Few modification ideas for the standard game

[Lanthanide]

After having played Aquaria solidly for 4 days and beaten it, there are a few things that I think could use a little tweaking.

One thing that is quite different about Aquaria compared to other action/adventure type games is that the standard abilities don't get strengthened over time at all, they only get temporarily stronger after eating food. There were a couple of ideas I had around this to make the game a bit more progressive in this manner:
1. The first time Naija breaches the veil, the standard energy attack could be buffed a little - this would make it a more powerful experience. I think halfway between the strength of the regular attack and the +1 attack. This should also have graphics that are halfway between the regular and +1 attack, to make it obvious the strength has increased. +1 (and +2, +3 etc) would still be as powerful as normal, just the base attack should be buffed. Towards the end of the game the enemies require lots of attacks to kill and it gets a bit tedious.
2. The abaddon's should have their HPs dropped by 50%, they are very difficult to kill at the moment.
3. When getting nature form, the default defence for Naija should be increased by 1 point. Eating a +1 defense food would be in addition to this also (so effectively she'd have 2 defense). This defence increase would help Naija in all her forms, not just nature. At the moment nature form is definitely the weakest of her forms, and this would give people a reason to go for Nature form earlier than they otherwise might.
4. Increase drop rate for food items. I know you can re-enter a level over and over and farm items, but really it's just tedious. I see that some of the creatures have very low chances of dropping particular ingredients, like 2% chances for various things. Thinking about this logically, it means if you kill that enemy 100 times, it'll drop that ingredient only twice. This is fine if the enemy is a common one, but if there are only 3 or 4 (or 1?) of them in the game, essentially this becomes a huge pinata and most players would never see that item drop from that enemy. I think these should be increased, and also creatures that have chances to drop different items should be changed to potentially drop multiple items: eg instead of 40% plant leaf, 60% fish meat and they always drop one or the other, it should be cumulative: so 24% of the time they'd drop both, 16% of the time only plant leaf, 36% of the time only fish meat and 24% of the time nothing.

If anyone wants to take these ideas and go ahead with them, feel free. I've poked around the entity files but can't see what controls the veil event. In terms of implementation I think you could add a flag that is set, and then when Naija goes to attack, check the flag and if true generate the (new) more powerful projectile in place of the original one.


Edit: I've just looked at the Aquaria Native mod, and when you breach the Veil it doesn't do anything special there, and there aren't any special entities or nodes that I can spot. So I guess the veil-breach is something hard-coded into the game that can't be edited just through scripts and entities? I guess other mod-makers have probably run into this already. Annoying.

I thought of something else that could use tweaking:
When you go out of the water, even at a very slight velocity, you get rocketed really far up into the air, which is silly. It makes a lot of the bubble-jumping parts particularly difficult if you're actually trying to boost yourself from bubble to bubble - it's much easier to cross the frozen veil just by regular swimming, for example. It'd make sense if this were changed so your jump distance/velocity out of the water was tied much more closely with the speed with which you actually left the water - a slight boost would be ok, but not a huge one like now. And when you are going as fast as Naija can go, you should still boost as far as is possible at the moment. To put it in general maths terms, the current exit-water velocity formula feels like this: 100 + velocity. It should be something more like this: 10 + velocity * 10.

Another thing that really should be fixed, which relates directly to the above (fixing the above would go a great deal to minimizing this, however) is that when the water level drops, as in the sun temple, Naija stays where she is, but the game thinks she's left the water and therefore rockets her into the sky. This is particularly annoying coming up to the sun temple boss, where the water level drops on you suddenly and you go flying out up into the air and hit on the spikey balls and get hurt. This comes across as very unfair and strange to the player, especially when it happens over and over again - the only thing that has changed is the water level, so why are you now flying upwards into some spikey balls?

[Aristobulus]

You make some good points, and I'm no modder myself, but to me this sounds like a lot of stuff that goes beyond the realms of simple modding, as good as Aquaria's modding toolkit may be. But I could be wrong.

