Something like a sequel mod

[NickonAquaMagna]

...oooooooohhhhh. I thought I had to stay the hell away from the jellies 'cause I'm playing as an ordinary fragile human. Guess I was thinking too hard.

Okay, moving on...


Aaaand I just met the Krotities. Nice to see these guys have been replenishing their numbers. Good for them.



UPDATE-

Just beat chapter 1. I was pretty impressed by the Dunkleosteus fight. Seeing how this part of the story is over, I can't wait to find out what Naija's been doing in the meantime, and how all of the other stuff you've been showing off plays into this. Like... I was a little surprised by how abruptly things ended, because I was sort of expecting that other stuff to appear, but now I just take it as a good indication of how far along the other segments of the sequel are.

Anyway, take your time. Looking good so far.

[False.Genesis]

Hmm has been too quiet around here... time for a little update (no spoilers this time; i'll focus on one thing only. And we're not dead!)

So about 2 months ago thegamemaster1234 came up with a dress up mod. He shared the modified sprites with me, and i worked on a pretty much complete costume system overhaul.  It should be finished enough now to show a few screenshots.


^ Distinct outfits for each character, but some are shared. Costumes are no longer tied to forms. This is pretty much random mix-and-match here. Try to identify which costume each part comes from?


^ Menu overhaul. Each costume part is individually selectable and can be put on or off. Forms remember their costume. Costume parts have different effects, some reduce damage, but are heavy and slow you down. Others are very light and fast but if you take damage it will hurt. Swimming around with everything off is the fastest (esp. in beast form), but dangerous, and getting hit then is a bad idea.
So in general the same thing as with complete costumes (as it was), but now very fine-grained and controllable. If you want to wear the jelly helmet in energy form for a bit of regeneration and the krotite costume for the rest of the body for maximum protection against energy projectiles, sure. Easy.


^ Another pic. Beast form without claws (does a LOT less damage) and more jelly costume (more healing). Not necessarily a practical combination but it's possible. Looks kinda cute too.
(And no, taking the underwear off is NOT possible, because Daxar would beat me up otherwise.  Modesty, please! )

I realize that this adds some RPG elements into the pot, which might not be for everyone. But there are intentionally no stats shown -- I want people to enjoy the variety, and not to micro-optimize their outfit.

I'm considering to make people give snarky comments if you don't wear enough when talking to them. That'll be so much fun.


Side note: Pretty much all of this came out of Alphasoldier's nude mod. Mad props to you, if you ever read this. *tips hat*
And big thx to thegamemaster1234 for the initial spritework, of course.

[Garr]

Thanks for continuing this hard work. I, unfortunately, cannot be a helper to you because of my experience and free-time, but... Oh well.
You're the best!

[Retnara]

Would be interesting to experiment with it 

[False.Genesis]

I'll try to do dev streams in irregular  intervals. Just see the banner in my sig
(Like it's up right now)

[Joey245]

This looks so cool! Sorry I haven't been around much - life stuff happens, y'know?

Nice to see that there's still work here - looking forward to seeing where it goes!

[NickonAquaMagna]

I just recently uploaded the part of my Aquaria review that focuses on the story. The last coupla' minutes touch upon the sequel mod. My next video will cover chapter 1. I dunno if you want me to make videos for each subsequent chapter or not, but this one will at least give people who may have trouble jumping into Aquaria because of its downer ending the hope they need of the story going somewhere.

[False.Genesis]

Ohh nice, link plz?

Just do the videos in any way you like. I don't know if we'll release chapter after chapter or all at once.
But i suppose it would make sense, considering how slow everything is...

[NickonAquaMagna]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO-g08AsyBA Here it is. Enjoy.

[FrancesF]

Nickon, thanks for these two very fine reviews of Aquaria!  Makes me want to play through the main game yet again.  Well, it has been a couple of years, so it's time.  I liked the pacing of your video, and that you covered the game from so many directions, game play, music, art work, voice acting.  And thanks for your last coupla' of minutes on Sequel Mod.  Now, if only our lives weren't so darned busy, and we could get back to modding... 

[NickonAquaMagna]

No prob. SOMEONE had to give the game its due praise. There just aren't that many Aquaria videos on youtube, and I haven't seen anyone upload videos of mods like "Beauty of Aquaria," so I may as well review the Sequel Mod while I'm at it. I'm editing that video together right now. As you can imagine, it's significantly shorter than either of the other two parts, but I still found quite a bit to talk about. I figured I'd include a bit of Li's opening narration to draw people in at the beginning, but I ended up being happy enough with it that I went ahead and uploaded it as a sneak peak at part 3.

Here's that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xohf5dltcS4

[NickonAquaMagna]

Sorry to double post, but I finished that Sequel Mod video. It feels cool to be the first person on youtube, if not the first in the world to review something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYc3dE7tQho
As you can imagine, it's the last video I'll make about Aquaria for some time. Enjoy.

[FrancesF]

Thank you Nickon; it's quite an honor to have a comprehensive video review of the preview mod.  I was especially impressed that you found almost all quirks and alternative story bits.  Thanks for your kind words about the story and the new environments and artwork.  I'm so glad you appreciated the duncleosteus!

