What modifications have people created over the years?

I’m interested to know.

The big one is Marble Blast Platinum (now PlatinumQuest).

Aside from that, there was also Marble Blast Advanced, which was inspired by the success of MBP, and Marble Blast Emerald.

Whirligig231 has released 2 mods: Marble Blast Powered Up (basically Marble Blast Gold with new features and ways to play) and Quaternion (which was released earlier this year).

Aaryl is currently working on Marble Blast Fubar, which has been in development for several years.

Gerson's Level Compilation is another notable mod, and I think Gerson's working on a sequel.

Of course, you, Jiquor, created Marble Blast Stop and are working on a sequel.

There were also several mods that were never finished, including Marble Blast Reloaded, Marble Blast Future, Marble Blast Opal, Marble Blast Space, Marble Blast Elite, Marble Blast Plus, Project Dragon, and Marble Blast Super.

Steven wrote: Aside from that, there was also Marble Blast Advanced, which was inspired by the success of MBP, and Marble Blast Emerald.

Quick note that MBA was before MBE, it just stopped having progress and eventually released the content they had. Wasn't not quite an incomplete release because of the amount of content, but certainly wasn't everything they had planned.

If mini mods count, don't forget Marble Blast Evil by Evil Taco and Rozi's Mini Mod!

I made Marble Blast Revived when I was 11 (spoilers: it was garbage) and I attempted to make Marble Blast Revived 2 a few years later but it failed

Steven wrote: Gerson's Level Compilation is another notable mod, and I think Gerson's working on a sequel.

GLC 2 has been out for some time now, but it's not on the downloads page.

There have been a lot of mods that fell apart after a few days because the creators realized that work was necessary to make mods. I think the golden age of the ProBoards forums was when a new mod was greeted with elaborate walls of text courtesy of Pablo and nobody. This would happen on a weekly basis. Not that the mod leaders ever used that advice, anyway. My favorite noob mod ever is Marble Blast Dzemal.

Also, Marble Blast Elite was the best mod ever but it was too good to be released to the public.

You forgot the greatest mod of all time

Also under the greatest mods of all time are Alexnico's failed projects: Testing Initiative Ball, Alex's Island, and Universes Coliding [sic].

eblu wrote: You forgot the greatest mod of all time

Also under the greatest mods of all time are Alexnico's failed projects: Testing Initiative Ball, Alex's Island, and Universes Coliding [sic].

And there's also Marble Blast Jeef!

These are all great answers. Tbh I never expected such thorough answers for a guy such as myself

I want to know more about Project Dragon. Can someone explain to me its goal, motive and design idea, and why it was uncompleted?

eblu wrote: You forgot the greatest mod of all time

Also under the greatest mods of all time are Alexnico's failed projects: Testing Initiative Ball, Alex's Island, and Universes Coliding [sic].

Universes Coliding was not a failed project,I managed (somehow) to complete it.

and yes that is a sic name

Jiquor wrote: I want to know more about Project Dragon. Can someone explain to me its goal, motive and design idea, and why it was uncompleted?

Okay, here's a story.

No game I've made is entirely original. Pretty much everything I do, creatively, is at least partly based on earlier works. I feel like anyone who has ever done anything creatively will say the same, that they can see other works hiding inside their own. Sometimes I actually go into working on a game project with an idea already in mind of which earlier games I want it to be a combination of.

So for Project Dragon, I was basically trying to combine the gameplay of the PSX Spyro games with Marble Blast. You would still roll a marble around levels, but the levels would be accessed from a hub. Completing some of the levels would then unlock the next set of levels. Yes, some of this general concept was preserved for Quaternion. But the levels in Project Dragon were mostly still platforming (i.e. not a lot of puzzles). There were boss battles, there was health, and you could talk to NPCs.

The project ended up being scrapped when, like about 80% of my projects go (and like 95% of Marble Blast mods go), I lost interest in working on the project. A big part of the reason for this is that I was starting to realize, simultaneously, a) the scale of the idea and the sheer amount of work that would still be needed to finish, and b) the relatively low quality of the levels I had put in thus far.

As a side note / piece of advice, this almost happened to Quaternion as well! About halfway through developing Quaternion, I was faced with the fact that the plan I had in mind for the game was going to take a very long time to finish, and at the same time I was already starting to get bored of working on the game. What saved Quaternion was me putting aside my original concept for the game and turning it into something both smaller and more fun to make. The original game would have been a lot bigger (15 full levels, the size of the worlds currently in the game), but even if I managed to release it, it also would have probably felt a lot blander, because it would have been the apathetic product of a disinterested developer. This is one of those instances where quality trumps quantity.

So I would say that what's important when making a game is to be able to dream big and at the same time have realistic goals too. As an example, I'm currently planning a game (not a marble game) with at least 18 levels, according to my overall plan. But at the moment, I'm only going to make one of those levels, and I've planned out the game design in such a way that I can easily make the game feel complete even with just that one level. So if I get burned out early, I have an exit strategy by which I can quickly stop working on the game and still have something release that feels finished.