizards and fought others. And his adventures expanded in new directions. Eventually, someone made a true sequel with almost entirely new content, and that was itself the basis for countless new D-Mods. Dink outlived Seth Robinson. He outlived you; he outlived me. Descendants of FreeDink ran the game on computers and operating systems as yet unknown. The game was played in forms that would be unrecognizable to us. Dink would always be there for whoever needed him.
~FIN~
...And that's all the D-Mods! Thanks for reading, everybody. Wrap-up post to come soon.
"I thought you were a noble hero. A real man."
"Depends on what day of the week it is. Today is not your lucky day."
Back at the start of this topic, I said, "There is still time for you to get your new D-Mod written up if you hurry." I thought I was joking, really, but DinkKiller took me up on it by releasing this unfinished version of his long-incubating sequel to his 2009 D-Mod "Dink and the Bonca."
When you play an unfinished D-Mod, the best-case scenario is that it's like a normal D-Mod (though maybe a bit less polished) until it comes to a stop after a certain major plot event and is nice enough to tell you that you've reached the end. In other words, the best-case scenario for an unfinished D-Mod is a demo, but without pretending it's ever going to be finished. Unfortunately, even the "finished" portion of "Shadows of Death" is pretty unfinished. NPCs are left unscripted. Houses are un-enterable. Treasure chests are empty. The worst part was that there are some buildings you can enter, but they're set to warp you to a nonexistent screen. The copy of screen 2 they send you to can't be escaped; all you can do is load a save. Really, all he had to do was turn off the warps on the map and the biggest problem would have been fixed... well, the biggest problem apart from the ending not working, but I'll get to that.
Odd things can happen if you don't do things in the order the D-Mod expects you to.
At the start of "Shadows of Death," Dink finally learns who's been trying to kill him. It's that jerk Luke, who appears in "Dink and the Bonca" but not in this game. Martridge teleports Dink to yet another beach, which of course causes him to lose his stats and stuff again. You know, I'm not sure if the rapid movement is worth the trouble. Anyway, in the Kingdom of Astaelith, Dink has some typical D-Mod times. He has to help some people by going into a cave full of monsters so that they'll fix a bridge for him.
Seems like a reasonable job to me. What kind of a job is "adventurer," huh?
If you saw the development threads, you may know that this D-Mod was supposed to involve some kind of moral choice system. When the second town you come to is attacked by knights working for Luke and his allies, you get to decide whether or not to help them. If you choose not to, you get to skip the battle and watch a cutscene of the town being destroyed. On the other hand, you'll also miss out on a reward of some cash and a longsword and lose access to a healing fountain and a weapon shop, so you'll probably want to help them out.
I dunno. It was my day off?
The last fully playable section features a clever puzzle. It's a cave with several levels, and you have to push rocks into holes on the upper levels so that they'll drop into the lake on the base level and form a bridge. It's kind of like the Seafoam Islands in the original Pokémon. It's not as simple as just pushing the rocks into the holes, however. You have to solve some simple puzzles to reach them, including pushing some other rocks around and solving a very easy math-based riddle. Then you have to push the rocks around carefully to get them into the right position. The rocks move a set amount when you push them, and they'll stop if you push them into a hard object. It works well, and I know it's not easy to do this sort of thing in Dink, so I was impressed with that part of the game.
Dink sets up the puzzle.
Unfortunately, there's a bug that prevents you from progressing just before you get to the message saying you've reached the end of the "finished" part of the game. When you try to leave the cave, the game fades down and nothing else happens. This is because a touch procedure is being constantly triggered. I went into the script and added the line "sp_touch_damage(¤t_sprite, 0)," and that fixed it, triggering a cutscene and then the end message. It took me 49 minutes to reach it, which is still quite a bit longer than the finished "Dink and the Bonca."
After the message, you can wander around an unfinished desert. It's part of a much larger, even more unfinished section that is mostly inaccessible and includes a snowy area. There's one scripted NPC to find in the desert, but he sets up a quest to which there is no resolution (the ending text warns you about this).
It's just as well, really. I dunno about this guy.
I'd also like to take a moment to acknowledge a good use of one of my favorite 1.08 features, the dnotalk and dnomagic scripts. There are whole new sets of default text here, and they're pretty amusing, especially the "no magic" text.
Heh.
I understand running out of motivation and wanting to release what you've done, but I do think it's a bit of a shame that "Shadows of Death" was released in this state. It could have used a little cleaning up to make the "finished" portion playable without incident. It wouldn't have taken that much work - I'm not asking for a high level of polish, just some smoothing down of the roughest edges.
354: Pokemon: Bible Version (Stupid) Author: Skorn Release Date: January 24, 2015
"Hyper Beam."
