Recent Posts

Huh, so is the chatroom on irc or Discord then? There are still people in the irc.

Thank you so much!  I really appreciate the time and effort that goes into these updates!

Hello forums!

I am leading a small team of people with the goal of publishing a short video game. Unfortunately, none of us have any business experience and very little business exposure! I found the internet to be daunting and unhelpful in answering my questions and my college professors tell me it’s not their job to clarify or assist in my research. I considered emailing Alec as he clearly has had success producing indie games, but decided that would be inappropriate as I do not really know him!

Therefore I have turned to this forum as a way to seek assistance, as I know many of its users have developed wonderful Aquaria mods and may have even worked on unrelated game design projects. My biggest question is as follows:

Our team has members from around the world! What are some methods we could use to publish and ensure that everyone gets equal credit and intellectual ownership?

My biggest concern/source of confusion is the international aspect. My biggest impression is that international business is complicated and confusing and creates problems that would not arise were we all in the same region. I am not sure if this is relevant, but two of us are from the a United States, one from Canada, one from Macedonia, two from the Netherlands, and two from the United Kingdom.

I sincerely appreciate any help, information, or resources.

There was an Aquaria Discord? What happened to it?

Before i abandoned the Aquaria discord, i'd discussed with False the possibility of including Cascadia waters, and not just because of my love for the area in the real world, i feel it would open lots of creative opportunities to include sea life from that region. Since the Frozen veil is pretty much right next to the veil, in terms of lateral distance, we can take some creative liberties on the whereabouts of the Area. Some of my brainstorm ideas involved a Salmon boss, Prawns, and Seals. as for area design, there could be mountain scenery, and gameplay wise freshwater streams and rivers could give host to some interesting new mechanics involving rushing currents. Figuring any ideas are good, i'd love to get some feedback on what you all think about this. 

No problem man  . Pm sent!

Sure... I understand. By the way I played Sequal Mod 1, it's awesome, the jellyfish throwing concept was new and freeing the prisoner made me  very happy 
But he repaied me instantly since Li is very weak 

I do. The game is superb!

My idea for combining the vanilla and sequel maps was more just a side-thing than something for the sequel itself. If there's one thing I love, it's combining or otherwise compiling parts of different entries in a series together. For example, one of my projects is a map Hyrule and its neighboring kingdoms from the Legend of Zelda series that, while based primarily on Breath of the Wild and Adventure of Link, incorporates elements from plenty of the games. So combining Aquaria's original and sequel maps is more of a just for fun thing. It would be hard to make work plot-wise the way I envisioned (Aquaria Expanded as opposed to Aquaria 2) due to the time gap between the two games.

That said, I could see the original areas being implemented in a way akin to Pokemon Gold and Silver, where after beating the main game, you get to visit the first game's areas as a little bonus. I think it'd be nice if the first game's areas were all there, even if they don't serve a role in the story, but they're not necessary.

quick rundown: the 6 energy temple maps, 3 veil maps, mithalas + cathedral, top 2 open waters maps, the starting area things, Li's cave, one forest map

What forest map?

"Cold waters" sounds indeed interesting.

What about Warm Waters? Your open area is in the right place (near the Energy Temple, which if it weren't for being underwater would totally be the Fire Temple), and still doesn't have a name. Adding some "warm" elements would give the place more identity, but then again, if you're not gonna revisit old areas, and this is the new Open Waters, maybe that's not a good thing. Even then, though, a sequel shouldn't be a retread, so there's no harm in a slightly different atmosphere. The biggest issue would be figuring out what exactly the "warm" elements would be. The Veil and the area directly below it are already tropical, so you can't exactly do that. Maybe hydrothermal vents? As shown on my map, I was thinking of putting a volcano above Warm Waters as the logical extension of the "warm" aspect, and hydrothermal vents would tie in nicely to this. A warmer color palette would make sense. I tried doing a mockup with warmer colored rocks, but it just ended up as an ugly brown. Maybe changing the background gradient would be a better idea.

Aww. I was gonna try hook it up to the native mod to have the whole map with Sequel Mod areas. But I respect your decision.

You can do that, or whatever else works for you. There's a flag in the mod's XML file that prevents opening the editor, and in case someone gets past there scripts will do their best to prevent further editor use. One of the reasons why i put this is in is to prevent cheating.
(i know myself, if i've been through a map 5 times and there's any way of taking a shortcut, i'll take it. i feel like i've kinda ruined sacrifice mod for myself this way back then. So that measure forces me to go through a map as intended, and when i don't get bored when playtesting then it's good enough.)
There are more reasons but i will not tell you those.

Anyway, so you can move the maps somewhere you have access (any mod skeleton will do), but entities will be blank, nodes will have no function, and none of the map/mod special things will work. But just for looking at how it's made, why not.

About your map suggestion:

I didn't intend to keep most of the original maps. Some are there because they have to (home area, open waters, krotite temple), but some are either too long, bland, or too repetitive so it's imo better to replace them with something new. Right now 23 map XML files are original (more or less modified), and it's likely it'll stay that way. (quick rundown: the 6 energy temple maps, 3 veil maps, mithalas + cathedral, top 2 open waters maps, the starting area things, Li's cave, one forest map.)

What do you think? The forest maps are the least varied ones, so i'd like to redo them or get rid of them. I've made another couple of 2 different forest-style maps ages ago, but not quite sure yet where i'll put those or how much expansion they need.

EDIT: But i will think about your idea. "Cold waters" sounds indeed interesting.


One last thing, because i like to be open about things i do:

I've been way more busy with life (and most importantly, PhD work) than i had imagined, so projects left and right went on hiatus (there wasn't really anything else i could do), including this. I do read the forum's RSS feed and saw every new post, but had my mind elsewhere and forgot to reply.
I'm trying to get a somewhat stable schedule established (at least XX hours work on the mod per week), wish me luck. It's good to work on something creative once in a while, hard scientific coding gets very dull after a while.

Right now i'm poking at some graphics files (attempting to finish some leftovers from a long time ago) but i'm kinda lost how to do this

In any case, and that applies to everyone reading this, if you have an idea for an suitable (under-) water creature (enemy, neutral, scenery, background, whatever) and you feel confident with gfx, feel free to send a draft or even usable tiles. If i have body part tiles i can animate & script the thing and incorporate it. Or try to animate it yourself for some fun