I've been waiting for a high-effort Steve mod ever since I started playing SRB2, and while this isn't quite what I had in mind, I am nevertheless impressed and mostly pleased with the ideas that were implemented into this mod, though I think the implementation itself needs some tweaks.
First of all, I must applaud the visual presentation. The 3rd-person view looks remarkably faithful to the source material, and I love the details like the swing and death animations. The hotbar UI is similarly on-point.
The main gameplay loop is unlike any other character I've played. Having played from GFZ1 through the end of CEZ1 (only possible thanks to springs I had collected which made the DSZ2 water slide and CEZ1 bridge beatable), it seems to basically boil down to finding and collecting springs in order to create your own makeshift spring launchers to cross gaps that Steve is too slow to merely jump across. There's an element of strategy in how and where you use your springs that I find really interesting.
Meanwhile, the monitors laying around everywhere become far more valuable than in the base game, since each one acts as a sort of quarter-size block that you can use for smaller gaps (where using a spring would be wasteful), backtrack across areas like the water slides, or even gain a little extra height by stacking them and placing a spring on top. There's an interesting tension between collecting as many springs and monitors as possible versus trying to complete a level more quickly.
The ability to pick up and place springs anywhere is probably the best part of this mod. For most other characters, such an ability would feel like cheating, but for Steve, it is an essential tool that completely changes how you approach a level. At first, I was confused why horizontal springs were placed facing away from the camera, but upon realizing how they could be used as a sort of boost pad you can place ahead of you, I realized that design choice was actually kinda brilliant.
However, there is one major issue with this mod that I would consider nigh game-breaking. It might be a hard limitation of SRB2, but if not, here's the number one change I would like to see: your inventory should be preserved across game reloads.
The current wiping of inventory on game exit makes it extremely difficult to complete the vanilla campaign unless you either do it all in one go, or else carefully pick which levels you exit the game on. Even as early as the starting room of THZ2, you find yourself in situations where it's incredibly difficult to progress without carrying at least some tools from the prior act. (Thus far, I haven't found anything that's impossible to beat, but I suspect BCZ1 may be impossible without a massive spring stockpile... unless you've made the boss killable at the start; if you haven't done that, you probably should.) This single issue is enough for me to knock a whole star off my rating, because it severely discourages me from wanting to start up a save file with the character, and hampers the cross-level strategizing that I find so appealing.
The second-biggest issue, in my opinion, is the interaction range. There were several places where I felt like I should've been able to reach a ledge to place a monitor, but it was out-of-range, and similarly, attacking enemies quickly devolves into spamming the attack button while you wait for them to get just a little closer. I can almost accept this as a balancing decision to keep enemies threatening, but the effect it has on block placement is very frustrating. The item pickup range is also too small. There were several places where I was able to punch a monitor or spring embedded into a wall, but was then unable to pick up the item, when I *know* I would've been able to pick it up in actual Minecraft.
Additionally, I found it a little disappointing that you couldn't sneak over the edge of a cliff to place monitors and build a bridge. I'm guessing it would probably be difficult to make this work properly, but combined with the tiny interaction range, it makes monitor platforming somewhat frustrating.
Far less of an issue, though still somewhat lacking, is Steve's sprinting speed. I'm not certain how accurate it is to Minecraft (hard to tell without traditional blocks for reference), but regardless, it feels too slow. I'm not saying Steve should be as fast a vanilla character, but sprinting barely feels faster than the default movement speed, and I find myself holding down Sprint at nearly all times, to the point that sneaking feels nearly useless. It's made a bit worse by the fact that it takes a while to accelerate even when using Sprint, so the kind of sprint-jumps you can pull off from a small platform in actual Minecraft require additional running ground here.
I'm also fairly certain that Steve's jump height in actual Minecraft is a bit higher than it is in this mod, so I found myself failing to clear some platforms that I'm pretty sure I could've reached in actual Minecraft. For reference, the Minecraft player jump height is approximately 1.2522 blocks.
The choice to have health be non-replenishable during an act/life seems at first to be a fair trade-off for being able to just click on enemies to instantly kill/damage them. However, once I reached CEZ1, it started getting pretty difficult to reach some checkpoints. I can only imagine what Egg Rock will be like. I think perhaps there ought to be some way to replenish health.
On a related note, it feels a bit weird having rings be basically useless outside of life-collecting. I think they ought to do *something*, though I haven't come up with any ideas for them yet. Maybe add a "ring bar" in place of a hunger bar, slowly restoring health in a similar manner to the experimental "Combat Test snapshot" versions of Minecraft that came out a few years ago?
I love that you can punch down and pick up solid objects like trees and spikes. However, I noticed that placed spikes don't have any hitbox, and thus can neither harm Steve nor be picked up again. I also have yet to think of a good use for the trees (since they're way too tall to use as platforms), so punching them down feels kinda pointless. Maybe they should just drop classic, full-size Minecraft wood blocks, in order to provide something larger than a monitor to stand on?
I know it makes the most sense to play this character with mouse and keyboard (and that's what I did most of the time), but there's one thing about the gamepad experience I think ought to be improved: I tried mapping hotbar slot switching to my d-pad, but it was hyper-sensitive, moving several slots at a time unless I gave the lightest and quickest possible taps I could muster. I don't know how difficult it would be to make it less sensitive without negatively affecting how it works with a scroll-whell, but this is probably the closest thing to a game-breaking issue I found with the controls.