[False.Genesis]

I'll also leave my youtube comment here, to be sure...

Thanks for making this. It's an honor to be reviewed with this much attention to detail. Your interpretation is spot-on, there's not much you have missed, and i can't recall anything you grossly misunderstood. Good job
Putting in little things is fun, and it's even better if they are noticed and appreciated like this.

2:15 No auto-save was a major gripe many people had with vanilla, and while no such thing exists in the PC version, i figured it's at least convenient to keep the last good state in memory and revert back to it on death. (The iPad version does have autosave, but even if the system used there was backported to the PC, autosaving is technically almost impossible to implement for this mod. Oh well.)

4:03 Yes, the goal was to make you forget the original game ended, and make it feel like you were still playing, as you said. We will probably make some more changes to the original maps in the future, but only so much that the illusion isn't lost.

4:27 One thing you didn't mention are the technical improvements, but I wouldn't expect anyone not familiar with the game engine to notice those. Originally the game didn't have any sort of post-processing (that is ubiquitous or even overused in most of today's games). That was added later in the open source version, and is one of the least influential reasons why it's damn impossible to make this mod work with any older version.
Another example is the hardcoded pause menu (in C++, not configurable in any way). Think about what it means to implement your own menu system with cooking, backjack and h**kers and somehow force the game to forget about it's own menu. Fun times

4:42 Weight is optional and disabled on the easier difficulties. There was a lot of debate about this, and the consent was to each their own.

5:15 Yes, you'll get back to those areas.

5:48 There are admittedly fewer new maps in chapter 1 than we had hoped to put in, but there is only so much you can stuff in an introductory chapter.
Currently there are about 120 maps in the mod, and 25 of these are vanilla maps (or heavily derived from them).

6:23 +1. Good eye you have there. Confused yet?
6:37 No
7:25 Yep, you will see more of the two.

7:30 So you say the shots should be made homing? Might consider this for easier difficulties, but making Li feel rather powerless was intentional (which is further enhanced when his blaster gets stolen). So the best (and intended) way is to mostly dodge and be on the run, and use the blaster only when it's actually beneficial.
You can aim the blaster with the 2nd analog stick on your controller though, and it even shows a little aiming "laser dot" if you do.
If the 2nd controller is centered, the first one is used instead. If that is centered too, the shot goes in facing direction. This is pretty much vanilla behavior. Same for throwing.

10:14 Any idea how the suit ended up in the fish? (Hint: It's not the obvious thing).

10:26 You didn't attack the children? Really? I assumed some people would, and the cutscene that follows if you chase them is supposed to... correct that attitude a bit.

10:53 ... And if you manage to smuggle the blaster into the temple, you can cause mayhem there. Not for long tho. (Hint: Try to attack the king in the throne room. That's some sneak peek for future energy form upgrades. I wish I could have shown off my new humanoid AI more in the first chapter, but that's the only part where it can really shine as intended.)

13:43 No, it's a different city. The one that got hit by the meteors is the *sunken city* and gone for good. But it's a hint at things to come, of course.

15:03 I haaaaaaate writing cutscenes. They are the absolute worst D:

Does any of this raise new questions? Making this is fun, and there's a good chance for suggestions to get heard, so shoot

Some further things i wanted to mention that don't really belong on youtube:

Regarding your technical issues, you can press Ctrl+G to grab and ungrab the cursor in windowed mode. Not sure if it helps but for mod development it takes a major annoyance away. The game will still pause when not in focus, though.
There's one (hacky) way to fix this: There's a setting that was specifically added for the jukebox mod that came with the updated version 1.1.1 of the game. See _mods/jukebox.xml. If you insert the runBG="1" attribute into the same spot in aq2_ch1.xml it won't pause when in background. I know it doesn't help anymore, but i wanted to mention it.
EDIT: Whoops, forgot the mod is normally packed as a .aqmod file. It's just a zip archive you can unpack, do your edit, and re-pack (or just leave the files there and delete the aqmod file).

I've noticed massive screen tearing when you run this in windowed mode. I did some updates to how the graphics are set up, I hope the next updatepack will fix the screen tearing and some other issues. Can I PM you a beta version when the next updatepack is almost ready? I'd like to fix those problems with your recording setup for good

I'd also like to see that "screen flickering" you have when entering new areas. This has never happened to me and i'm quite confused about what this could be.
The only wild guess i have about this is that windows might think that the game froze and fades the background to white. Happens for me for some games that actually freeze sometimes. It's possible since loading resources takes longer than vanilla, and it doesn't report back to windows while it's still loading those.

[NickonAquaMagna]

Just replied to your comment on youtube.

The screen tearing and other issues really aren't so bad when I'm just playing the game. I've had to fiddle around with OBS to get it to record Aquaria, and it reacts to every game I record a little bit differently. It's probably my fault. The game does run very smoothly when I'm playing it normally.

The screen flickering is where things get WEIRD. The times it happened were only ever in full-screen mode. The top or bottom half of the screen would quickly flicker black, sometimes alternating back and forth for a few seconds. I don't know what to do about that.

By updatepack, what do you mean? A beta of future content, or some fixes to the current build?