DOWNLOAD 1.0.0: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12iOOvOdZPFT-l-FQprsmRhkLUc0M805l/view?usp=sharing

Sooo, I took a bit of a hiatus from Project K and put this together! It all started when I got bored one day and decided to write a script that divides a grid into a specified number of regions of random size and shape. Then, I decided to turn that into a game thing! Near the beginning, I didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted to make, at one point I thought it might end up being basically Ecsaiz 2, then it turned into something completely different.It's a little arcade-style arena shooter, inspired by games like BubbleTime. It's got very in-depth scoring mechanics and I think it's super fun although I'm biased and I also think maybe the mechanics are too confusing. Would recommend reading the instructions first.

The player character is Kyan because I put him in there as a placeholder and then was too lazy to make something else to replace him with, so, there you go.

My high score is 4,617,787,470,355.

My buddy Nirusu was working at a museum at the North pole, and I decided to visit him there. The closer to the far end of the museum, the colder it is. In fact, there was an area at the end which was sectioned off because it was too cold -- you're still allowed to go there, but only once. I did so, then quickly returned to the main part of it.

I accidentally opened a freezer by mistake, and two baby ducks hopped out. They were there so they could be put into stasis for some reason. So, my friend and I grabbed them, shoved them into separate compartments of my backpack, then shoved the whole thing back in the freezer.

Unfortunately, it didn't work -- the ducks grew to full size in a matter of hours, broke out of the freezer and started trashing the museum. Nobody could control them.

This is that secret project thing I mentioned. I have a real name in mind but I won't reveal it until I'm sure I'll have something to show for it. No promises yet, it might still all come to nothing.
 
The plan is for a metroidvania type platformer with fancy advanced movement. I was going to write a long document about all the things that inspired me and how I arrived at my super brilliant design decisions, but instead, for now, I'll dedicate this thread to what I've actually accomplished so far.
 
Originally, Sypher was going to be involved with this, but given that he's not in the picture anymore it'll be just me again. Although, I want to get a few trusted people together to look over things to make sure what I'm doing isn't awful.
 
A lot of ideas been carried over from a tech demo I made in 2019 and then cancelled, which I called Legends' Perdition. I got pretty far, though.
 
The basic platforming physics is all there and I'm quite happy with it. I wanted smooth comfy platforming physics that still kind of resembles the style I used for Legend of Grey Moon and the Solar Shadows, but updated with all the modern conveniences for the smoothest and most comfy platforming experience. So, I added coyote frames, input buffers and corner correction, and so far it all works great.
 
I originally wanted to add moving blocks, however, that turned out to be monstrously difficult so I decided it wasn't worth the trouble.
 
I also reduced the base walking speed and jump height so that things don't get ridiculous once the movement gets upgraded. One of the reasons why Legends' Perdition failed was that the character was too agile, which clashed badly with the contained, single-screen rooms of my other platformers. So, I'll have bigger, scrolling rooms this time. Like Misery of Magic, the game window will be 853x480, but unlike it, it will make use of all the extra space to show you more of the room. Misery of Magic has 640x480 rooms and uses the extra space for the sidebar, and for whatever reason in Legends' Perdition I copied the sidebar thing because I'm a dumbass I guess.
 
To accommodate the bigger rooms, I created an upgraded "grid system", which is what I call the code that connects the rooms to each other. LoGM, SS2 and Misery of Magic all have very similar systems where all the rooms are part of a grid and each room's position within that grid is encoded in its internal name. This is very convenient because, when one goes out of bounds, the game can automatically figure out the name of what room should come next so all I need to do to put a room in the right place is to give it the right name. With the Legends' Perdition demo, I upgraded it a bit and and made it so that rooms didn't necessarily need to be all the same size, although they were still limited in how they could be connected together. 

