Test Mod

Use Test from the selected mod's in-game editor menu to play the mod with editor data loaded. This is the fastest way to catch missing files, invalid references, bad loops, broken spawns, and gameplay balance problems before exporting.

What Test Does

Test mode sends you through difficulty selection and loads content from the editable mod folder. Gameplay mods use their own game pack, borrowing missing content from 30th Anniversary. Presentation-only reskins run 30th Anniversary with the editor mod applied as a skin, keeping gameplay and the roster supplied by the base pack. Test falls back to Classic if 30th Anniversary is unavailable.

Use test mode after:

  • Adding or changing character animations, boxes, logic, or audio events.
  • Editing level scenes, spawns, walls, collision, or music.
  • Adding custom sounds, music, loop metadata.
  • Changing difficulty settings.
  • Editing character color palettes. Choose a palette in character selection; players and enemy spawns use their configured palettes in-game.

Classic character, level, audio and cutscene reskins can all be tested here without exporting. Test applies the editor skin temporarily and leaves your saved skin preferences unchanged.

Hot Reload

While testing, you do not have to quit and relaunch to pick up an edit. Pause the game and choose Hot Reload.

This reloads the active content pack — and the editor pack too, when they differ — then resumes play. You stay in the same session, at the same point in the level, with your reloaded data in place.

Test builds a stable color mapping from the character's base palette guide, then indexes only sprites requested by the normal loaders. Character selection loads its idle frames and icons; full animation art is loaded when that character is needed in gameplay. A cache in memory tracks source image hashes, indexed pixels and live textures. An unchanged Hot Reload reuses those textures. Editing an alternate palette updates colors without rebaking sprites; editing sprite art only rebakes that sprite. Changing the base guide invalidates dependent sprites, which are rebuilt when requested. Colors absent from the base guide use its nearest color, as in a palette preview, so keep the guide representative of your art. The cache survives Hot Reload and repeated tests of that draft, but is rebuilt after restarting the application or reopening the draft with a new provider. Source art is never overwritten. Verify the exported package too: export computes its mapping from the full sprite set.

Hot Reload only appears in the pause menu while a mod is open in the editor. It is not present in a normal game, so if you cannot find it, you are probably running an exported mod rather than testing an editable one.

This pairs with the editors saving every change immediately: there is no save step in the Character, Level or Audio Editor, so the loop is simply

  1. Change a value in the editor.
  2. Switch to the running game.
  3. Pause, and choose Hot Reload.
  4. Keep playing, now with the change applied.

That makes it practical to tune things that can only be judged in motion — hit box timing, hit pause, jump arcs, grab range, enemy aggressiveness, music loop seams.

Two caveats. Hot Reload re-reads content, so it does not undo anything that already happened in the session: enemies you have killed stay dead, and an enemy already on screen keeps the stats it spawned with. For changes to spawn data or level structure, restart the level. And because it discards palettes it no longer recognises, a palette you renamed mid-session may vanish rather than update.

Good Test Passes

For characters, test player control, enemy AI, hit reactions, throws, item pickup, weapon use, sounds, and portrait/icon presentation. See Character Editor.

For levels, test scene transitions, scroll boundaries, wall collision, spawn triggers, enemy order, item placement, cutscenes, music, and special screens. See Level Editor.

For audio, test replacement entries, music start points, loop transitions, and volume balance. See Audio Editor.

Troubleshooting

If something works in a tool preview but fails in test mode, check references first: mod names, entity names, sound names, music names, animation IDs, and classic replacement targets must match the saved data.

Export only after the mod loads cleanly in Test. Related page: Export Mod.