Halo 14 Side A

Some of these recollections have been much easier to create than others. This is one where figuring out what we wanted to say proved to be somewhat difficult. Probably because we have conflicted feelings about this hack. Ascension was well received generally (especially with the updates) but some intense negative reactions caught us off guard. Of course we knew some of the stuff we put into the 1.0 version was messed up, but our hope was that people would understand that we were just having fun and that they wouldn't take things too seriously.

We were always proud of what we had made, but eventually we realized players were not unreasonable with some of their criticism. The hack was long and difficult and very fast paced and sometimes rough around the edges. There was a big cryptic puzzle you had to solve that would send you to another hack you would have to play through. Doing that would let you play through even more, long levels in Ascension until you finally saw credits. Some of the trolls and messed up sections we threw at players along the way also didn't quite land the way we hoped they would. Understandably so. It was just a lot. And people got exhausted.

Part of our harmless way to deal with it was to make up completely ridiculous level ideas for a fictional hack called Intentionally Hateful, named that because of feedback from one streamer who stated that had to be our design methodology. We just took it as a joke, but the funny thing is, pretty much all of those ideas were reworked into actual fun levels over the course of the next number of hacks.

So what were we supposed to do next? We didn't just want to make something we weren't excited about, but throwing together yet another really big hack including puzzles and secrets didn't seem like the right move. Eventually this idea popped up: "What if we made 2 smaller hacks with around 10 exits. The first hack would aim to be really smooth and fun and straight forward, while the second hack would use the same gimmicks for a more out there, experimental and harder follow up?"

That seemed really cool and exciting. We could make a lot of stuff but people would only have to play through 10 exits at a time. At one point we also toyed around with the idea to actually connect these hacks in a meaningful way. So you would be required to finish the first one before you could get access to the second. We didn't figure out how to make this work well and we also kind of wanted each hack to be able to stand on it's own.

We are both big music fans and one of the artists we have an equal amount of love for is Nine Inch Nails. Our favorite record of Trent Reznor's career is The Fragile. A double album with Side A having 12 songs and Side B having 11. Trent labels and numbers all of his releases as "Halo's" So his first release was "Halo 1" while The Fragile ended up being "Halo 14". Light also had this interaction at a skatepark that he felt was absurd and for some reason stuck with him around 2020. He was listening to music there when a teenager came up to him and just said "Your music choices are really cool! Have you ever heard of Limp Bizkit?" So of course after that story was shared, it had to fit in somewhere.

We threw together a silly little story about Mario wanting to go buy this record but needing to clear a bunch of kaizo levels on his way to the record store. The level names act as a playlist of songs he is listening to during this adventure.

Side A:

Recover by Chvrches

CIRCLONT14 by Aphex Twin

Heartbeats by The Knife

We Carry On by Portishead

H by Tool

Control Movement by Gesaffelstein

One Seven Three by All Else Failed

Friends Are Evil by Jesu

The Same Deep Water As You by The Cure

Thanatos by Soap&skin

All We Could Have Done by Nine Inch Nails

Downtime, All The Time by Heavy Sigh

Overall we think the hack turned out well. We came up with some cool gimmicks and how to implement them. The hack has a nice mood with a handful of levels that had neat visual progressions. We collaborated well together once more, the levels had interesting setups, were fun to play and generally easier and smoother than before. But we were constantly worried. "Would this be fun for other people?", "Do we have to make this easier?", "That idea seems cool but...maybe not for this hack?"

It was just constant second-guessing and the worst part about this is that the hack still ended up getting released with rough spots.

Every time we play through this hack, all we notice are more than a handful of setups that should have been worked on more. A lot of people now seem to think this hack is the perfect introduction into our collaborative efforts but we think hacks like Side B and Agnosthesia would work even better. Of course nobody is going to jump into Side B before getting through side A even though they could.

One of the things we are still absolutely happy with is the custom Phanto boss fight. We told spooonsss what exactly we wanted and he was happy to work on it. It was a very smooth process and it turned out just like we hoped it would. This hack would also introduce the start of us working with spooonsss for the next few hacks, who really could have been considered an unofficial third member. There is no way we would have made some of the ideas work without his contributions.

Really only one question remains before we jump into Side B.

Have you ever heard of Limp Bizkit?