However, I've totally overhauled the grid system for this new project. The game now automatically builds a list of where all the rooms are on the grid and how big they are. When the player leaves a room, it combines the position of the player character within the old room with the position of the old room within the grid to calculate a "global position" of the character, then checks that global position against the list of rooms to see if it's inside any of them. If it finds one, it can then use the global position to figure out exactly where to place the player within the new room.
 
It's nearly as convenient as the old system and lets me connect rooms to each other however the hell I want!

Like a year ago, Charlie said on CSTSF that I could make a new planet for Serenth's Apocalyptic Wind Tower, with a planetary ID of greater than 2100, and I kinda never bothered with that until now, so... Here you go I guess. It's inspired by some wild dreams I had many years ago.


Name: Astel Aventad
ID: 3012
Sage Goddess: Claiyfoure (there are no regular Sages, she is the only one)
Adjective: Astellyan
Continents: 1
Countries: 0
Size: 1.45 Newerth diameters


The Graveworld of Astel Aventad is an inhospitable rocky planet, somewhat larger than Newerth. It was shrouded in myth until it was located in a remote corner of Serenth. It is covered in ancient Elven ruins, but now most of the planet is devoid of life.


MYTHOLOGY:
For a long time, it was only known about through the Arx mythology, a vast collection of insane stories about the distant past of Newerth, most of them entirely made up. One story claims that, some 300,000 years ago, Astel Aventad was "the city between the worlds". A later story claims that, in eons past, Newerth was part of an alliance of five friendly planets, all of which were part of a "great migration" across the universe. However, Newerth started to slowly be affected by a creeping magical corruption. Eight heroes travelled to some cave, which happened to be the most evil place on Newerth, in order to fight the corruption, but they failed. They did, however, find the source of the corruption – a human who had been granted the powers of a god, but could not handle it and went mad. He used his god powers to take the other four planets in the alliance and fuse them together to form the "holy homeworld" – a terrible molten planet which was a bastion of tremendous evil. The name Astel Aventad was re-used for this planet. One of the surviving heroes went there to find a place called the Stone Heart of Energy.


The planet was believed to be fictional, until it was discovered in 2003. The story is still made up, of course – the planet is now known to be entirely natural in origin.


CONTINENTS:
Astel Aventad only has a single continent. It has no name and uses continent ID 0.


LOCATIONS:
The planet is divided into two main regions.


The Face is a roughly circular region of pale brown rock and sand, covering approximately 1/6 of Astel Aventad's surface. It has several vast mountain ranges, which do indeed look kind of like a face if you squint a little. The vast majority of the remaining land-based life on Astel Aventad exists in The Face. Locations here include the Stone Heart of Energy, whatever that is, and a few recently-constructed research stations.


The Flats covers the majority of the planet and consists of a smooth, dark stone surface, ranging from black to red-brown. It is the remains of a prehistoric sea of lava, which slowly froze. In some places, a shallow ocean covers it. The Flats are rich in eternium. Life has survived in the ocean, but the land in The Flats is mostly desolate. This area contains many ancient ruins, some of which are quite extensive. It is thought that these were built by an Elven race, who arrived from off-planet, and were equipped to survive the harsh conditions of Astel Aventad, until the civilisation was destroyed by an unknown disaster. These people were called the Moon Elves, but they are believed to be extinct. In case they are not, they have been given racial ID 3920.


Somewhere on the planet stands Serenth's Apocalyptic Wind Tower.


SEASONS:
Various scientists and explorers still disagree on how to define the seasons of Astel Aventad because the Moon Elven calendar is not well understood. It is known that the Astellyan year is approximately equal to twelve Newerthian years.


According to one popular model, there are four different systems of seasons in play in different parts of the planet. The seasons are of wildly unequal length. There are 8 seasons near the equator, 7 seasons near the poles, and two separate regions of 9 and 11 seasons covering the remaining areas. In some regions, seasons can be up to several Newerthian years long.


DAY/NIGHT CYCLE:
Astel Aventad has days of roughly seven hours. There are exactly 15,000 days in an Astellyan year. Most of the planet experiences midnight sun, however, so the sun may not rise or set for very long spans of time.