But some of those issues, I imagine, would take an entire retooling of the physics system to fix, so it could be entirely too much work and in fixing it would you cause other problems to surface - like, fixing the issue of Naija rocketing out of the water. It COULD be that if you fix that, because of how the physics works, you would mess up the fluid way she swims through water normally, or it would become too difficult to get fast, far reaching leaps when you want them.

Who knows?

Though I really do like the suggestion of improving some abilities as you progress through the game - the concept of what you've raised is nice, as for example one thing that has bugged me is how weak Naija's original form is compared to the rest, and her normal form is really my favorite. Yet it's so hard to just relax and explore in that form, because you constantly have to switch to Energy form to fight things, or Beast form to fight/travel through currents, and normal form is just so helpless in comparison and shield only blocks some energy shots...so even if it meant beating the game to get a bonus, SOMETHING to make just staying in normal form for standard ocean exploration would've been nice.

[Alphasoldier]

@Lanthanide
1. I'm not sure why you want this exactly at the Veil, but there's actually an entity or something you can collect that gives you an energy upgrade. I can't really remember how this went or IF THIS SAVES AT ALL, but that could be looked into.
2. Hard to kill is part of the gauntlet.
3. A rather good idea, though hard to implement seeing Naija's scripts aren't easily accessible, seeing they're not simply in the script folder. If you'd know how to edit the source however...
4. I think the balance on the food is just fine. I could get ALMOST every recipe without killing a single creature. Second to that, if you'd get too many ingredients the game would be way too easy... which I think it is already with the amounts of food you gat. Third to that, they want you to feel extra guilty for harvesting ingredients from innocent creatures, especially when they don't drop a thing.

As to how the water works... Naija always JUMPS out of the water no matter what, logical in some way, annoying in the other. I however think that it adds to the difficulty level that water works like that, and seeing you reached the veil, you already know that she jumps out of the water like that. Besides defending this point, I suppose your velocity * 10 works but I'm fairly sure the creators made it like this for a reason.

@Aristobulus
Use your shield to be in normal mode more often. =p

[Sindhi]

Normal form with the jelly costume is strong enough already. You enter nature form to throw those spikes (like in the bowels of Mithala when you run into a bunch of mutant froggies blocking your passage to the boss, or just long enough to kill the mantis shrimp in the ice caves); you don't use it for long, so you don't really need more power or defense. And part of the game is learning how to solves obstacles without just killing everything; to be creative in a game that is free-form as far as where you go when. As far as making the game more "fair", Aquaria as it is now is more like life; unfair sometimes, but full of magic if you open your eyes. If you know how to write scripts and code you can make a mod with all the things you suggest and see if you like that gameplay better; you can also modify your original game and see if you like it. The source code is available to everyone. Alex is trying to finish Marion so asking him to recode the entire game, which was released in 2007,  is a bit pushy. I'd rather see him port Aquaria to PS3 so more people can play it and the mods.

[Lanthanide]

Thanks for the replies.

My main point is that Aquaria is somewhat different from other games in that there is very little ability progression outside the collection of new forms and food. Personally I found this a bit of a niggle with the game.

Increasing shot strength at the veil, and defense once you achieve nature form, were two simple things I could think of that worked in a somewhat thematic way (nature form = bark-like skin so increased defense, veil breach = energy upgrade from feeling the sun and the air).

