The Reconciliation of Ascension

The Reconciliation of Ascension is a special hack for us. It marks the beginning of a ridiculously prolific period of creative output, as well as the beginning of a great friendship.

Light was in the final phases of making Jouhou changes from testing feedback, as Saela was doing the same with Enter the Void. Two levels in Jouhou were vertical autoscrollers, both highly inspired by the level Cosmic Flashlight from Saela's hack Silencio.

When NikdudeN7 was testing the final level of Jouhou, Light joked that the next hack he was going to make would be all vertical autoscrollers. Saela saw the message in chat and messaged Light in discord saying "I'd work on that." The rest is history.

This hack was created over a four month whirlwind. We started on February 8, 2022 and initial release was June 14, 2022. Light started making Pipe Dreams, and Saela started what would become Bad Mario Day. So... a carnival overload of pipes and sticky floor set the stage for our hack. Nothing could go wrong, right? And what started as a 16 exit hack ended up being 22 exits, with a puzzle that led to an 8 exit companion hack.

During that time span, there probably was not a single day where one of us didn't do something to contribute to the creation of it. Our schedules lined up very well, where one person would work on the hack while the other was at work, pass along the changes, and then they would pick up where the other left off.

We quickly realized we had a lot of similar interests and sensibilities. The process of creating the hack had us talking about what games, tv shows, movies, life events, etc we really liked, when then turned into references that were spread throughout the hack. For example, the name Bad Mario Day came from an old inside joke of Light's. He had a friend who once literally crashed into someone's house, but instead of taking the blame he called it a bad driving day. So people who can't beat this level aren't failing; they're just having a Bad Mario Day.

There were no ideas that were brought up and rejected. Instead, it was a collaborative effort to figure out how to work together and make the ideas work. This led to lots of rapid back and forth ideas and updates where sometimes levels would be swapped back and forth 10 times a day.

While we had lists of level ideas that outlined sprites or ASMs we wanted to use, a lot of the levels came organically from Light messing around on stream and Saela in chat adding on to it. Chuck Tower came from trying to overcome the creative block of starting a level and just building the most basic thing imaginable, then adding more interesting components later. Irrumabo Porta only exists because MrCope came into Light's stream one night and said somethjng along the lines of "You need a level filled with fucked up chuck gates. Fuck gates." Speed With Teeth had us both dying laughing when we realized we could control the tempo of the music, which expanded the level from just being a quick pseudo-shmup section to being the speed incremental level it is today.

Speaking of Speed With Teeth, this hack is held together with string and duct tape. We were punching above our skill level, both of us knowing very little regarding ASM and basically applying trial and error to make the tweaks we wanted. It's a miracle that the level scroll/Mario movement/straight speedy fireball combo actually ended up working, along with the myriad other ASMs shoved into this hack.

Testing for this started when we had any percent done (up through Dealt a Killer Hand.) Some levels definitely elicited reactions. Immediate ones that come to mind are NikdudeN7 saying "Are you really sure this is how you want to start this hack?", TheMFFlash stating they can look at a helicopter and still not know how to fly one, B2DE81 just completely destroying Grasshopper in a cheese filled one shot, and Stucat_ coming close to losing his mind playing Iwazaru.

During the testing process we actually got some very notable help. Fyre made a fantastic port of The Whistle Song from Deadly Premonition, which was really a wish list item for us. Blaagon jumped in and helped us understand how to make palette swaps of certain sprites that were giving us a hard time with different behaviors. And of course, Stucat_ came through with some wonderful boxart.

There are many references hidden throughout the hack, all based on interests we shared with each other while we were making it. Twin Peaks, Killer 7, No More Heroes, Deadly Premonition, Godhand, and many more. Inspired by some of the developer Easter eggs hidden in old PC games, we included a list of music we listened to while making the hack.

The band Heavy Sigh has to have a mention here. Their album Hard to Care came out when we were making this and was in very heavy rotation by both of us. When we were about 95% done with the hack, Light offhandedly said something like "Do we need a trailer?" To which the answer was yes. He had never done video editing before but decided to dive into it, hiding even more references in it. Light decided to reach out to Eric from Heavy Sigh, asking permission to use the song Glare for the trailer. His answer was "Yes! Share the video with us when you're done and we will post it too!" Which was incredibly kind of him and the band.

One last thing to mention is the secret on The Other Side. We are both fans of behind the scenes type stuff (hence all these recollections) and wanted to include something for people who actually made it through everything. So at the end of The Other Side, we put a ~30 minute video of different states of the hack and bits and pieces of streams where memorable things happened (with another Heavy Sigh song used in the background.) Originally, The Other Side was an inverted control version of Chuck Tower. Unfortunately, it is now the only version of Chuck Tower. It makes sense still though, as it acts as a mini game/challenge for those who want it.

This was the most fun we ever had working on a hack. There was no second-guessing, we didn't worry about what people might think of the hack, it was just free creativity and making each other laugh.

Even if we got better at aesthetics, smoothing out some rougher edges and just romhacking in general in later hacks, the memories associated with this one can never be topped. In the end we did release updated versions with significant changes that made the hack more enjoyable for other people but it's still true to what we set out to make.