Agnosthesia

Going through old discord messages trying to refresh memories and piece timelines together revealed something we both have forgotten about it seems.

Halo 14 Side B was submitted to SMWC early December 2022, which had the first input-playback level.

We started talking about Memorabilia in October 2022 and actual work began in November; so one month before Side B even came out. For some strange reason, while we were working on in, Saela decided to just make a full, big overworld for some other hack that didn't exist yet in between making rooms for Memorabilia.

Soon after that, the idea to use this overworld for an Ascension sequel came up. It was going to be called Ascension: The Return and be a big hack. Bigger than all the ones we have made before. The overworld was already designed to easily fit somewhere between 20 and 25 exits. So off we went. First drafts of levels were shown off on discord.

Apparently we figured Halo 14 Side B was ready to release in December while we were working hard on levels for Memorabilia and Ascension: The Return.

All of these collaboration hacks so far have been using the first version of the flux baserom made by SJAndCharlieTheCat. When we first started on Ascension, Saela had gotten tired of starting from scratch and when Light suggested to take a look at this new baserom, we agreed that it would give us a lot of cool features to use while also making the collaboration a lot easier and straight forward.

During the early phase of Ascension: The Return we knew SJ was working on Flux 2 - A heavily updated and reworked version. We were in contact with him and eventually got a pre-release version to test out. So the hack was ported over to this new baserom and we also figured another full hack of vertical autoscrollers would be too restricting. We just wanted to do whatever we felt like.

We needed a new name…

Early testing versions of Memorabilia were sent out in January 2023 and work continued into February.

Memorabilia had finished testing, we kept playing through it multiple times everyday until it eventually hit the SMWC waiting files in march. By that point, multiple early versions of Agnosthesia levels had been created. Flux 2 saw constant updates too so this message popped up in discord multiple times:

We had an almost finished overworld that surprisingly enough, only slightly changed by the time the hack was done. We ditched the vertical autoscroller focus and eventually our actual goals became clear: Make a chocolate hack full of fun gimmicks with level design that felt smooth and fair, not too difficult, but still creative. Basically a continuation of Halo 14 Side B, but bigger and better.

Saela goes through phases where sometimes designing the first screen of the level takes forever and it makes him think maybe he doesn't have another level in him, and other times where a full new section gets made almost everyday. Luckily this was a time when starting and finishing new levels felt easier than ever. Of course the collaboration with Light proved to be fruitful yet again. Combining sticky ceiling with groundpound, figuring out that these weird crate blocks would float up on water and could prevent the ability to jump off of them, making an autoscroller do a big loop so you would end the level back where you started it, and various other cool ideas only happened because they were working together.

SJ not only continued working on Flux, he was also helping us out with specific issues and was gracious enough to make an asm we wanted to use.

The story was also something that could only develop like this due to the collaboration. Light came up with the idea to use the concept of "Agnosthesia" which was combined with Saela's desire to understand why a relationship ended the way it did (We're good now, actually. Thank god.) The story might seem vague or nonsensical to some but it makes perfect sense to us. The inclusion of Taylor Swift into the whole thing was important to Saela and something he could and would not be able to prevent, due to his ever growing obsession with her music. Luckily, Light was not against it and even listened to a few of her albums.

We also included a bunch of other references to things we both enjoyed again. The Pricemaster, Fringe, Returnal and Twin Peaks. There's always Twin Peaks. As we came closer to finishing the main 22 exits of the hack, we started to feel really good about it. The only problem was that we felt like a cool new standout gimmick was still missing. We threw ideas back and forth until there was a breakthrough:

Now the question was, could spooonsss make it work?

Of course he could. We got the first version of it around 2 weeks after we told him about our idea and it was working great already. A few tweaks needed to be made and we were good to go. Designing Clonio levels (a name NikDudeN7 came up with during testing, thanks) felt similar to messing around with input-playback for the first time. It was something completely new and exciting, so we ended up with way more rooms than needed. Since we didn't want to cut too many of them, the decision was made to make 2 sets of rooms and let players chose which one they wanted to go through, along with some more that were hidden deeper in the hack. We then asked for tweaks to the regular shadow Mario sprite so it could be killed by sprites to act as a boss fight of sorts, and the final level was in the bag.

Another level to talk about is Atropos. Many hacks have a level that revisits ideas and gimmicks from previous levels in the same hack. Since we had made quite a few hacks already, we felt like we could take that concept a step further. Section 1 is a callback to a level in Jouhou, the second part is a combination of a room in Silencio and a gimmick introduced in Agnosthesia. Section 3 is a combination of gimmicks from Memento Mori and Enter the Void, as well as some callbacks to obstacles from the Agnosthesia level "Transilience". Section 4 combines ideas from Ascension and Agnosthesia, while the boss fight calls back to Halo 14 Side B. There are transition cutscenes between these sections that resemble the title screens of each hack.

