Epiphany

Agnosthesia was finished and the reception was outstanding. We talked about taking breaks after every hack but it never happened. But this time we truly needed it. We even felt like it might be time to retire for good. We made a lot of stuff and it became harder and harder to come up with levels and hacks that had something interesting and new to offer. And why not step away from SMW to focus on other hobbies after a hack like Agnosthesia. Seemed like the perfect time to get out.

We actually had a somewhat healthy amount of time in which we did not open lunar magic and focused on other things. But if you are a creative person, you can't just switch that part of yourself off. I also had this foolish desire to create that one hack I would forever be happy with from start to finish. Every time I had thought I achieved that, I looked back on hacks months later and thought "hm....I can do better than that."

Around 2 months after the release of Agno we started talking about hacks again and came up with an idea so ridiculous in hindsight, it's amazing how we thought it was ever good to begin with. Well ok...the idea itself was awesome and hilarious, but it would have required an outrageous amount of work. We figured we got so burnt out from making big hacks and trying to make them as good and polished as possible, so it might be a better idea to work on multiple small projects instead. Quick little 3 exit hack over here...another 5 exits hack over there and so on. We wouldn't allow ourselves to get obsessed and lost in details until we reached a breaking point. We'd just casually throw stuff together whenever we felt like it.

I think you should know where this is going by now.

One idea lead to another and we came up with a grand plan about how to connect all the projects together. It would involve not only hacks but visual art, music, a website, YouTube videos, heavy lore and various other forms of content. So we started working on it and figured it might take years until anyone would be able to see what the hell we've been up to. We even reached out to friends so they could assist us in one way or another.

Aside from the hacks we were making, a lot of this extra content exists on discord and our computers, but they will most likely never see the light of day. A few little things did end up getting out, but of course only me and Light know what these things are and what they are referencing.

The hack I started working on first had a completely different name and would only have 2 levels. They were later positioned as exits number 6 and 20 in what would become Epiphany. I kept working on levels, some with heavy ASM gimmicks and others that were flirting with vanilla. At one point I had multiple short and incomplete hack folders occupying every blank space on my desktop. They had names like "The Prophecy", "The Vault" and "Call It What You Want". All referencing Taylor Swift.

During this time, I was also asked to join a somewhat big hack collab that ended up going nowhere. So I got the 2 levels I contributed back and incorporated them into my own projects.

Another important piece of the puzzle revealed itself when Fyre150 sent me and Light a new port he had been working on. I loved it immediately and it inspired me to create abstract, minimal art in SMW. This is what turned into the "movie" that kicks off Epiphany's final level.

Eventually I had so much stuff spread across various projects but they all felt inconsequential and too short on their own. So I decided to combine all the chocolate levels into one hack and all the other levels into a second hack. This is when the chocolate hack was named Epiphany and the less ASM heavy hack would have been called The Prophecy. Some levels from the other projects ended up in Signals. I'd go back and forth between these 2 projects, making a new chocolate level one day, and another level where I wouldn't have to worry about a cool new ASM gimmick the next day.

At this point I had been working on all of this for maybe half a year and managed to put things aside for a good while. I ended up joining Light's First Step Forward and Signals projects and we always kept talking about and messing around with various other aspects of this big undertaking.

Before I returned to my project, I felt the need to finally remake Memento Mori, more on that in it's respective recollection. Me and Light also had the incredible opportunity to create a level for the Summer Games Done Quick 2024 SMW relay race and of course we jumped on that, regardless of how many things we had going on already. We think our level turned out well and getting to watch it be raced by awesome people in front of a huge crowd will always be one of the big highlights of our time as part of the SMW community. Karma is real.

One of the criticisms I had repeatedly heard about our hacks from multiple people was that we would have the ability to make one really good and fun hack that could be enjoyed by everyone but there were always a few too many chocolate gimmicks included that took it too far and negatively impacted the enjoyment people got out of the hacks.

This is what eventually caused me to fall back into a Memento Mori kind of mindset where I felt like I wanted to give people what they asked for and The Prophecy was almost finished and set aside as a 10 exit hack that would have been a fun happy time for everyone. Luckily I quickly came to my sense and said "fuck that shit".

