Chaos Cards (an update to SRB2: Chaotic Edition)

Welcome to...
Chaos Cards!

Been a little bit since I updated anything here, I like taking breaks in-between my projects. But here's my next big project, Chaos Cards. If you've heard of the SM64 ROM Hack called "BAZR", the concept of this will be familiar. Of course, I'm not trying to rip off the idea completely, that hack goes for more roguelike elements, while this will just be integrated into the pre-existing Chaotic Edition mod. Rogue-like elements aren't off the table, but it's not the focus of this update of course.

Anyways! How this works is that your abilities have been replace by "cards", which gives you unique abilites. You do have the basic jump, spindash, and thok, but you have other moves at your arsenal, like an "Explosion" card that catapults you in a set arc, or a "Spark Jump" card that gives you small jumps that will attract rings, to the straight-up weird cards like the "Teleporter" card that sends you to a random part of the level. I currently only have 9 implemented thus far, but I have a whole list of ideas ready to be coded and implemented, with much more to come.

I have planned integrations with the Chaotic Edition mod, such as turning pre-existing chaos effects into cards (it'll be heavily visualized in-game), the shop system allowing you to buy new cards, and much more. As of right now, the current state of the mod has 0 integrations, but it'll come in due time, and I'll be sure to post about them here.

Here's a video showcasing what I've done thus far:

I hope to share more with y'all soon!

this is it, people. the true return of mod-on technology.

This is incredibly peak. Can't wait to see where this goes.

Alright, update time! I've spent most of this time just updating the UI... makes me think I should've waited an extra day to make that youtube video, but I was really eager to show off that I've started a new project. As you can see here, this is one of the new ability cards, the "Thwomp"! Acts kinda like the bounce bracelet from SA2 now that I think about it. Thus far I have 11 cards, all of which vary in terms of ability.

The one below is "Spark Jump", it was already shown off in the gameplay showcase, but now it has the defining ability of attracting rings! If you think the way it attracts rings is familiar, you're right, I just ended up using the "Classic Ring Attract" made by Golden lol. It saved me the trouble of having to code up my own implementation, though that said I did tweak the numbers so the rings aren't as chaotic as the original add-on (funny considering where this is going lol).



There's also the "Purple Gem", and yes, it's from Sonic '06. Behaves how you've all seen it work when people show it off, just gives you infinite double jumps when you're small. ...though it lasts 5 seconds this time around, just pretend they fixed the energy meter in the retail release.



And there's more of course, but these are the ones I feel like are worth showing. There is "Teleporter", but not much exciting there since it just teleports you to a random spot of the map (and currently doesn't check if the ceiling is high enough, so you can get squished by a thok barrier, oops).

I'm very excited to show y'all more in the coming days, I have soft deadline set for when the Switch 2 releases... if only because I pre-ordered one and I'm very eager to get that in my hands. If I don't hit that deadline, then I'm not gonna rush myself, I've caught myself rushing some of these things and having to make like, 5 updates to fix all the stuff I missed lol. But with this, I feel like I can get this done in time. Time will tell though!

Next up on the agenda is me making more cards, and once I get this in a good enough spot, slowly integrating it into SRB2:CE itself, including the shop systems. My current plan is to have the current teleporter also let you change what gamemode you're currently in; either you'll use the "Chaotic Engine", or the "Chaos Cards" system. ...there will be a way to enable both if you want to maximize your pain, don't you worry.

JSC: The SM64 to SRB2 transfer.
I love this ROM hack (I meant BAZR) because I had to use my brain to get stars and coins faster.

Idea: Add the long jump card

Another day, another update, here's what I've done since the last post.


I'll start with this, if only because this has caused me problems for no reason. Living up to the name of the "Nefarious Anglerfish", this card has been crashing the game. What does it do? It just scans the whole level for enemies, and sets you as their target. I don't know why that causes the game to crash, and only sometimes does it crash, but it sure does. And that's just annoying.


Now for the juicy stuff, cards that actually function. This is "Lava Boost"; it'll send you up in a set arc, based on the momentum you had before you did the jump. That is to say, if you're perfectly still and use this, you'll go straight up, and continue to go straight up, no matter what direction you hold after. It also expends some of your rings; I plan on having some burnt rings get tossed out of the player to indicate as much.


Another new card is the Firework card, which works the exact same way as the Chaotic Edition effect of the same name, it even has the chance of exploding you when you use it. I'm not sure if I'll go with my initial planned system of "turning" chaos effects into cards, since there's not really that many this'd work with.


