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Actionsoft's latest game, Midnight Mansion 2: The Haunted Hills,  includes 28 mansions. The 8 Built-in mansions have 3 difficulties along with 4 extra custom mansions. We don't have that many other custom MM2 mansions yet. Design your own custom mansion! Info below.  You can find out more about the game here.

The original Midnight Mansion game contains over 150 mansions. The 8 included mansions which have 3 difficulty levels each, and about 115 approved custom mansions which you can download here and also several freely uploaded mansions. To know the difference between these three types of mansions, click here.

Are you a creative person and thinking of designing a mansion yourself? Or want to know about how to upload it? Click here and we'll show you! You'll find guidelines for betatesters here.

News:
Midnight Mansion 2: The Haunted Hills version 1.0.2b has been released. This fixes a bug in Jasperlone Mountains Hard. Simply re-download the game, bring over your custom mansions folder from the old version and play on. All your saves and high scores will not be changed.

Midnight Mansion HD (MM1) is now available at the Mac App Store and at the Actionsoft website. A Windows version is now available.

Here is a list of downloadable MM1 HD ready custom mansions, which also work in the Windows version of the game.

The MM2 custom mansion Hanging Gardens of Babylon by Freddy/SandyBean/Josephine/brell was updated on 19. Nov 2023 to add a fourth section. Available here


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A nostalgic blog concerning designing mansions (Read 7083 times)
brell
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Re: A nostalgic blog concerning designing mansions
Reply #30 - 04.11.2022 at 19:02:12
 
One more thing:

You may recall that there is a tool called Rezycle that can be used to convert MM1 cm's to MM HD cm's.  This does not work for MM2 cm's as MM HD cannot play those.  Also, MM HD cm's cannot be converted to MM 2 cm's.

So the converting options are:

MM1 cm's to MM2 cm's via the MM2 level builder.  The new format will be editable in the builder.

MM1 cm's to MM HD cm's via the Rezycle app.  The new format is NOT editable.
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« Last Edit: 04.11.2022 at 21:44:32 by brell »  

A stuck Jack is better than no jack
 
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Freddy
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Re: A nostalgic blog concerning designing mansions
Reply #31 - 05.11.2022 at 17:00:35
 
BLOG (part 21)



2022 November the 5th

And off we are. We = Jack Malone and I.

brell wrote on 04.11.2022 at 18:30:57:
... Note: you'll see lots of the same numbers appear in the dialog repeatedly. This doesn't mean the process is "stuck". This is normal. Conversion takes a while. ...


When the mansion is MM&M, 'a while is' a euphemism. Felt like more than a half hour. But that this is possible in such an easy way!
Cool

I detected a never before noticed double problem in room 15906 of
MM2 - Midnight Mazes and Monsters
. I created this room before I introduced ladder jumps further down in the same mansion. That is why I never realized that here it was possible to continue with taking the moving platform upward.

First problem is that Jack may die by falling from the wooden platform, something that absolutely not was supposed to be possible in this very easy room. After a jump to the left on the conveyor belt arises the other issue: a half Jack-stuck with Jack reappearing in the upper right corner. Or when he is stubborn even to a real Jack-stuck.

So for the very first time I dived into the MM2-builder to do an easy fix: making the ladder just a little bit longer to avoid the ladder jump.

Design flaw solved!
Smiley
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Freddy
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Re: A nostalgic blog concerning designing mansions
Reply #32 - 26.11.2022 at 21:02:13
 
BLOG (part 22)



2022 November the 26th

I am in 'deep' trouble because I don't know what to do first: play, restore MM&M, posting at my design-blog or start to do something with my Brave New World ideas. And for the time being I only have MM-time on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

This morning I started
MM1 HD - Nightmare Mansion normal
. It has a brilliant setup, but only for players who are interested in revisiting a mansion. Walking through all rooms, picking up all money and finding all secrets in one visit is nearly impossible.

Alex Diener
did two recorded visits and was afterwards convinced that in 'room 2 with the two purple doors' one had to make a choice between a left and a right path. And that further in this mansion it often felt like a guessing game.

He is right that at several places one has to make a choice without having any clue. But for me this is the challenge for this type of mansion. So this morning it gave me several hours of fun to get my Jack into the very first room of the red section with, I assume, all money and secrets. And a spare purple key. See image.

The last word isn't said about Nightmare Mansion normal, because I still have to resume this suspended game in room 17094.

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« Last Edit: 27.11.2022 at 13:11:16 by Freddy »  
 
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Olle the Greatest
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Re: A nostalgic blog concerning designing mansions
Reply #33 - 05.12.2022 at 23:21:01
 
I'm amazed that there's still activity in this forum, even though it seems like a one-man-show with perhaps no readers... until now Cheesy

Found an old MacOS 10.6.8 Server and plugged it into my TV at home to download the original MM (since not all the great MM:s are HD:s) and logged in just for fun, to find this blog.