We got a kick out of people realizing what's going on but even when they didn't, we felt like that level was cool and fun. No extra knowledge required.

We could have stopped right there and put out the hack, but then we started talking about secrets. We both enjoyed old games that had really obscure secrets that you would either find accidentally or learned about them through other people, and we wanted to emulate that. Our goal was to put in lots of secrets all throughout the hack, but ideally most people would not have a clue and just play through the entire hack without second-guessing anything. Eventually someone would find something accidentally and word would spread until every secret was uncovered.

The only thing we didn't want to do was make even more levels. Considering all the overlapping madness of this hack, Memorabilia and Halo 14 Side B as well as everything we had made before, it's easy to see how we started reaching a breaking point. Of course you could argue that just taking a break regularly and only working on hacks whenever we truly felt like it might have been a sensible approach.

But that's just not how we roll. Saela gets really obsessive and once he's committed to a hack, he cannot do anything else with his free time until the damn thing is finished. Whenever he tries to step away and do other things, the hack simply won't leave his mind, so what's the point. Light isn't all that different. We are committed to a fault. But that's also one of the many reasons why we have continued working together. We know we are both equally committed and excited and can rely on each other to get the work done.

On top of all we were working on, someone mentioned in a comment on Ascension that they came across a crash we had never seen. Light asked them to explain what happened and then spent a day trying to recreate it. He was even more confused when he did recreate it and found out how ridiculous it was that it ever happened in the first place, since it requires dying in a specific part of the screen within a two pixel span of the autoscroll. The need for this to be fixed prompted Saela to make a large amount of changes on regarding things he learned to do better over time, and this ended up being 1.65.

So eventually the idea came up to ask a handful of friends if they would be interested in making levels for a big secret post-game area. To our huge surprise and delight, everyone we asked was immediately excited and ready. We couldn't believe it! Fyre150, ItsMegaScott, Nicoke42 and BabaYegha would make levels for our hack. Incredible. All of these levels were getting built not long after we asked and turned out great. After a while Saela and Light found some motivation to make some more stuff as well, so aside from adding even more extra content to the hub, other secrets were ready to be discovered elsewhere too.

While everyone was making their levels, Nicoke42 sent a video of an ASM they made that used the P balloon to make Mario move tile by time. They coupled that with collecting coins to make Mario skip tiles, and went on to say that they made the ASM, but couldn't think of levels to go along with it. We both saw this video and immediately knew something had to be made with it. Light, who is definitely not a puzzle game designer, jumped in and started trying to create rudimentary puzzle one screens, which eventually turned into little minigame of it's own. Designing them was definitely a challenge, since it was something completely different and really just using SMW as an engine, not a platform. In the end, the playtesters were able to figure them out without too much trouble, and Saela took care of the aesthetics as always. We decided to segment it as it's own thing, yet another secret hidden inside the hack, and wrapped it in more inside jokes and the annoyance that some people feel like every hobby should be a money making endeavor.

We then designed 10 single screen rooms that could be discovered in various levels. Each of these rooms would need to be cleared in order to gain access to this secret hub. Since we hoped it would take a while until people realized there were secrets, we wanted to hide the rooms very well, while still giving subtle hints on where to find them in most cases. One of these rooms could only be accessed by jumping right into a death block that otherwise serves no apparent purpose. We were kind of worried that this one was taking it a step too far. "Why the hell would anyone just decide to jump right into a death block for no reason?"

Incredibly, most people who accidentally found the first secret did so by jumping into that exact death block. It makes us laugh every single time.

It didn't take nearly as long as we thought until everything was uncovered but that's fine since we also wanted everyone who contributed levels to see people play them. We are just very happy that nothing was found during moderation and no 1.1 was needed. There are always little things you wanna tweak after a while, but thankfully Agnosthesia was one of our projects that still didn't really need another version.

One last thing to mention is that by the end we actually ran out of rom space. This is something we never even considered could happen but combine Flux 2's incredible amount of included resources and our highly careless and unoptimized approach to hack making, it's starting to make sense. At one point not even a single tile could be added to the overworld. So we went through every level and deleted unnecessary stuff and cleaned up our map16. We also had to start stripping out custom sprites from the sprite list to fit Baba's custom reznors. Luckily that was enough to finalize the hack. Phew!

Reception to the hack was outstanding. People who like chocolate think it's our best hack and even people who usually prefer vanilla said they had great fun with it.

Even now, we can both play through this whole hack without thinking "why the fuck didn't we change this?", so while hacks like Ascension and Memorabilia will always have an extra special place in our hearts, we can't really argue with people who think this one came out the best.

UGH!