Chronoclasm

We were retired. We were retired and happy. And then we started talking about Mario again for something simple. And then we had to start talking about more ideas. A couple days later, Saela sent this message:

It's always fun to toss random ideas around with someone who will naturally just build upon it. We seem to both be on the same wavelength a majority of the time. Lots of times, it is benign and is just a fun thing to joke about, or maybe at most a prototype. We actually have a handful of non-SMW projects that won't see the light of day, but exist in some manner.

Almost 2 years pior to the creation of Chronoclasm, the idea of a global timer was brought up. "What if we make a hack called "A Matter Of Time" which has a global timer of an hour and if you don't beat it in time you lose your save file. There are little clocks to collect that add more time."

We both though this was a cool idea but nothing happened, and we moved on to different projects. At some Point later, Saela started to think about one-screen hacks. Most of them are chill, turn-your-brain-off experiences due to the checkpoints you get after every single screen. While those hacks are great, there was a desire to create a one-screen hack that gives you checkpoints but still somehow feels tense and dangerous. This led to the idea of limited lives and a game over once you ran out.

At this point it didn't take long for all the pieces to fall into place.

Work really started January 2, 2025. We had an outline of what we wanted to accomplish. Limited lives, limited timer added at the halfway point, risk/reward choices, mostly single rooms. We knew balancing the challenge was going to be really hard, and that prompted us to want to add difficulty levels as well. Also, B2De81 asked if there would be a version with no one ups after playing hard mode.

Over the course of the previous few hacks, Light had started taking care of a lot of the ASM/block/sprite coding. For Chronoclasm, he was able to hack together a number of blocks and figure out the ubers and patches to allow for proper event handling when running out of lives. He also managed to get a really janky global timer working. However, very thankfully, Abdu came to the rescue and helped us implement a much more sophisticated global timer. We both tried to think of ways to account for the difficulty level implementation. In the end, Light couldn't make a code based solution work and Saela took on the huge task of doing it manually, basically making a whole copy of what we had done and tweaking the levels accordingly.

Early on, we also knew we didn't want it to be linear. Originally it was going to be much more rogue like, with randomization between individual screen occurring. However, we thought that really killed the balance and fairness of the hack. It's already asking a good amount of the player to start over when they die. But at least when the randomization is restricted to groupings of rooms, they can learn them faster.

Overall, a successful run of Chronoclasm consists of completing 80 rooms, and there are around 150 possible rooms in the hack. Randomization occurs and splits between groups of usually 8 rooms based on the players input during the final level grouping. There can also be slight variations within these groupings. Pretty sure there is a tree diagram drawn out somewhere that breaks down the grouping of levels and possible routes that can be taken.

The main challenges with designing the rooms were coming up with distinct ideas/gimmicks for all the groupings without having to slow things down for explanations and tutorials. The rooms needed to be fun, fast paced and allow one-cycling but we also had to make sure nothing felt unfair and players could take their time to look at everything before commiting to the first jump. We mostly succeeded in this. There did end up a few rooms that would kill you if you didn't go immediately, but we made sure to include a pretty much gauaranteed one-up in those cases. This is why we also couldn't really include a difficulty mode without a single one-up. We wanted everything to be fair at all times, no matter the difficulty you chose.

In terms of aesthetics, Saela felt like some of his previous work was a little too unfocused and all over the place. So with Chronoclasm he wanted to make it all feel as consistent as possible while still being unique and varied enough.

For the "packaging " of the hack, we really wanted to lean into the arcade feel. The box art/poster was designed to be minimal but draw players in. The info pamphlet was designed to act like an arcade cabinet marquee, giving required info for people who were not familiar with what certain blocks may do that could cause them to burn lives. We aren't sure if anyone outside a handful of friends has ever bothered to look at them. But its there for our personal satisfaction.

The making of this hack certainly had it's share of turmoil and heartbreak. Shortly after starting it, Light found out he was being laid off from his very long term position. A few days later, we were both hit with the news that David Lynch passed away. This was a devastating blow, as his movies, music, tv shows and art have meant so much to us. The day we found out, both of us immediately shifted focus within the hack. Saela added the wonderful homage portrait scene to the end of the hack the same day. mmBeefStew's damn fine port of the Twin Peaks theme completed that sequence. Light, who had started messing around with a trailer, immediately scrapped the whole thing and started it over as a tribute to Lynch's work. The title screen was updated to show D K L as the save file options, for David Keith Lynch. It still hurts to know we will never get anything new from him to experience.

In the end, Chronoclasm feels like a one of a kind hack. There's not really anything else like it out there, and that's something we hope to accomplish whenever we make anything.