Re: alpha
2. There's a difference between 'hard' and 'tedious' though, which I think the abaddons fall into. Seeing as how they don't actually move, and their projectiles are fairly predictable, there's really no reason to slog it out trying to kill them because it takes so damn long, it's easier just to swim past. But if they were reasonably killable, you'd be more likely to hang back and shoot them. I guess this makes the gauntlet easier, but I think on balance people would probably still swim past them anyway.
3. I think it could probably be done through entities and scripts though, right? I'm guessing there's a script-accessible flag that says whether Naija has the nature form song or not. I guess the problem is then being able to actually increase her defense - you can do this with food items, so maybe there'd be some hacky way to make a psuedo-food item that automatically eats itself every time you enter a new map that provides +1 defense for 1 hour? I am actually a software engineer working in C, so although I've never worked with game code directly I could probably take a stab at it if I was sufficiently motivated.
4. As for the drops, what I'm suggesting would actually result in some creatures not dropping things at all: 40% chance to drop fish meat + 60% chance to drop fish oil means the creature will always drop one or the other. Under my suggestion, there'd now be a 24% chance of dropping nothing. Also the point here is to reduce people needing to repeatedly farm the same areas just to get ingredients they need, as well as making the rare and special drops actually occur, as many players would never see them at present.

Naija jumping out of the water makes a lot of sense for what we actually see happening in-game, which will probably make this much trickier to change. Presumably the states would go something like this:
Swimming in water - approach surface and pause - jump from surface. With the pause state in between it would make it much more difficult to retrieve her velocity from when she was swimming in the water.

Presumably the jumps aren't just a set distance though? Like maybe in beast form she jumps further than in the other forms already, so there would be something in the code that lets you vary the distance of a jump; jumps from water could be detected and adjusted separately from other jumps.

Re: Sindhi
My suggestion with the defense from acquiring Nature form is that it applies to all of her forms, as a type of character progression, rather than only applying when she is in Nature form.

Also I wasn't saying that Alex should re-program the game at all, these are just some personal issues I had with the game that I figured I'd throw out here and see what other people thought.

[Aristobulus]

Normal form with the jelly costume is strong enough already. You enter nature form to throw those spikes (like in the bowels of Mithala when you run into a bunch of mutant froggies blocking your passage to the boss, or just long enough to kill the mantis shrimp in the ice caves); you don't use it for long, so you don't really need more power or defense. And part of the game is learning how to solves obstacles without just killing everything; to be creative in a game that is free-form as far as where you go when. As far as making the game more "fair", Aquaria as it is now is more like life; unfair sometimes, but full of magic if you open your eyes. If you know how to write scripts and code you can make a mod with all the things you suggest and see if you like that gameplay better; you can also modify your original game and see if you like it. The source code is available to everyone. Alex is trying to finish Marion so asking him to recode the entire game, which was released in 2007,  is a bit pushy. I'd rather see him port Aquaria to PS3 so more people can play it and the mods.

True, but I'm a freak for aesthetics and I don't like the way most costumes look. Certainly I don't like the way the jellyfish costume looks. At any rate, even for the ones I DO like, I think the normal costume looks the best.

[Sindhi]

To Aristobulus: Well, you are right; the jelly costume looks like an oversized bike helmet with an ugly bathing suit, but the protection it offers is worth offending the fashion police. Alpha, your spacesuit is so cute; could you make a better jelly costume? I would love to have better costumes for our mod at least. I like the energy form and nature form best, and beast is fine... I know what you mean about aesthetics; that is why I take so much time decorating the maps in Magic, and why Yogoda and I have gone crazy making new flora and fauna.

[Alphasoldier]

To Lanthanide...

2. Perhaps it's possible to change in the script that Abbadon also gets damage when his tendrils are hit, though a lot less, that would make it a bit more fair don't you think so? Perhaps I'm even able to pull this off really quickly... I found something... Testing it now, let's see if my basic code knowledge can pull me through. Aight... found how I could change it, testing works... lemme wrap it up.
Aight... I ended up with this little piece, it's the original Abaddon, which takes a 4th of normal damage when attacking his tendrils, and the normal amount when attacking him in the middle. I also tried giving it SOME way of making it show that you hit his weak spot... but besides making him blink more often (also a different color?) I had no clue what to do else... besides that... when you're manically shooting, you don't watch how much an enemy blinks. XD
3. Finally to point 3... only took me 4 hours... ANYWAY. Seeing you're a software engineer you should know that making "temporary" scripts, no matter how long they go is just not good enough, if someone's in a map for an hour it just goes away, so that's not possible. Second, adding a node to every map to check if she's in nature mode MIGHT be possible, but would require you to change every map.... or every map's script. There's no pseudo food item on which you're talking about either.
4. The drop rates are fairly easily managed, though again... it would require a lot of modding and replacing a lot of original files, something you just can't do easily... and no one likes hardmodding their game when it comes to it.