CURRENCY:
The only currencies in use are brought from off-world. The Moon Elves may have had a currency at some point, however.

This is a ranking of everything I played for the first time in 2020. I didn't play too many games this year, because I've still been playing more Celeste than anything else and some games I wanted to play either didn't come out this year (Silksong... >_<) or I haven't played yet because I'm waiting for a really good Steam sale (Ori: WotW, Black Future 88).

Bolded entries were released in 2020 and have a second ranking which only includes other bolded entries, while italicised entries were released earlier but I only played them in 2020. If I only played pre-release versions of a game, it is excluded. If I end up playing something else in the last three weeks of the year, I'll edit it in.

Fortunately, I liked most of the games I played, which led to some good games getting bad rankings.


12/7. Rift Wizard
This game kind of tries to be a traditional turn-based, grid-based roguelike, but I really didn't enjoy it. It has a lot of my game design pet peeves, like unnecessarily complicated character building systems to create false depth and an excess of long-run resource management encouraging timidness and making sure you can feel your doom approach from way too far off. It somehow managed to invent a new one, too: it has this weird over-reliance on enemies which spawn more enemies. They're present in every single level and they're the main threats. Makes fighting the smaller enemies feel like a complete waste of time. To its credit, it keeps the tactics of the old-school roguelikes, but unfortunately it loses everything else which made them great.


11/6. Inmost
I've already complained about this one. It's a boring metroidvania with a lame story where you always feel underpowered and everything cool only ever happens in outrageously long cutscenes. It was really close between this and Rift Wizard for the bottom spot, but I think this one had a lot of wasted potential while that one had very little potential at all. Despite how serious my complaints are, I actually enjoyed my playthrough regardless: it can be beautiful and atmospheric at times and has a few genuinely awesome moments. However, by the end of it I felt like I had wasted my time.


10/5. Neon Abyss
A shiny new platformer-roguelite drawing heavy inspiration from Binding of Isaac. It's charming and pretty, has a cool cyberpunk aesthetic and great music. While I had fun with it, it has some terrible game design flaws which drag it down – some inherited from Isaac and some new ones. My main complaints are a) it's a luck-based nightmare, b) usually the best strategy is to sit in a corner and camp, c) the game doesn't tell you what items do until you pick them up and there are so many items that even after 20 hours of play time I don't know what half of them do and, most damningly, d) the balance is god-awful. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of the "new-school" roguelikes and roguelites have substantial "macrogame" systems – as you play more of the game, it will transform to reveal more of itself. Neon Abyss' macrogame system is not exactly mind-blowing but it is probably the biggest and most extensive I've ever seen, which I guess is a point in its favour. At the end of the day, my most memorable experience with the game was finally reaching the game's last "manager" (which is what the game calls its special superbosses – the regular bosses are instead called the gods of something really lame, which I thought was cute) and obliterating her immediately with my outrageously unbalanced firepower before she even had a chance to attack. Then I put the game down and didn't really touch it again much.


9/4. Helltaker
I really don't understand the hype behind this one. It's a simple puzzle game, free and less than an hour long. There's not really much to complain about but it had very little impact on me. I liked the music. It was slightly annoying to have to repeat the whole puzzle if you picked the wrong option at the end of the level and get a bad ending, but that's not really a big deal. Final boss was pretty cool. Meh.


8. Among Us
The idea behind it is really clever – take a social logic Mafia type game and make it real-time. That's really clever. It's got a cute artstyle, kinda like an 00s-era flash game. My main complaint is that it's way too fast-paced. Each game is like 3 minutes long, you're constantly running around at top speed, people drop like flies and by the time you start to get a picture of what's going on and begin forming your insane theories, the game's already over. At least with Mindnight's 20-minute games, there was enough time to think and take notes. Among Us can be great as a party game or as a brief diversion in between studying or something.


