I've been taking it easy today and it's already late, so I'm probably not going to share too much on this week's blog. (Scratch that, I had no idea how long I could write just reflecting on Dawn of Djinn.) But I did just record a Game and Chill (a nice beefy long one to boot) so a lot of the mis. things from this week will probably get brought up next week. Let's get stated.
First of all, no stream next weekend. TBH Kirby Dreamland 2 burnt me out so I'm gonna take a week off from streaming so I'll have a fresh mind when I jump back into things.
Next up, there's a new Paper Mario 64 mod that got released today. It's a small Easter themed mod to enjoy for the holidays. You can check it out in the link below. TBH I probably won't have a good moment to play it for a bit, so if you want to see what it's like I'd highly recommend checking it out instead of waiting for me to cover it.
Paper Mario: Eggstraordinary Egg Hunt by Den01, BOSS05 (itch.io) Finally, April 7th was the 1 Year Anniversary of Golden Sun, Dawn of Djinn. So I wanted to take a few moments to talk about that (especially because I attempted to in Game N Chill, but I think I got sidetracked in the middle of it all.
I've kind of stopped caring about a lot of anniversary and milestones tying to the activities I do online, but I think this one is important because working on Dawn of Djinn was a breaking point for a new chapter of my life. I've always had a passion for Game Design since childhood, and I've had a curiosity of playing ROMhacks for a majority of my online career. Most of you probably don't know the later because I was hesitant just to try playing stuff like that, because of how weird Nintendo has been in the past to fan-made creations. So just a couple years ago, I would of never thought I'd be making my own. But after hitting roadblock after roadblock with actually making games and getting myself comfortable enough with programming to actually make anything, I kind-of just hit a point of my life that "I didn't care anymore" and was willing to take the risk, with hopes that worst case scenario, I'd at least get comfortable enough to program my own creations. I just happen to stumble on a Golden Sun editing program that made modding completely possible without any programming and then I was hooked.
Fun fact, originally, I started modding in The Lost Age, as that was the software was made for but I got frustrated with changing the class system, so I decided to take a break by "just making a hard mode" for GS 1. It was originally going to just be Golden Sun with bigger numbers, especially since the editor didn't actually change text. Then one day I was rambling on the Discord about "how fun it would be to make new Djinn, but it wasn't worth doing because of the buggyness of text edits in GS1" and then I got recommended GS toolkit to actually make the text changes work, and suddenly I was making new, Djinns, then new items, new enemies and well... odds are if you're still reading this blog, you know how that all turned out. :P It's part of the reason why I'm conflicted about continuing Dawn of Djinn into Lost Age, there's a part of me that wants to just go in a more original direction if I mod GS2...but that's something I'll worry about when I'm done with Dawn of Djinn for GS1.
Funny enough, it ended up working too well as I'm now way deeper into making modded games than original programming. Not that I'm complaining, something like Dawn of Djinn has been the closest I've ever been to reaching my dream of making Overseer of the Elements into an actual game series, especially since the OC takes a lot of inspiration from Golden Sun in the first place. I've tried to get into programming mutiple times in the past, from using Game Maker back when it was Version 1, to majoring in Game Design in college until I learned how terrible the Games industry was and immediately transferred, Gamebuilder Garage, and etc. Nothing else was clicking with me, so I'm so glad that this did. In a year where 2022 was otherwise terrible to me, it was the ultimate silver-lining to it all. Especially reflecting back now and actually being able to visibly see people actively enjoying Dawn of Djinn online. From people reaching out to me on Discord and elsewhere to share their experiences and feedback with me, to just seeing that download number soar so high on ROMhacking.com , that still feels surreal every time I look at it.
For the fun of it, let's look at the number now... 1137 downloads. Again, I was impressed back when that number was 100, let alone a thousand. It's hard to admit somethings, but Golden Sun is kind-of a cult classic at this point. It's kind of crazy to think that 1000 different people played a mod of a game that hasn't been in the limelight for over 10 years. (The most attention Nintendo gave Golden Sun at the time was a port on the WiiU virtual console, and Camlot making a minor update on their website for HD versions of their offical art...yeah I'm grasping at straws for Golden Sun content so bad that I'm counting a minor update on the developer's website. :P)
Heck, even the whole RetroAchievement thing pleasantly surprised me... even if I am conflicted about it at times... it doesn't change the fact that someone not only went out of their way to play Dawn of Djinn, probably multiple times, to decide on and make those achievements, but enough people were interested in the concept to make it a reality in the first place. Now if only I could get over my concern of people getting so fixated on them that they don't enjoy the mod as is, or the awkwardness of not having agency over an element of my creation I didn't even know that it existed until someone told me. It's fine, Second Mix is gonna do what I should of done in the first place and not leave in a sequence break, only to tease it in the Readme...in hindsight, I totally invited something like that happening in the first place with teasing it and trusting everyone to go in order despite that.
Okay... I feel like I got very off topic, bringing things back around. Dawn of Djinn is a big deal to me and it's even more amazing that so many people share that sentiment. Golden Sun is at least getting a little time in the spotlight again with the whole Switch online announcement (and hopefully for the sanity of any new fans coming into the series, Lost Age isn't far behind it), but considering I started this little fan game as a way to give myself more Golden Sun content to play with, I'm happy to hear it gave so many others something fun to enjoy as well. Still working away at Version 2. Honestly didn't think it would take me a year. I think I made Version 1 in about a year and I thought that once the new classes were done I could just copy/paste everything else and be done. Thankfully, I realized I should put a little more care into it than that. Plus now that I'm juggling my time between Paper Mario and Golden Sun, it was inevitable that version 2 was going to take more time than Version 1. With Version 1 I was working pretty intensely on exclusively Dawn of Djinn, I think even things I normally do like videos got a bit neglected during that time.
It's been slow, but consistent and if I can find a good way to do so I'd love to show off a demo of my progress once I'm around Mongol Forest or so with progress on it. We'll see how that pans out though. Either way, thanks again for all your patience and here's to the future of Golden Sun looking even brighter. Heck maybe even Overseer of the Elements might become something more than sketches some day. If I could at least see that come to life before I hit my deathbed, my life would be complete. In the meantime, making Dawn of Djinn has been a very suitable consolation prize.
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