As to your response to Sindhi... I think that would ruin the game honestly... seeing there's not a single thing in the game that actually works like that.

Then to Sindhi, if you have any suggestions, quick sketches as to what you'd like the costume to look like, I'd love to try a stab at it... seeing my current inspiration doesn't go further than attempting to throw a large boulder. And btw, it's Samus Aran's Zero Suit... from Metroid.

Oh and to you both... it's Alec, not Alex

[Lanthanide]

2. Perhaps it's possible to change in the script that Abbadon also gets damage when his tendrils are hit, though a lot less, that would make it a bit more fair don't you think so? Perhaps I'm even able to pull this off really quickly... I found something... Testing it now, let's see if my basic code knowledge can pull me through. Aight... found how I could change it, testing works... lemme wrap it up.
Aight... I ended up with this little piece, it's the original Abaddon, which takes a 4th of normal damage when attacking his tendrils, and the normal amount when attacking him in the middle. I also tried giving it SOME way of making it show that you hit his weak spot... but besides making him blink more often (also a different color?) I had no clue what to do else... besides that... when you're manically shooting, you don't watch how much an enemy blinks. XD

Nice! What about going a step further, though - if you damage a particular tendril enough, the tendril itself gets destroyed, opening up a weak spot which you can use to attack the center part more easily? Still also do the 1/4th damage to the entire thing as well. I guess to do this you'd need to give each tendril it's own HP - maybe just 3 each?

3. Finally to point 3... only took me 4 hours... ANYWAY. Seeing you're a software engineer you should know that making "temporary" scripts, no matter how long they go is just not good enough, if someone's in a map for an hour it just goes away, so that's not possible. Second, adding a node to every map to check if she's in nature mode MIGHT be possible, but would require you to change every map.... or every map's script. There's no pseudo food item on which you're talking about either.

Yeah, I know it was a hacky solution, and I said so. If you could make the time duration something like 12 hours though, then for all intents and purposes that would be sufficient. I thought you'd probably have to edit the maps themselves to make it work properly, but then again when a new map is loaded, aren't all entity init scripts called? Does Naija have an entity init script? If so, you could add special code just in there, without having to edit all the maps. The problem then remains the mechanism of how to add +defense - if this currently is only possible via food items, but there's no way to make a pseudo-food item, then we're stuck there.

4. The drop rates are fairly easily managed, though again... it would require a lot of modding and replacing a lot of original files, something you just can't do easily... and no one likes hardmodding their game when it comes to it.

Yes, it would require changing quite a few files. But that's just what it takes to make changes sometimes. I also dispute that it's something you can't do easily - they're just text files, and simply if/else clauses at that. And yes, all of my suggestions are essentially hard-modding, so I don't see that as a specific point against changing drop rates.

As to your response to Sindhi... I think that would ruin the game honestly... seeing there's not a single thing in the game that actually works like that.

Yeah, and that's why I want to introduce such character progression things to the game. It's very common in other games that your character increases in strength as you go on, but in Aqueria this only happens through the acquisition of new forms, and the specific armors that apply to your normal form only.

A lot of what I'm suggesting here are just things that I thought could be improved about the game, but they could also act as spring-boards for other people to develop on further if they could think of nifty things to do.