The "Wings" card gives you wings that you can use to fly temporarily. If you hold it, it'll also let you fly up, and once you run out of juice, you can still float slooowly back to the ground. Something you'll also note is the Jump card is marked as a mystery card; you won't know what card it'll be until you first use it! It could be something good... or could be something bad. Or maybe it's something you'll wish you didn't use yet, since it just chucked you into a pit.


A new-ish card is the Super Spindash! While you're holding down the button to use it, it'll cost rings, and it takes a bit longer to charge. But once you let go, you really go zooming. Another thing to note about this is you see an "x2"; this is a multiplier you can randomly get on cards. When one of your cards expires, there's a chance while drawing for a new one that you also get more of the same in your other slots! It goes up to a 3x multiplier, after that your cards can't get more uses. If you really wanna save up a card, there's a good chance you'll get good use out of it later!


To wrap this up with some small stuff that isn't worth showing off in GIFs, I've made some trap cards that instantly use themselves when they're given to the player. The aformentioned Anglerfish card is one of them, another is the "Over Again" card, which sends you instantly back to the last check point. I turned what used to be the Thwomp card just be the bounce bracelet from SA2; now the new Thwomp card is a trap card, once you get it, whenever you go mid-air, you'll go hurtling back to the ground.

Considering I started work on this 4-5 days ago, I'm impressed with myself how much I've already gotten done with this, and how polished this is turning out already. Of course there'll be many weeks ahead of constant bug testing, one thing I noticed is how, due to me ripping out the ability to jump, you can't escape from things that carry you (the spinning things in Castle Eggman, or those annoying birds in Red Volcano, etc.), so I had to fix that up. Another thing is I'm gonna have to rip out support for NiGHTs stages, since the mechanics are flat-out incompatible with this.

Next up on the agenda is probably starting to do work on integrating this with SRB2:CE; i've already borrowed some assets and stuff (it's currently using a hijacked PK3 just for me to store stuff in) and some borrowed functions too. I've already made preparations for toggling the chaos cards on and off, and I should ensure the regular chaos systems work well in this way too. That'll of course necessitate reworking the shop/rings system a bit too, especially as I figure out what to do about ring multipliers.

More updates time, I've been integrating this with SRB2:CE; been doing most of the light work, not much heavy integration just yet. That'll come once the shop systems are integrated, and I have plans to show-case the cards in their full glory... which will take an updated menu system to do that, oh no.


In the meantime, I've been working on some other aspects of SRB2:CE itself, since I don't want the Chaos Cards system to be the only thing I throw in here. First off, text boxes in Chaos City now smoothly move up and down! ...it took some serious hijacking of the textbox library I'm using to perform this trick, so if your name starts with "C" and ends with "loneFighter", I'm so terribly sorry if you bare witness to the code horrors that lay beneath this.


I've also tweaked how the Teleporter menu works, now you also get the option to disable the Chaotic Engine (as I'm referring to it now; this screenshot is older), or the Chaos Cards system. In v3 you could disable it, but you'd have to wait for the next level to start; now it'll stop it if you choose to disable it in the first 15 seconds of the stage. ...to be fair I might change this to be the inverse, that is you can't enable it after 15 seconds have passed; this is just to prevent people from cheesing the Ring Multiplier system. Which, while doing all of this, I have discovered a horrible oversight I had to patch out.


Also, I have decided Fang will be the shop for the new Chaos Cards. I was contemplating Metal Sonic, since I feel it'd more fit him, but considering the unlock requirements to get him (I have made it slightly easier to find him in v4 now, with other planned changes making it easier to get the dialogue from Knuckles that hints at this), and the fact that Fang's just been there teasing the fact he will have a shop soon, I decided it'd be more fitting for him to get one. He was initially planned for the Randomizer portion which I ultimately scrapped from the last version, to do at a later time. But, that's still a ways off, since that is a very complicated system that's hard to get off the ground. Thus, he deals cards now.


As for new card abilities, I haven't added much since I'll be honest, I'm running out of ideas lol. Here's "Boost", this works akin to the Sonic Rush games, or Sonic Unleashed Wii, which gives you a forced burst of speed until the duration of it ends. It'll also make you temporarily invincible! I might have plans to make the player get stunned if they slam into a wall, but that might be egregious so maybe not. There's a reason they scrapped that from Sonic 2. ...then again they did include that in Sonic Unleashed and people didn't complain...


