)!I still have to finish the PPC and Palm OS versions of the next GBC world... but as it took too long since the last release and the Mr Dark boss fight is very "experimental", I need your feedback! So, in the meanwhile, here’s the demo for Arcane Forest! Quite a fitting world for Halloween, today!
It features all of the GBC levels and the Mr Dark battle! All of it is pretty much finished, but there can be room for improvements, especially when it comes to the boss! Tell me if everything works!
You have to download everything and merge all the folders as I’m limited by the maximum-file sizes here. As a result, only the original GBC graphics are available for now, and Time Attack doesn’t have its music currently (same goes for Pirate Cage, despite the file name for Arcane Forest).
The Mr Dark folder not only contains his music but also some unused sprites that I intended to use as an "animation" when you defeat him like in the original, but custom graphics layer each other randomly and you can’t remove them after spawning them, so all I could do was a replica of the stage’s graphics with a frame of Mr Dark’s soul glued in the middle... It also contains a separate version of the level with only the Mr Dark boss, so you can test the battle far more easily and directly fight him as many times as you want!
As you would expect, Mr Dark had to be very different due to ReDesigner’s limitations, and tons of mechanisms had to be implemented into the stage (I barely even had the space
)!But the main concept is still here! Here’s how it goes:
-Phase 0: Mr Dark floats in front of you. Jump or simply climb on a higher platform and the battle will start.
-Phase 1: "Fireballs" fall from the sky. Dodge them. Be careful as I had to spawn them pretty low as they tend to have the time to fly immediately into walls when they’re placed higher. They’re really not as "vertical" as their original counterparts...
-Phase 2: Instead of Mr Dark’s ball form (which was the thing I couldn’t replicate at all obviously), he’ll appear three times within a big lava ball with a Coloured Boll behind him to pick up. Break the ball, grab the Boll (sounds very weird
), and repeat until the next phase. Note that punching while jumping doesn’t do extra damage against them, but a barely charged fist can take them down quicker if you can dodge their fragments quickly enough afterwards!-Phase 3: You get a health power-up and lava balls fall from the sky and will bounce on the ground until they meet a wall and explode. Dodge them and their projectiles.
-Phase 4: Phase 2 again, but Mr Dark’s spawning spots are in a different order and each "ball form" get an extra small lava ball.
-Phase 5: The hardest one! A health power-up appears again (use it wisely...), and Lightning enemies will fall (one of the ReDesigner easter eggs and the enemy which came from Dark Magician’s Reign of Terror), and you both have to dodge them and to destroy them once they make their way to the ground (and then dodge the resulting projectiles); otherwise they’ll progressively take over the whole arena! Watch out for the sky, react quickly, and you should make it to the final phase! That one can take some learning before you can go through it without any damage.
-Phase 6: Phase 4 again, but with yet another extra small lava ball and different spawning order! Also, the final Boll is replaced by a Coloured Ting, which will end the battle. You’ll become invincible (a safety measure in case you somehow allowed any enemy to survive), Mr Dark’s soul will appear in an explosion, then Exit Signs will appear on the whole stage after a few seconds!
Done! If you played the complete level version, this will make you finally reach the World Map (though you can’t replay Mr Dark’s battle from there, like in the original); otherwise the level will simply end!
Note that every "attack" phase uses as many projectiles as in the original game, though their behaviour and extra splitting projectiles here make them more dangerous! But considering how much faster you are in ReDesigner, the battle would have been too easy otherwise. By the way, don’t worry about Mr Dark’s curses as the whole arena is set inside a Curse Cleaner and so you’ll be instantly cured before even noticing any effect.
I’ve also changed the "walls" as you suggested, and now they’re like the boss walls featured in Rayman Redemption, but with the GBC style and colours! I couldn’t really use anything else from Arcane Forest’s environment, so that’s the best thing I could come up with. In the end, they really had their use considering how many Gendoors and Fairies I had to put inside!
The idea for the walls is also slightly inspired by some old concept arts shared by Davide Soliani on Twitter, which revealed more of Mr Dark’s lair in Rayman GBC.
Making Phase 5 in particular was a nightmare... It was such a pain both to make it and to test it that I had a headache by the end of it!
I originally tried to use Evil Eyes instead, but they don’t disappear and keep firing their lightning bolts at you continuously even in Phase 6, and so it was too different and tedious. The way they react to the camera also made them pretty dysfunctional...
Sadly, their replacement is incredibly fast and only explodes when you punch them (which would have made them way closer to Mr Dark’s original final chain of attacks), but that’s all I could do to have Mr Dark throwing some electricity at you while having a phase that’s both much longer and more challenging than the others (like originally).
The main issue with all these attacks is they can’t aim at you unlike in the GBC game, so I had to make it so every platform is targeted at some point or another to maintain the illusion. Honestly, I’m surprised I even managed to find a proper equivalent for everything!
It definitely was the biggest challenge in all of this project so far... Hope you’ll like it, and tell me if you think some things could be improved!
As for the levels themselves, aside from some of the usual issues (some collisions had to be changed, some Pink Rings or platforms and obstacles behaving differently), it should be fully functional! But as usual, make sure to report any oversight if there’s one!
The complete Redistributor release should be made in about a week, once I fix any possible issue and I make the other versions! I can’t really complete the other versions yet as long as I don’t know if everything is perfect, since they’re always based on a copy of the GBC file and as I try to avoid adding too much unnecessary work, so your feedback is important!
Have fun!
Hopefully the rest of the other stuff you have left to do is a cakewalk. Though now I'm wondering what you'll do after Forever...Well, if anything at all. (I'm still looking forward to playing through Forever yet again!)
, but you expected that by now, right? 
(finally got to use this smiley!) I definitely got a great laugh out of this part!
~PluM
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