Back on tracks

     This title is so cliché.

Hello, I hope you guys are having a good day today, it has been a little while since  I wrote here hasn't it?

Three months have seperated us since last time, a lotta things happened, I focused on school and got everything checked to finish my year!
I'm pretty happy about things, I've been conceiving projects for after Curly's Weird Crusade once the mod will be over which won't be so soon.

Truth be told, I haven't done anything regarding art or video game making since the beginning of the year, I have mainly focused on music and writing, it was a very nice break to say the least.

Now that I had the time to be lazy, last time I wrote about the future red village update, while that hasn't been done. I finally got to the zone I have been teasing since chapter 3, and that's the sand zone.

(Still W.I.P.) (Also I noticed the sand crocs got a little issue, gonna have to find a solution for this)

The whole debacle of Chapter 3 with the Monster X corridor lead to this, I hope it wasn't anti-climatic.

So for this area that I probably won't call the sand zone, I'm not sure.
I got inspired by two things, the challenge level in Cave Story + called Sand Pit that inspired the level design with a challenging vibe and another level that inspired me was a level I made back in 2020 for an old project that was my Cave Story Beta remake.

Funny fact, I took like two months to make the level in trying to respect the source material while making something new and when the level was over, some new Cave Story Beta footage released to discover that the sand zone was a mess of level design with sand that push you around and just, not fun gameplay. It didn't look fun to play.

The level zoomed from very, very, far away.

The concept of the sand zone here was that it was a loop instaured once you got to the tip at the right.
You had to find the map system to be able to understand the path to fall on the very far right and get out of the zone.
The level was pretty packed with a bar where you could get a martini, some shovel brigade betrayed by their path seeker that probably died and some new enemies. Oh also, cake.

It was a neat concept, a maze that needed to find it's exit thanks to a device, very metroid-vaniaesque.

Sadly the level got it's flaws, the map system isn't that useful apart of understanding a riddle and there is a chance you'd already would have understood where to go from the loop of the level.

So I've rethought the level and after speaking about it with my friend Dixel, I decided to revamp the level to make it less boring, more action-packed and an idea I got is to make so there are two levels that are connected, You have to go to the under half to navigate around the sand zone to access the upper half that got doors that lead to places. There'll be a bit of fetching quests to be able to access the downer part, the Red Village.

Now I think it would be too long if you had to redo the entire path to go back to the blue village, that's why I thought of making an elevator somewhere in the Red Village. Maybe with Gizmo's card you could activate it.

Anyways! That's about much I got, quite a mouthful hehe. I love how I did all this work with levels that lead to this to end up being lazy until april to make it haha.

I decided to revise some stuff of Curly's Weird Crusade, a little revision of the whole mod. (If I say like that it sounds cool but I mainly had to replay it because I lost my save)
After replaying the mod, I noticed some little snippets that got out of grasp first time, it wasn't in the public release thankfully. In the factory, there were still '*' next to dialogues, these little stars come from the place-holder text that signified in general what was being done.

A decision that I also thought about is to give Curly an air-tank after saving Quote, it would be a reward and save the error of consistency that the mod had at it's shooter part. Only issue I got with this is that some part of chapter 3 that had water remove the urgency of getting out of said water, not a bad thing I guess.

Anyways, I got only one thing to add this blog post that I remembered after replaying,

remeber Gizmo?