A while back I was working on a mod for Psychonauts codenamed "Speedrun Hell". The purpose being twofold - firstly as something of a sadistic gift to the Psychonauts speedrun community and second as an excuse for me to make a mod with huge, wide-sweeping changes that would surely help me familiarise with many of the ins-outs and quirks of the engine and its API.
So what came of that effort?
Well, I set myself a deadline and got to work. I worked pretty hard, got a friend to playtest stuff, aaaand the first release really really sucked. Bad. I did not give myself nearly enough time to acquaint with everything, or finish everything I wanted to do. Quite frankly, I ran out of ideas real fast. The best ones were based entirely on suggestions from others. For example, enforcing Lungfishopolis movement throughout all of Basic Braining was a blast and one of the strongest parts of the first beta.
I made some other changes. I made the Lungfish fight a real nightmare which was good but it wasn't really a fun puzzle in the same way that the Basic Braining changes were. I also patched up a whole host of speedrunning tracks in different ways (this was the original goal - to make a mod specifically unpleasant for a speedrunner to play. This goal quickly fell aside in favour of just making the game a nightmare of difficulty.)
I also ported an earlier mod called "Meatier Circus" wholesale into it. This was one of the first mods ever created for the game and besides some fixes I basically left it as-is. It wasn't up to part with the difficulty of the other parts of the mod.
Milkman was an issue because I overtuned the demons way too much into an unfun, gruelling slog. And added several more fights with them. Thankfully despite my best efforts the runner managed to dodge most of them.1 The asylum trio was bad because... I changed nothing, basically. I didn't have ideas nor time. So it was just the same boring old run that everyone knew. I even patched up the skips in those levels so it was even worse. Not a good look.
All this to say, it was back to the drawing board. Despite still having basically no ideas, my ambition was still running wild. Fuck it - I might as well just make a hardcore mode mod, give the game a whole ton of extra spice!
Aaand efforts ground to a halt soon after. I made some good progress on overhauling the blueprint brain tank fight but didn't finish it unfortunately. But... maybe I'll go back to it soon. I still have no ideas but it was fun to work on. So maybe I'll return to that. And maybe you'll spot some updates on it soon.2
I really wanna make it a spectacle, you know? Really show off some cool stuff - new cutscenes, new boss mechanics, a super fresh experience to challenge even experienced players. Though it's gonna be real hard with still no level editing tools. Gonna have to work around it, I guess. Oh well.
I dunno if the VOD for it is still around in any capacity but I would at least like to shout out and thank AstraLumina for being the guinea pig that endured however many hours it took to finish the abomination that was Speedrun Hell Beta 1. I promise it will be much improved.
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And those demons weren't easy to implement! In theory they were because they're set up to be very generic because cut content and all that but I had to define the trigger volumes manually in code because we still have no proper level editor.
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But not too many because I want to keep stuff a surprise! Especially if I have any particularly good ideas.