Beyond The Black Rainbow

Once the idea for a puzzle came up while making Ascension, it didn't take us long to come up with various ideas for it and how to implement them. The main problem was that we didn't want people to just open up the hack in lunar magic to basically bypass everything.

There were some ideas thrown around for a few days but no concrete solution had been found just yet. We knew unlocking roms wasn't that hard and other solutions to prevent the lunar magic cheese were not known to us either.

Then one early morning, Saela woke up to a message from Light suggesting the possibility of a separate hack. On the evening of that same day, the second hack had a name, a title screen, and 3 short levels finished. What was supposed to be a 5 exit hack expanded like almost everything else we ever worked on and turned into 8. Unlike with Ascension, where we really didn't worry or care about much, we did want this hack to be a short, smooth and easy ride so people who got this far wouldn't burn out from everything we threw at them.

At one point we did consider fleshing this hack out a bit more and submitting it as a separate release on SMWC, but eventually decided not to. Having a secret hack out there that can only be found via a puzzle is cool and should stay that way.

As a note, all the levels in this hack are named after episodes of TV shows we both enjoy.

We do remember running into a possible issue about 3 days prior to submitting Ascension. Neither of us were aware of the "only one SMWC account rule." We had created another account to use the filebin as a hiding place for the hack. However, after reading that, we were worried it might get rejected, deleted, or we would get suspended. Thankfully after reaching out and it being discussed, the mods said it was fine and we moved forward.

Puzzles are difficult to create. You never know how someone may interpret a clue, or interpret something that isn't a clue as a clue. It was very fun to watch people hunt for names in the credits of Ascension that were a different color (which we did as a call out or extra thank you) or see people hunt through levels only to overlook an extra level on the overworld 10 times. Though neither of us are puzzle designers, we are pretty happy with how it all came together.