Some other miscellaneous suggestions:
- Add view bobbing to the 1st-person view. Doom, SRB2, and Minecraft all have it by default, so it feels weird that this character mod doesn't.
- For special stages, give Steve an elytra, and if possible, have him hold a firework item during the drill animation. With how complex his rendering is for normal gameplay, I wouldn't mind if Steve ends up just using pre-rendered sprites in the special stages. Anything would be better than default Sonic.
- Sneaking while in water or other liquids should make you descend quicker. (This could be useful in the goop sections of THZ.)
- This is probably difficult to implement, but using the spin/sprint button underwater should initiate swimming just like modern Minecraft. While in this state, your hitbox should shrink to the height of rolling character, allowing you to reach tight areas (or you should at least be able to reach tighter areas than usual). You don't have to worry about changing the horizontal size of the hitbox; actual Minecraft doesn't bother doing that, lol.
- On a related note, perhaps it would make sense to allow Steve to just enter the vanilla crawl state (perhaps by holding down both the sprint and sneak buttons), to allow the character to reach otherwise inaccessible areas. There were several routes I had to backtrack from because of the ceiling being just a little too low for Steve to enter. (Fun fact: in vanilla Minecraft, crawling started as an unintentional quirk of how swimming was implemented, but it ended up becoming standardized as a standard state that could be induced by forcing the player into a one-block-tall area.)
Some additional recommendations for other players (you might want to add these to the mod description):
- 3D models for Nightwolf's Steve mod will conflict with this mod, resulting in a smaller, second Steve appearing on top of the normal one. Kinda funny, but also annoying. Make sure to remove those models before playing with this mod.
- Don't forget to turn OFF "Lack of Perspective" in OpenGL options if you had it on for whatever reason. Otherwise you're gonna have a bad time.
Overall, this is an impressive mod that provides a whole new way to experience the game, with many fun concepts combined with interesting limitations. If I were rating this purely on uniqueness, clever concepts, and visual design, I'd give it 5 stars.
But as of the current version, the actual gameplay experience is frustrated by several issues that, compounded, make this character far less fun than I know he could be. For that reason, I only feel comfortable giving this 3 stars right now. (On an x/10 scale, I'd give it a 7.)
It is indeed very difficult to implement hotbar persistence across game sessions, and I'll admit I've exhibited a fair amount of neglect towards save files for that reason. Earlier today, however, I was informed of Xian's GlobalBanks script which exists to remedy this issue, so I am hoping to have it implemented in the next version.
The interaction range isn't something I've received much feedback at all about, but I will look into increasing it in the next version as per your feedback. Same with the item pickup range.
As for the inability to create bridges out of monitors, even just the action of placing objects on the surface of another object is in a less-than-ideal state at the moment, and I would rather get that fixed up before worrying about advanced sneaking tech.
I find it interesting that you mention the sprinting speed in specific being slow, because assuming the information on the Minecraft Wiki is correct, his sprinting speed is in fact 3.33% faster than it is in Minecraft. I imagine the issue is the less drastic change in FOV paired with the lack of camera bobbing (which you mention later in your review). I'll probably adjust the FOV in the next version, but implementing camera bobbing in a way that is both effective in conveying speed and won't make you feel sick from looking at it will be a challenge.
I believe you're correct in your assumption that Steve's jump height is lower than it is in Minecraft, so I'm going to increase it in the next version.
Methods of regaining health during a level is something I've pondered, although in the end I decided that infinite lives paired with health being restored upon level completion would be fair enough. But on second thought, maybe something like healing a couple hearts upon touching a star post (similar to how Mario games do it) would be a welcome addition.
The code for determining if an object can be mined is admittedly rudimentary. I suppose I could add exceptions for specific objects though. As for trees dropping wood blocks, I'd rather save it for when there's finally a proper gameplay element involving Minecraft items - which is something I wanted in the initial release, but a combination of the college semester starting and me realizing I was overworking myself led me to release Steve without it.
I'm aware of the hotbar slot issue, and I'm hoping to have it fixed by the next version.
The elytra was actually something I wanted to implement as a reward for collecting all emeralds (like a Super form, but without the need to collect 50 rings first), but that ended up not happening due to the same reasons discussed above. Hovever, even if I was in a better position to implement it, there's a chance I wouldn't be able to anyway because floorsprite/papersprite rotation is both very limited and very frustrating to deal with (it's a miracle that Steve looks and works as well as he does). You did mention that you would be fine with pre-rendered sprites, and that's fair enough, but the issue unfortunately applies to your swimming and crawling suggestions as well (which definitely wouldn't be using pre-rendered sprites). On a different note, your suggestion to make Steve descend quickly while sneaking in water is something I've been considering and will probably implement in the next version.
Finally, I did notice that both Nightwolf and I's Steve mods break when loaded at the same time. This should be easily fixable on my part by renaming Steve to something else internally, such as "mcsteve".
Once again, thank you for the constructive feedback, and I hope to fix most of the issues you mentioned in the next version.