Halo 14 Definitive Edition

Not long after Side A and B were released, I (Saela) started thinking about how cool it would be to eventually combine them into one big hack simply called "Halo 14". It would have been a lot of annoying, tedious work and the next new projects were always being discussed and worked on, so this thought was put aside and seemingly abandoned.

Over the following years, more and more issues with the hacks came up. Too many messy setups and aesthetics. I had an old shitty laptop back then and there was absolutely zero visible difference between pure black and very dark grey, which led to some unfortunate visual oversights. So there was always a desire to go back in and fix everything. Especially since most people assumed Side A was the ideal introduction to our collaborative efforts.

After finishing Replica and Karma, I remembered that idea and sent this message to Light:

After talking about it a little, I truly wasn't committed to it yet but Light thought it was a rad idea and knew me well enough to realize there's a 90% chance I was serious about it.

This exchange happened a day later and from that point on there was no turning back.

There was typically one full section remade per day. Sometimes even 1 or 2 entire levels. In some areas only slight tweaks needed to be made and in other cases, setups had to be completely re-thought and aesthetics updated. There is a delicate balance involved in remaking something. You want to make it as good and new and exciting as possible, but it still needs to stay true to what it was. There were some sections that could have been revamped a lot more but at that point, they would have ended up being something entirely different.

Level order was also a slight issue. It would have felt off to start with the original opening exits of Side B halfway through, after defeating the first Phanto boss. Changes had to be made. Then the new issue was that we had so many vertical auto-scrollers and spreading them out so you don't play 3 of them in a row proved to be somewhat difficult.

Which brings me to my next topic.

All of this was happening at the end of December, when Light and his family went on a big vacation to Europe. That involved visiting my home town for a day and a half, which was incredibly exciting and surreal. When I released my first hack Silencio, I set up a board on speedrun.com hoping that a few people would give it a go. One day I saw Light (who I didn't know at all) had submitted a time. I realized he was running 1.0 though so I felt the need to send him a whisper on Twitch, asking him if he could switch over to 1.1 since aside from small tweaks, a full new section was added to this update.

Light was of course very nice and friendly and agreed to switch over. So I tried adjusting my sleep schedule to watch him do runs live (his streams used to start at 3:30am my time).

The first time I did show up, we of course started talking about not just hacks but also music, Twin Peaks and David Lynch. Light immediately struck me as a very nice, cool person. After stopping by few more times we quickly became great internet friends.

At that point I never considered we would meet for real one day. Seeing him walk up to me in person the first time was a surreal experience I won't soon forget. It must have been even stranger for him. I've seen and heard Light speak on stream for years but I am mostly text on a monitor for him. He might have seen me on a photo once or twice but that was it.

Anyway, the point is, after spending time in the city, going to restaurants and having fun with unfriendly waiters, we figured opening up LM to try and make a level together might be a nice experiment. To our surprise, it actually worked! Of course we couldn't think up anything crazy because time was limited but we did end up with a full 40-second section that was cool and fun to play. We would constantly trade spots in front of my computer and basically every setup was talked about and worked on together. Great times.

I only spent a little bit afterwards to do aesthetics and fix a few little issues that came up, but it's still pretty much the exact same level we had when Light left. It was a no-brainer to include this level (called The Eleventh Hour) in the new Halo project. The fact that it was yet another vertical autoscroller didn't really help with re-ordering the levels but oh well. Like I said, we had a limited amount of time and we had to do something fast and familiar. Also it doesn't matter. Vertical auto-scrollers are always fun.

I started getting really annoyed with myself and this project about halfway through. The big differences between Flux versions 1 and 2 meant I couldn't simply port anything over and all the little changes and issues started piling up. The exact same sprites, blocks and codes were used in certain cases but still caused headache inducing and unexplainable trouble. This meant even more levels and setups needed to be tweaked to make everything work again.

My initial idea was to make a whole new overworld too but I eventually decided re-using and updating most of the old one while adding a few extra subworlds was the way to go. Another issue came up with the story. It was always just a fun, silly little thing that you could either pay attention to or ignore for the most part. But I still didn't wanna redo it with the same style and all these walls of explicit text. I decided to make things slightly weirder and less direct.

I finished everything exactly one month to the day after I started (more work went into it after testing.) I'm so glad I got it done and I love the way it turned out but I hope I never get the urge to remake anything ever again.

In the end, the name "Halo 14 - Definitive Edition" was chosen because Nine Inch Nails released an updated version of their masterpiece "The Fragile", also called "Definitive Edition". It was remastered and features 2 additional songs. I only listened to it once and would recommend sticking to the original version to anyone who wants to get into Nine Inch Nails. The added songs aren't that good and ruin the flow of the album in my opinion. Hopefully the new hack gets a better reception.