Nice to see I'm not the only one still enjoying this outstandingly great game!
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"How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?"
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brell
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Re: A nostalgic blog concerning designing mansions
Reply #34 - 06.12.2022 at 16:33:08
 
Well, I have also been reading (and commenting a little) on Freddy's blog.
I am currently using VMWare Fusion to run MM. http://www.actionsoft.com/forums/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1659263236
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A stuck Jack is better than no jack
 
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Freddy
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Re: A nostalgic blog concerning designing mansions
Reply #35 - 09.12.2022 at 19:16:17
 
Hello 'everybody'!

The number of followers of this blog did increase with 50 %, from 2 to 3.
Grin

Hi Olle, nice to see you back on the boards. Don't hesitate to add replies.

I wonder if Semi-Native already had time and interest to search and find her old mac, because sooner or later I will need some betatesters ...
Lips Sealed Cool
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Semi-Native
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Re: A nostalgic blog concerning designing mansions
Reply #36 - 09.12.2022 at 19:39:29
 
Hi Freddy, brell and Olle, it's always good to see someone on here. I have my old Mac, but I haven't fired it up in a very long time. As far as I know, it's still working. I'll get around to it sometime.  Cool
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Freddy
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Re: A nostalgic blog concerning designing mansions
Reply #37 - 11.12.2022 at 14:46:42
 
BLOG (part 23)



2022 December the 11th

Freddy wrote on 26.11.2022 at 21:02:13:
... The last word isn't said about Nightmare Mansion normal, because I still have to resume this suspended game in room 17094.


A few weekends ago I could finish
MM1 HD - Nightmare Mansion normal
with all secrets. But that is not the point. The question was: does the master puzzle with all those (one way) poles, doors and keys fit, so that it is possible to visit all rooms and find all money and secrets in one visit?

Well, it does. In the whole mansion I left six doors unopened and arrived at the exit gate: from three colours two doors each. At the finish of the mansion I noticed that I had four unused keys that correspondent with two of the three doorcolours.

My conclusion is that for the third colour it is absolutely necessary to keep two doors closed to be able to get everywhere. And that makes it a cool puzzle for players who don't mind to revisit a mansion as often as needed to solve the problem.

But when a player starts a mansion, he is not aware of this information, so I do understand that one may get frustrated during play and call it a day.

In MM1 HD - NMn I also found a good example to explain the importance of a good balance concerning the difficulty degree. After being very very busy on normal level in the previous 5 areas, Jack arrives in the final grey section of 12 consecutive rooms where he has nearly nothing to do. See the image. He even doesn't need to climb the ladders. I assume that the designer have had something in his mind, but it didn't work out for the players.

This grey area also exposes perfectly an issue that may be seen often, but not in this size, in the original mansions. I know that in the hard version of NM Jack has to do a lot of things in the very same rooms. But in the normal version it went wrong.
Sad
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Freddy
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Re: A nostalgic blog concerning designing mansions
Reply #38 - 11.12.2022 at 16:32:31
 
BLOG (part 24)



2022 December the 11th

Early this morning I started to download all not-HD custom mansions from
brell
,
Semi-Native
and
Olle the Greatest
.

That will give me endless exploring fun and, meanwhile, an idea about how those mansions look in MM2. Yes indeed, I did convert them all.

@ Olle:
I don't know how to get the downloads for
Octopus Mansion 1.5
and
Octopus Mansion hard
working. Can you help me?

The first thing I did notice with the converted mansions is that the lava did change into green. Acid I assume. I better play the MM2 hint house first to figure out what the differences are between lava, acid and water. And then see if I may change water into wine. I mean acid into lava.
Wink

Anyway, when starting a new mansion from the empty lava room all lava will be orange.
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Freddy
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Re: A nostalgic blog concerning designing mansions
Reply #39 - 11.12.2022 at 17:50:46
 
BLOG (part 25)



2022 December the 11th

The visit of the right path in the
MM2 - Tutorial Mansion
brings me to an other important design issue.

I always tried to deliver neat work while building and pretty soon I realized that the best/easiest/laziest way to do that is create framed rooms. When parts of the bottom floor or left and right walls are missing, weird things may happen.

Have a look at both added pictures from rooms in the mentioned tutorial.

On the first image you see a room where Jack fell into the gap at right. Because of the snow, not me!
Grin

He felt to his death in the room that you see on the second image (screenshot later made from the map). Now, to start with, (far) to early the player gets a view of a room. In this case the knowledge of the saving point may influence the paths one is going to take.

But there are more important consequences. While falling you may catch money or shields or killing enemies. In rare situations you may 'fall' into a secret area! And most of all, sometimes Jack doesn't die because of hitting a pole or vine and later got stuck. So that is really something that a designer has to take care of when he decides to create unframed rooms.

For those who remember parts of MM&M, there were ... mazes in it and several had a lot of open rooms, things that I have to check during the restauration. works.
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« Last Edit: 13.12.2022 at 21:17:21 by Freddy »  

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