And now here's Brawl Code. I think the GIF speaks for itself, but if the joke isn't obvious, it's based on the infamous tripping mechanic from Super Smash Bros. Brawl. You're left completely vulnerable when it gets applied to you.


And now I'm getting some of the card art done by a good friend of mine, Chesapeake! You can see it here with the "STOP!" card. Just wanted to throw a mention of that in here somewhere.

Bonus GIF:

EeveeEuphoria said:

so if your name starts with "C" and ends with "loneFighter", I'm so terribly sorry if you bare witness to the code horrors that lay beneath this.

Click to expand...

Is that a Gravity Falls reference?
(The "the name starts with "D" and ends with "ipper"" thing)

Imagine a pre-made deck that is called: The Sonic Deck

Time for another update! Real quick, another gameplay showcase dropped:

Now with that... I don't have much to show, unfortunately! I've been reeling it back a lil as I'm coming up to some big challenges regarding this, mainly further SRB2:CE integration.

\
With that said, it is indeed happening! There is now a store menu for this; it's still a bit rough, especially as I'm using the custom font library to render the text, which none of the other menus use, but still!


In other news, I have been doing more to the base SRB2:CE experience, it's not much I can tell you, but... I have added baked in shadows to the map, to make it look a bit nicer.




Sorry there wasn't much this time around, I'm keeping myself in check to not wear myself out too fast on this, I've done a lot already, but I still have a good bit ahead of me before I can launch this! There's a whole bunch of other things unrelated to chaos cards that I've been meaning to polish up in this mod anyways, so I've been taking my time tidying up code and the such, whenever I can.

skibidi toilet card

EeveeEuphoria said:

so if your name starts with "C" and ends with "loneFighter", I'm so terribly sorry if you bare witness to the code horrors that lay beneath this.

Click to expand...

I'm already sorry that you have to bare witness to the code horrors that lay beneath the original textbox library, to be honest...

That aside, this looks interesting so far! Looking forward to playing this and getting stuck at a spin gap /silly

Also, just sayin': Fang really DOES fit more for the Chaos Cards. If anything, Metal makes sense for randomizer-related things because he's a robot (and thus knows how the RNG works)

Add a homing attack card

Hey, EeveeEuphoria! Is there going to be new stuff if you 100% completed the unlocks?

New update time, things have been slowing down because of things happening IRL, and just a genuine lack of ideas coming out of me lol. Think I'll start buttoning this up for release next week, no promises though!


First off, a new card, "Delete"! ...I basically ripped the concept right from Mosa Lina, it's a card where you can delete objects, but not only that, it "deletes" terrain! It basically just pushes them down to your current floor level, really.


A more clear look at the terrain "deleting" capabilities.


Another new ability, the "Frog" card! This is an early GIF I took of this, but it still basically works the same; you can ride atop the frog and let it take you places! And yep, this is another one I took a bit from Mosa Lina; you're not meant to "ride" the frog there, since momentum is severely cut down there, but I decided this is how it'll work here. I might tune the numbers of this somewhat to make it more powerful.





I've also been working on the ability to laminate cards! This basically boosts the power of your cards in unique ways, and generally increases the amount of cards you get when given the card. Not all cards will get this, but a lot of them will.

Some final plans of mine are to maybe introduce a new item that would enable a "Raw Random" mode, which disables all the features I have in here to try to protect the user from absolutely unmanageable chaos. But, if you buy this item and keep it on, you'll disable all incompatibility checks with the Chaotic effects, and overall make things much, much more difficult, since now you can possibly softlock, or even crash the mod entirely.

I also plan on adding little upgrades to the card system itself, I've debated on if I should have custom2 be a button that can be set or not, and I need to figure out further upgrades than the couple I have jotted down.

But yeah, the roadmap up ahead is tightening up, I need to clean up the unlocks screen to properly show the cards, I need to implement a blacklist system for cards (so basically the "Toggle Effects" thing made for the Chaotic System, but for cards only), and maaaybe touch up some of the HUD elements. I might also toss in a couple of the ideas that didn't make it into the final cut before, if I got enough spare time after all this to do so.

Here's hoping I get this out before the Switch 2 launch!


Bonus GIF:

Another lil update! Been chipping away at this little by little, but the finish line is looking closer and closer!