Previously on Crazy Old Tim Plays All the D-Mods: The Next Generation...
Locutus: From this time forward, you will service... us.
Tim: 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.
Riker: Mr. Worf... Fire.
And now, the conclusion.
******This DMOD, "Pokemon: Bible Version,"********* ********Has been awarded the prestigious********* ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS***** ********On this day February 1, 2015*********
Sorry about that. I couldn't resist. In fact, you might say that my resistance... was futile. OHHHH
Skorn says that he hadn't even seen the above statement when he released this. You know, I can actually believe that. I have access to the records of rejected submissions on the site, and like a third of them are Skorn's. He does this kind of crap all the time.
I like Pokémon. I'm far from its biggest fan, but I have spent a lot of time playing it. It's a really good series of games. Back in 1998 when it came out, I was obsessed with it. Even before I got Pokémon Blue Version and a Game Boy Color for Christmas that year, I played the game using an emulator. Actually, that was when I first learned about emulators. "You mean I can play all these games for free on my computer? What's the catch? 'Delete after 24 hours?' Uhhh... sure."
This, on the other hand, is not a good game. In fact, it isn't a game of any sort.
Derp.
It's really just the picture above with a Pokémon MIDI. The Gyarados is you. You turn into a different Gyarados, another copy of the Pope, or Dink Smallwood depending upon which direction you move. Do not download this. Do not install this. Do not play this.
355: Dink and the Chins (Stupid) Author: Skorn Release Date: January 26, 2015
"Wow ...unreal. My gosh!"
Well, this at least could be considered a game.
A bad one.
********This DMOD, "Dink and the Chins,"********* ******Has been awarded the prestigious********* ****DINK FOREVER MEMORIAL AWARD OF BADNESS*** ********On this day February 1, 2015*******
Dink finds himself amongst a world made of chins. You can collect lint instead of gold. If you collect 720 lint and bring it to a little girl, she'll make you incredibly powerful. I couldn't find that much lint, but fortunately a save with what you need is included. You can then defeat the boss.
Your chins have no power here!
Nothing happens when you defeat the boss. It just goes back to the title screen.
Or... maybe something did happen. Maybe something happened when I wasn't around to see it. Maybe the power of the chins was too much for Dink after all.
Dink Smallwood died. As had happened so many times before, he fell to his knees and planted his face into a rapidly-expanding pool of his own blood. But this time was different. When the player pressed the start button, Dink was still dead, for true death is a thing that cannot be undone. The player was confused. He checked the scripts - Skorn must have done this using save_exist. "That's actually pretty clever," he thought. "Maybe I won't give this the Award of Badness after all." But there was nothing to cause this in the scripts. He deleted all of the save files and tried again. Dink was still dead.
He tried to launch another D-Mod. Dink was dead there, too. The snarky hero, the former pig farmer, he was no more. The other characters in the intro to "Dink's Doppleganger" acted as if he were still there, but when the game started, he could do nothing. It was the same with every D-Mod he tried, except those that didn't star Dink at all - those still worked. But Dink himself was dead and gone. They had asked so much of him, pushed him into so many strange and awful situations. The chins were the last straw. The concept of Dink Smallwood had died.
Soon, everyone else noticed it too. It didn't seem the Dink Network would long survive - what was the point? And yet it did continue. In fact, it became more popular than ever as the bizarre story of the old PC game that suddenly stopped working for everybody spread like wildfire across the Internet. At first the story was spread by those who vaguely remembered playing the original game once, and then it hit the mainstream as people looked for an explanation and couldn't find one. This project was read thousands of times more than it had been previously as the only remaining documentation in many cases of what these games had been like. Eventually, someone found a workaround. They made a character that was like Dink, but not quite the same, and replaced him in all of the old D-Mods. But still... something had been lost.
Or... maybe that's not how it went. No, Dink can't die. We need him.
Dink lived on. "Dink and the Chins" was not the last D-Mod, or the second-to-last D-Mod, or the hundredth-to-last. Dink outlived the Dink Network; improbably, another community eventually replaced it. Who can say where the new interest came from? Dink persisted on and on, getting into new adventures and endless permutations of his old ones. He slayed boncas, he had bridges repaired, he assisted some wizards and fought others. And his adventures expanded in new directions. Eventually, someone made a true sequel with almost entirely new content, and that was itself the basis for countless new D-Mods. Dink outlived Seth Robinson. He outlived you; he outlived me. Descendants of FreeDink ran the game on computers and operating systems as yet unknown. The game was played in forms that would be unrecognizable to us. Dink would always be there for whoever needed him.
~FIN~
...And that's all the D-Mods! Thanks for reading, everybody. Wrap-up post to come soon.
