Replica

As touched upon in the Karma recollection, this hack was supposed to be a quick and fun little side project. I was just gonna throw 11 vanilla-ish levels together in a month or 2 and get it out.

Of course I ended up putting way more effort into it as things progressed and I feel like the level design turned out really well in this one. I think I came up with some cool setups and ideas without relying on flashy custom gimmicks.

I was also trying to make a flux hack that doesn't look like the usual custom block-soup hacks that usually get made with it.

The main problem with flux is that the incredible amount of resourses can lead to very lazy and nonsensical design. Where problems get solved with one hard to read custom block after another, instead of trying to find a vanilla solution or attempting to redesign the setup from the ground up.

Flux definitely can be really neat and fun to work with, as long as you fix a few things and restrain yourself.

This hack ended up being a nightmare to fix and decheese. This was because setups tended to be slightly more complicted than usual and, as mentioned earlier, I didn't want to make things ugly with too many silly custom blocks.

The rex turnaround setup in the level "Hydralieren" (not a real word, don't worry about it) was especially hard to decheese and that whole sequence went through countless redesigns.

As I got closer to release I started talking to Koopster about some kind of clone boss I would like to have in the hack. I had an idea for this for a while but there were no concrete ideas for movements and phases or specific attacks.

So me and Koopster ended up throwing ideas together until it turned into something good and fun. It was a really smooth and enjoyable process and I am super happy with how it turned out.

Overall I worked on Karma and Replica side by side for around 7 months. Retirement, here I come!