First off, there is now a new system in place to make the cards system more interesting; you have a limited stock of cards! Once you run out... that's it. If you can't finish the level after you run out, you get sent all the way back to the start of the level, in the most brutal way possible.




I'm now also doing work on many of the little upgrades you can get! I've been fine-tuning the balancing, trying to figure out what works and what would be better. For instance, "Auto-Refill" used to just be... you get infinite cards, and that's it. But that's kind of boring, no? So... you get card refills if you have 100 rings, and it only takes them away once you run out of cards! Simple, but way more engaging than just "you don't run out of cards".

I've been able to just barely scrape by in nearly all the levels with just 10 cards and Auto-Refill, so, it's definitely possible! ...but the deck upgrades do exist for good reason, I think 20 should be plenty to beat most levels. The one level I can't test right now is Egg Rock Zone... because the anti-gravity straight-up does not work. At all. The very first section where you flip onto the conveyor belts? Completely broken; you hear the sound for flipping, but it doesn't flip you! This is going to be a nightmare figuring out how to incorporate this into the mod design, and could be a serious roadblock.



In the meantime though, I have drastically expanded the list of laminate-able cards, with there being a second page not shown here, even! There's also been a lot of work done trying to get more card designs, two new ones are in this post (Red Button and Delete are done by my friend Chesapeake!)


Wrapping things up, Metal Sonic now... kind of serves a purpose, until I give him a real purpose later down the line. Just annoy him into giving you an extra card! This is currently the only one you can unlock outside of the shop, I was planning on there being more, but as it stands I only have 27-ish cards on hand, so yeah.

Roadmap ahead is... kind of confusing, if only because the reverse gravity junk has thrown a gigantic wrench into my plans. I'm not sure how to account for Egg Rock Zone because of this, I'll be quite honest! I want the whole vanilla campaign to be beatable, so I'll have to think of SOMETHING. As of right now, whenever you're in something that the game considers to "carry" you (minecarts, roll-out rocks, the annoying pterodactyls, etc.), pressing "jump" just gives you a normal functioning jump. So... I might consider that in these anti-gravity sections, that expect you to have a normal jump. Even though that'd be incredibly confusing.

Bonus GIF (incidentally, this shows off the new card counter at the bottom-right, it has an animation when you take a card out!):

Small thing worth mentioning: with how much space the UI takes up, it might become a bit hard to see ahead of you in resolutions with a more square aspect ratio (such as the game's default 8:5). Consider either reorganizing it or slightly shrinking it down (closer to the size it is in BAZR, maybe?)

Undyne, what's the next update number?

And here we are... the final update. This finally comes out in a couple of days!

I have basically everything I needed done, just need a couple tweaks here and there maybe and it should be set to go live by then!

With regards to the flip gravity situation, I have decided that the game will give you a "temporary jump" card; it's not really a card, it just grants you your regular jump ability when in those situations. This also happens when the game determines you're being carried by something.


Outside of that, I've made one new final card; the Wheel card. Basically acts like the wheel ability from the Kirby series. GIF I recorded here is a bit old; this puts you in the spinning state, but you have full control if you move your camera. ...I hope that won't be an issue for controller players lol.

...and I don't have much else to say, actually! Most of the other stuff I've done is just create new card designs for the remaining ones, a lot of the tidying up, and finalizing some last second changes. There was a bunch of tedious bugfixes, playtesting, and even more bugfixes on top of that. I tested practically all the cards in reverse gravity, and it took so much work to fix it all... for something that's only used for 2 levels in the game. Ugh.

All that said, I'm glad I got this done in time for my self-imposed deadline of the Switch 2 launch! I did a whoooole lot of good work at the very start, but of course, the polishing stage takes a long time, but is very worth it to make something real good. I'm hoping this is mostly bug-free, I only had one playtester this time around, and I only briefly tested this in netplay. Since it worked the first time in netplay, and I haven't seriously altered how the mechanics work since then, it should work... let's hope I'm not jinxing myself here.

As an aside, my local GameStop is doing a midnight launch event, and I'll most likely attend it. I missed out on the one for the Switch 1 since... I got a pre-order in at the very last second, and didn't know they had a big event for the midnight launch, I just went to it when it struck midnight lol. Shoutouts to everyone else getting a Switch 2, hopefully this'll be something you can look at if your delivery gets delayed, or just something to play while taking breaks from the console x3

Bonus GIF:




...oh, just one more thing, I'll just drop the changelog here. Just 'cuz.

Yay! Finally, a request that I always wanted!!!