This was quite good. I've been anticipating it and I wasn't disappointed. Noticed a thing or two that broke the immersion.
- In one conversation the ambiance changed.
- In the same conversation the music is missing in the first part.
- When shifting to an identical screen you should use Do Not Quantize. It'll stop Juni from mysteriously centering herself on the tile she's standing on.
- Finally, I ran into some of your signs, 2nd and 3rd conversations. In third conversation you can put it in the floor directly below, and it wont move the sign. 2nd conversation you could put it in top row without the sign moving, but it's still reachable unless you move it far to the right.
You used shifts A, B, and C to create larger shift areas; but you only need one. Unless you select Absolute Target, the shifts will send Juni to the same relative position. You could have put shift A in those three spots and it would've worked the same. The way you did it is fine, but it required more programming than necessary.
(http://www.cowmuffins.net/stuff/art.png)
It's the trees I'm upset with. They're distinguished from the far background, but the lack of detail makes them look strange, as though they should be cracks rather than trees. (I mistook them for vines at first...)
Particularily bad with the one at the bottom.
Hm. My brain just doesn't parse those trees as something that looks like it should be in the far background, I guess. It puts them in the same category as most other trees in KS (except for very small, pale-coloured ones), namely, the category of "stuff that is somewhere fairly closely behind Juni". Nifflas' trees usually don't have outlines either. (IMO, outlines on trees look odd, in most cases - what with the twigs and branches usually being fairly thin and all...)
Also, that particular screen technically doesn't even have a far background - it's just a couple of ledges on a cliff face.
I suspect this is another one of those intractable matters of personal opinion... ;-)
@bulbapuck: It's a track called "Dark Walk" (I think) by Kevin MacLeod. MacLeod's stuff is used in a lot of free games. Also, I'm really happy to hear you found the level calming, as that's one of the effects I was aiming for. :-)
@yohji: Well, at least my roommate told me today that he'd just found . *g*
Personally, I'm more surprised nobody commented on the disembodied city itself,
as that's what I find the most visually striking element of the level, myself. But then, everyone has a different emotional reaction to things, and that is just *my* reaction. :-)
Incidentally, the idea of was inspired not just by the already mentioned manga, but also, on the visual level, by a round of my mad creativity technique of randomly stepping through the tilesets that left me with a screen in which the lighted windows from Quincent Cartographer's tileset seemed to float in a dark landscape.
That was the real first seed of this level.
minmay, the Jack, how about a new thread about the foreground/background issue, as it's clearly a general aesthetic discussion and not so much one about this level?
ETA: Thanks, Aptequar and WatcherCCG! Glad you enjoyed the level! And, yeah, the win tile issue was discussed with my betas. Personally, I don't feel that environmentals really need one, and I seem to remember quite a few environmentals without one. Is it *really* part of the definition given in the world.ini file that environmentals have a win tile? Or is there another, additional level type definition that says so, somewhere on the forum?
Me, I like the sense of being able to just keep on walking around an environmental; I guess I see them as something more akin to a virtual park than a game. ;-)
I did add the text in the monolith cave
to give the level *some* sense of closure, after discussion with my betas, though.
Thank you, Teper.
Re: what Aptequar said about the places being ephemeral - I meant to reply to that, but forgot, so here goes:
Well, from a philosophical standpoint, *everything* is ephemeral, of course ;-) but there are degrees to this, in the level (as in reality ;-)). Also, there are different senses to the word ephemeral, I think... one being something close to 'transitory', and the other, maybe, closer to, though not identical with, 'ghostly'?
The city is, well, like the intro screen says, essentially something like a ghost, or a memory. There used to be a real city there a long time ago, and maybe some of the boulders and rocks (especially the more rectangular-looking ones) aren't boulders and rocks but the remains of its ruins... but the lights that appear only at night are not a physical phenomenon. (So maybe *they*, actually, are not so ephemeral at all - in the sense that they will always be there at night, because what isn't physical doesn't decay...?)
The I think, is real, and not particularly ephemeral (although it is, of course, a symbol of the transitoriness of every form of life).
The may or may not be ephemeral. I don't know any more about it than Juni does.
The in my mind, is not ephemeral, although it probably only looks spectacular in the dark. In my mind - but you're free to your own interpretation, of course - it's a little patch of nature developing rich and strange new forms after the fall of the civilisation of the city. A real and tangible sign of the future, if you will.
And Juni's village is entirely real and non-ephemeral, of course - but it is also quite obviously a dying place, visibly built from the scrap of that long-dead civilisation. (The crazy old man's bouncer village probably derives from a futile, in fact insane, desire to stay that decline.)
This level is absolutely beautiful. Very tranquil at first, but as you progress into the city and the music becomes more discordant it gets creepy and unnerving, while still beautiful and calming at the same time. I didn't find any though :(
as you progress into the city, you'll start hearing faint sounds of traffic and chatter, as if from a great distance.