7. What Remains Of Edith Finch
I don't really know how to organise my thoughts here. This isn't what I'd usually consider playing, it's a sort of visual novel type thing built around its story – basically, everyone is dead and you need to explore a creepy house to find out what happened to them. I've seen the story, which is ridiculously depressing, get slammed for relying on cheap tricks to get an emotional rise out of the player, and while it does kind of do that at times I think it mostly works. Game generally looks and sounds great, has a lot of trippy visuals and some really cool moments. I had an issue with the controls where I'd occasionally go through a door or down a ladder or something and then immediately go back the other way by mistake, but that might've been because I was really drunk while I played it. Sometimes I feel like my own grandmother is slowly ruining everyone's lives with her subtle pathological influence, but this game made me realise that she's not bad at all and it could be so much worse.


6. Super Lucky's Tale
Cutest game ever. Really solid 3D platformer, I had no real problems with it. I wanna cuddle Lucky so bad, he's adorable!!! I didn't quite get through the whole game, it seems to be quite long and I got kinda distracted partway through. There's heaps to do and it just generally makes me feel good. Has the kind of controls where, if you have mad skills, you can combine moves to reach further than it appears you can at first. 4 through 6 were all really close together.


5/3. Spirits Abyss
Another platformer-roguelite! This one draws heavily from Spelunky instead. It's not as slow-paced as Spelunky, though, it's more conducive to running through levels guns blazing than Spelunky is. First thing which jumped out at me was the awesome chiptune music. I have an issue with the controls – usually, there is no inertia, and you can change directions instantly, but when you wall-jump then suddenly hello again Newton! It feels really awkward and strange. There's a lot of variety in the level types – there begins with 4 level types which happen in a fixed order, but later on more get unlocked and I think there are a total of 10. In addition to those, it has a fascinating system where, randomly, between the normal levels, you'll get thrown into little intermediate areas. The game throws curveballs at you in a way which makes it seem really mysterious, and that's something I find very compelling. Sometimes, stuff will just happen and you won't be entirely sure why. It seems kind of small at first, but there's a great deal to do here. It's by the same developer as Skelly Selest from 2018 and has a lot in common with that one – the menus look really similar, everything has a similarly bizarre writing style, it even has a weird card game tacked on to it just like that game did – but I think Spirits Abyss is a lot more impressive.


4/2. Spelunky 2
I dunno if I should put it this high, I just kinda think it would be blasphemous to imply that Spirits Abyss is a better follow-up to Spelunky than this one is, given how ambitious it is, although, I don't know if it is or not. The game is a lot bigger and shinier with more hidden stuff than the original – I've reached the final boss (which I really don't like, I think it's quite badly designed) but apparently I've only seen about half of the areas in the game. At first I was keenly aware of all the subtle things that were changed from the original, which annoyed me, but after that I had a great time. I loved the re-imaginings of the old areas with new enemies and whatnot, and the references to some of my old favourite Spelunky mods (like the repeating laser traps in world 6 referencing Gates of Hell, and how world 5 was compressed into a single super-long level which I think references that one mod where you fight Cthulhu). It's substantially harder and longer than the original Spelunky, which makes me think it was designed for people who have already mastered the original – I found it quite a challenge and I never even got into any of the post-game stuff, at least not yet. 13-year-old me would've loved this more than anything in the whole world.


3. Axiom Verge
A really bloody good old-school metroidvania, keeping everything good about the subgenre intact – exploring a mysterious world, getting new stuff to gain more power and unlock more freedom, stumbling on crazy stuff, getting kinda lost in a good way – while losing some of the cliches. I first heard about it in a YouTube comments section where somebody dared to suggest that it (along with Hollow Knight, which I found a more reasonable opinion) was better than Ori. I thought that was a ridiculous notion at first, but after playing it, while I'm not sure I agree, it certainly gets close. It strikes a good balance between being too linear and "where the **** do I go", and it makes you work for your cool toys (and they are VERY cool, the drone gun is brilliant) but it feels so good to finally get them. The whole game has this cool alien aesthetic. I found the backtracking a bit tiresome in places, and there's some secret stuff which you'll very definitely need a walkthrough for, but those are minor complaints.


