Nifflas' Support Forum
Released Games => Uurnog => Topic started by: JTE on July 16, 2017, 06:44:23
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Hi. I'm JTE. I'm generally a programmer, not a level designer, so everything I make is a miserable pile of gimmicks with no practical substance.
I've been a fan of Nifflas' games for a long time. Uurnog was a complete surprise to me, and instantly became one of my favorite games. ever. It really stuck with me. Even now, I'm craving for more. More interesting creatures, more precarious situations, more clever use of the tools at hand. I'm actually here because I kept googling "Uurnog mods", hoping there was something, anywhere on the Internet, to satisfy my craving.
This mod provides none of that. I'm sorry it's not the complete new campaign you were probably hoping for, but I hope it will suffice for now. (Needless to say, no one should be playing a modded campaign before completing the original?)
http://catgirl.goddess.moe/JTE-Mod.uurnog
Install this by navigating to your "Uurnog\Uurnog_Data\StreamingAssets\" folder and renaming Uurnog.uurnog to something else to save the vanilla campaign, then copy JTE-Mod.uurnog into the folder and rename it to Uurnog.uurnog
What this mod does, primarily, is turn every single NPC shop in the vanilla town (not including the hidden ones) into an "ending", adding a back room where you can bring all of the shop's wares to stock it yourself in order for it to open. That means there are 9 "endings" in total. Unfortunately, you only have 5 playable characters, and I don't know what will happen after your fifth ending. I would assume your savegame becomes unplayable, as all of the playable characters have taken up NPC roles, so please choose wisely which shops you would like to open, if any at all.
I do not know if all of the shop's requested wares are reasonable to obtain, as there are many items which can primarily be used only in Cursed areas and similar. But you can always sacrifice portal guns and boxes to get around that, if so inclined. You will likely not have much use for the shops after unlocking them either, due to having to obtain all of their contents in order to unlock them to begin with. Therefore, I do not know the point of my mod.
Oh, one thing to note, however:
- Required bombs can have any fuse time and will be accepted. You do not have to match them.
- Required detectors can be any kind of detector and will be accepted. The monitor doesn't even display what kind of detector they're intended to be, because detectors spawn in a noise-screen sprite.
- Required books do have to match, therefore to make the library unlockable I used varieties of books which are available outside of the library, in respawnable locations. Unfortunately, only 3 such books exist in places where you can readily obtain them without being obstructed by Cursed grounds and 2 block doors, so for the fourth one I went with the bird book, which can be obtained from cursed grounds or by alternatively unlocking the bird shop. Not that I'd have any idea why you're wasting one of your five playable characters on the library to begin with, of course.
The mod also contains a new locked door in the save room (which will not appear on an old save game, I am afraid, as the save room saves doors along with the other objects!) which requires the master key to open.
This door leads to the only new areas added in the mod, which were also screenshotted below:
- An easy access path to Nifflas' prototype puzzle maps, should anyone be curious enough to want to try them but not able to find them in the editor for some reason.
(In which case, why are you more inclined to play through the game again from the start until you are equipped enough to reach a master key, or gamble until the save room dispenser gives you one?) - A single, extremely brief, original map. It is not a puzzle at all, just a simple, sparsely decorated platforming challenge.
In making this mod I encountered two editor errors:
- The right fence post side object puts the editor into an invalid state.
- The non-locked door object allows higher type numbers than it actually has assets for.
- Not technically a glitch or bug, but collection stations don't check the fuse length of bombs despite displaying them, and neither display nor check the targets of detectors.
My features wishlist:
- A proper mod selection system with separate save files, of course. :P
- The possibility of adding more player characters depending on which NPC skins are going completely unused.
- A spawner flag for the inverse of a cutscene trigger, for objects that only spawn until a certain ending has been reached, eg. to make doors leading to old endings disappear or become swapped out for doors leading to entirely different maps.
- The ability to handle multiple camera locks in a single zone, so that when you teleport across the zone using a door, the camera can fly over and get locked to a new fixed position, rather than the camera trying to slip away just because the complete area the camera is allowed got bigger due to having more rooms in the same zone.
- A way to trigger cutscenes that will still spawn new permanent things and show you a sequence of defined scenes, but not eat your character and end the game, for storytelling purposes.
- An alternative collection station which, instead of requesting the player character and spawning a cutscene when complete, simply destroys a nearby sacrifice block, for creating roadblocks which want non-living objects like gems to be eaten.
Untested modding ideas for later: (if you're modding Uurnog, go ahead and try this)
- I'm not entirely sure what caused it, but in attempting to make a cutscene showing poster zone, I found that the player respawned properly in the first ending cutscene from the debug start point, and could move around normally. This may be related to the way cutscenes work like a death by resetting the maps or something, and could allow for some interesting interactive credits sequences or other fixed-camera time-limited possibilities which ultimately result in the character being locked off and becoming an NPC (which can exist elsewhere in the game later on. )
- There can be as many "save rooms" in the game as you like, so making some puzzles permanent and unresettable, for missable or destructable valuable items, is an option.
The caveat is that I don't think save rooms can effectively spawn in random-chance objects or update with ending cutscenes, as they only spawn once and then save and reload their contents forever? - Make deeper areas of the game with more valuable objects require some kind of toll gate to get through, in order to make the player have to spend money to continue exploring that area as an additional penalty after dying. eg. a key you can only buy for a door that resets to locked due to neither end existing in a save room. If the door still permanently saves that it was unlocked for some reason, an alternative of just making a useless priced block sit in your path forcing you to buy it in order to pick it up and pass is a good alternative.
- Attempt a larger scale of nonlinear progression by using the same key letter in multiple locations for multiple doors and awarding the same key in multiple ways.
- Do some previously cursed room ideas freeform style, eg. expect the player to bring their own gun to a weapon-heavy path or their own bird to a slow fall laser tunnel. The player should be able to determine and provide their own necessary puzzle elements after having played through the default campaign to learn the mechanics.
- For some reason every time I go from right to left in the underground path below town, the NPC there generally insists on getting in front of me and making me push it onto the sacrifice block. When it lands on top of the plopp already being sacrificed, it cannot resist picking it up and sacrificing itself instead. Maybe you can make a puzzle around manipulating the otherwise chaotic AIs like that?
So uh, yeah.
That's a thing that happened, I guess.
I'm going to collapse asleep now, I stayed up too long obsessively fiddling with this. (Just learning the map editor and how various objects work took most of the day.)
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This sounds like an awesome mod! The idea of collecting for any of the village shops sounds epic and will create all kinds of weird ways of finishing the game. I do a lot of speedrunning so I look forward to seeing what the best way would be to get 5 shops open as fast as possible. Thanks for making this!
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Do let me know if anything turns out to be impossible or if you want a custom mod that helps with (or creates) certain challenge categories you'd like to run, eg. by removing the save room cheat or making the prologue a save room so you can only get one master key or something.