The decision was made to combine everything I had into one big hack. The first half of the experience would mostly be The Prophecy levels, there would be some kind of cutscene or event happen at the midway point and then, everything would switch over to heavy chocolate in terms of gameplay and aesthetics. It would all escalate into a final level that would be as far removed from where the hack began as possible.

I guess you could say this was my Epiphany.

Epiphany is of course a song by Taylor Alison Swift. My obsession with her music only kept growing after Agnosthesia and I felt the need to make a hack fully dedicated to her music since Agno also had other references thrown in. Every single level name in Epiphany was a Taylor song or a reference to one of her songs, there are many portraits and some levels that directly referenced the lyrics of the songs. The only thing I couldn't shake off were references to Twin Peaks but thats a-okay. I think combining Taylor and Twin Peaks is funny anyway.

Big shoutout to mmBeefStew, who provided the Twin Peaks port that was used in combination with the final Taylor Swift portrait.

Designing that final level was an interesting experience. I can't remember what exactly prompted it but I was in a real mood and fell back into an Enter the Void style of creation. I didn't care about what people might think and just created one section after another. One was a fast paced d-pad check, another one reversed left and right every time you collected an on/off block, one where all you could do was tiny jumps and holding down the button didn't do anything and various other sections that ended up getting cut. I had so much fun. More fun than with anything else in this hack. The level ended up getting very long but I didn't care. I was actually excited about throwing such a long level at people who kept complaining as soon as a section reached 31 seconds.

I was now working on this hack for almost a year and I slowly started losing my mind. I talked about getting quite obsessed before but this time it got even worse. I was so committed to making everything as perfect as I could. I spent one entire day slightly recoloring all the death blocks in the hack. A change most people wouldn't even notice if it were pointed out to them. I kept tweaking setups and palettes over and over again and fixed every single cutoff I could possibly notice. One day I also decided to try desaturating a few sprites that I felt like stood out negatively. This had a ripple effect and pretty much every sprite I used had to now look nice and desaturated.

Occasionally there would be sections where all the colors would really pop and sprites returned to their vanilla saturation. I also got seriously annoyed with all the black outlines looking slightly too black. So in the end 87% of every single black color in this hack is a very dark grey instead.

I played through the entire hack every single day. Most times more than once. No matter how good you get at this game, one full playthrough takes slightly under an hour.

I was not happy.

Eventually I did see a light at the end of the tunnel. We decided to put this giant project we had going on hold indefinitely and everything we had made up to that point would be slightly redesigned and submitted to SMWC.

I was so sure this hack could get away without a 1.1 but I wrong. The first update I felt the need to make fixed various little things that always come up during 1.0 playthroughs. I thought that was it but then Germdove ended up getting a crash during the final level multiple times and I had no clue why. So many people streamed and finished the hack already and it was successfully moderated twice. It made zero sense. Me and Germdove talked in DM's and he was trying to help me figure out what was wrong. Eventually I stumbled upon the solution and it still didn't make any sense. Funnily enough though, I was no longer confused about why it happened to Germdove, I was instead bewildered about why it didn't also happen to everyone else.

The final level had that one section where you kept running forward with a tight timer counting down. You had to reach the door but all the unavoidable on/off's in your way would constantly reverse left and right. At one spot, there were two of these blocks very close together. For some reason, everyone, myself included, always ran through all these on/offs with the state reverting back to normal before the next section was entered. But Germdove managed to run through them in a way that would give him the incorrect state. And since the following room needed to start Mario right inside on/off death blocks that should have been turned off but weren't, his game crashed.

The good news is that I also ended up fixing even more slight issues that came up with this 3rd release, so now the hack is still about as flawless to me as it can be. I wouldn't go as far as to say this is definitely the best hack I ever worked on. I think Agno has a few more standout ASM gimmicks but also a few things I would tweak in hindsight. The one thing these 2 hacks have in common is that I got so attached to them that it's very hard or even impossible for me to watch first playthroughs on twitch.