2/1. Scourgebringer
The fourth platformer-roguelike in this list, and the king of them all. While Spirits Abyss was inspired by Spelunky and that other Abyss game was inspired by Isaac, Scourgebringer is instead inspired by Monolith, but it builds off its quite spectacularly. It kind of de-emphasises the platforming in favour of an outstanding combat system with heaps of depth and where everything just feels viscerally good and makes my brain light up with dopamine. It's a bit overwhelming at first, with four or five different ways to attack and controls which take some getting used to, but the game's cleverly designed to get you over the initial hurdle, and to a level where you can make the most of everything, with minimal pain. It has a combo mechanic, one of many ideas borrowed from Monolith, except the game adds a new dimension to it to facilitate learning the game's mechanics. It divides attacks into three categories, and rewards the player for using all three categories, which pushes players to learn how to use all their attacks to their full potential. The enemies are all designed around the combat system, and with a few exceptions they all work great. The balance is also great – while a lot of similar games end up really luck-based and prone to "snowballing" where you become either overpowered or underpowered and that kind of sticks for the whole run, Scourgebringer avoids that by being careful with how its power upgrades are designed. The only real downsides are that the music isn't my style and the postgame stuff isn't as extensive as some other games. Absolutely sick. Favourite game of 2020.


1. Monolith
Surprise, it's a game I just mentioned! It was really hard to pick between this and Scourgebringer because they have so much in common and what's different between them is awesome in different directions. It's not a platformer and doesn't have a complex combat system, and in that one regard it's a lot closer to Nuclear Throne than Scourgebringer – while it doesn't stand out as much, it's perfectly solid. Instead, it has some of the coolest bosses and best postgames ever, and has that same mystery factor that Spirits Abyss has – it seems small at first then slowly unfolds itself before your eyes as you keep going, in a way that feels organic. I get the impression that there's a really interesting story buried under there if only someone could untangle the pieces. The controls suffer from what I call "Nuclear Throne syndrome" where it's trying to be a bullet hell shmup and a twin-stick arena shmup at the same time, and trying to play one of them with the controls of the other always feels a little awkward, like you're playing with your hands flipped around or something. The late game can get a little samey, as worlds 5 through 7 don't feel sufficiently distinct, which is a point against it compared to Scourgebringer where the last few levels are the best part. When, like, a boss mysteriously throws out an extra form, or a new boss entirely appears unexpectedly, or something unique and inexplicable happens, it's not something you forget. I feel like Monolith is slightly better as it stands because it's bigger and more polished and has more special memorable moments, whereas Scourgebringer has the stronger foundation and if it got a cool expansion pack like Monolith has it'd be likely to surpass it.

This is a thread for details of the Lunar Shadow universe revealed by Kim on her CSTSF profile, which can be found at: https://www.cavestory.org/forums/members/kim-tyranto.7139/


This is all copied from there.





Serenth info post:
The first four generations of Valkyries on the planet Newerth. (Serenity Horton's about 81st, so...)


The "super-short version", as it were.


Minerva (created on 14 March -145)


Synaeresis (born -123)


Sigyn Khrushchev (born -100: had seven children: Ruy (red), Orenj (orange), Grien (green) were her sons; Gelbe (yellow), Blae (blue), Indiga (indigo) and Violette (violet) were her daughters)


Violette (-65) stayed on Newerth, with twins Seria (who lived) and Ileene (who passed on 23 years later) and Violette is an ancestor of Serenity's.


Her siblings went to other planets and only Indiga is still alive (and took her mother's last name in 1739), but she has no descendants.


Orenj passed away first at age 25, but had no descendants.


One of Blae's descendants may've appeared in Selenic Shadow, though?

testing, testing...




If you're reading this, time travel is real.