[Alphasoldier]

2. Not possible, the graphic file of Abbadon has all 8 tendrils in one file and has 3 bones; the face, weak spot and tendrils. AKA, seeing all 8 tendrils are merged together it's impossible to make an individual tendril disappear.
Inevitably it could be possible to make the whole graphic (the tentacles) shrink so it'll be easier to hit Abaddon, but I don't know enough about LUA to get that working.

3. Every map has a script that starts up, you could possible put something in there, but then again I wouldn't know what... Naija's scripts on the other hand are still in the source, they're not simple .lua scripts you can modify and put back, you'll have to rebuilt the executable afterwards I believe.

4. It's a long and tedious progress, especially to get it balanced, besides that... it's easy as can be.

Also I appreciate the ideas, I'm just discussing the possibilities and if it's logical to make something so.
I mean... I did just jump back into Aquaria modding real quick to get you a weaker Abaddon. xD

[Lanthanide]

2. Not possible, the graphic file of Abbadon has all 8 tendrils in one file and has 3 bones; the face, weak spot and tendrils. AKA, seeing all 8 tendrils are merged together it's impossible to make an individual tendril disappear.
Inevitably it could be possible to make the whole graphic (the tentacles) shrink so it'll be easier to hit Abaddon, but I don't know enough about LUA to get that working.

Not possible with the current way the creature is constructed. Would there be anything stopping you from making a single tendril graphic and then adding 8 more bones for it? I guess Bit-Blot did it the way they did because it was much easier, but theoretically this should be possible.

3. Every map has a script that starts up, you could possible put something in there, but then again I wouldn't know what... Naija's scripts on the other hand are still in the source, they're not simple .lua scripts you can modify and put back, you'll have to rebuilt the executable afterwards I believe.

4. It's a long and tedious progress, especially to get it balanced, besides that... it's easy as can be.

Also I appreciate the ideas, I'm just discussing the possibilities and if it's logical to make something so.
I mean... I did just jump back into Aquaria modding real quick to get you a weaker Abaddon. xD

Fair enough. Thanks for the input.

I don't think I'm really motivated enough to do any modding in Aquaria myself, but thanks for looking at my ideas.

[Alphasoldier]

Of course it'd be possible to cut out a single limb from the graphic file, using that 8 times, SOMEHOW making it spin at the same time while everything is spread out equally... meaning I'd have to most likely make an animation for it. Then finally trying figure out how I'd make the individual bones get destroyed.

I'm eager to learn .lua, but not with such a big project. XD

[GMMan]

The really interesting thing about Lua is that there are so many different variations, even though there is just one language. Everyone using Lua customizes their own version, adding functions that are needed. So you're not really learning Lua, you're learning Aquaria Scripting Language powered by Lua.

[Alphasoldier]

I'm fully aware of that, .lua scripting is very elaborate and can be used in many many ways... however, I'm not about to rescript whole Aquaria to just add a few things.

[trojanpooh]

Wait you can kill Abaddons?  I just assumed you were supposed to dodge their attacks.

Though I really do like the suggestion of improving some abilities as you progress through the game - the concept of what you've raised is nice, as for example one thing that has bugged me is how weak Naija's original form is compared to the rest, and her normal form is really my favorite. Yet it's so hard to just relax and explore in that form, because you constantly have to switch to Energy form to fight things, or Beast form to fight/travel through currents, and normal form is just so helpless in comparison and shield only blocks some energy shots...so even if it meant beating the game to get a bonus, SOMETHING to make just staying in normal form for standard ocean exploration would've been nice.

Not to be a tool who self promotes his own shit, but I made a Naija skin that might interest you.  Basically it makes it so form changing only switches Naija's Clothing (So Energy form has the black armor stuff but Naija still looks like her regular pretty self.  Also it removes the hats from all the costumes and may or may not replace them with the Tiara depending on what the costume is).  You can find my thread here:
http://www.bit-blot.com/forum/index.php?topic=3808.0