First sorry to those waiting on replies from me, pm or otherwise.

I wanted to let everyone know I'll be back hopefully soon.

I spent last weekend having a surprise neurological event (they're still not sure if it's MS or maybe a stroke or what), the middle of the week finding out I'm developing macular degeneration (a kind of progressive blindness), and from Thursday to present fighting an infection that had me delirious with pain (and because the U.S. healthcare system is still so broken, I had to wait days for an antibiotic, never got pain management, and won't have the surgical intervention required until tomorrow at the earliest).

Typing is still challenging, so I'm dictating to my spouse. Say hi, baby.

["Hi, baby! "]

My focus and coordination are already noticeably improving. So hopefully I'll be back to 'work' on KS stuff soon. Good thing I'm already a card-carrying LoCP member, though. :rueful smile:

I came across this post: http://www.boredpanda.org/30-breathtaking-images-will-force-you-to-move-to-china/ * and many of the photos immediately reminded me of KS landscapes, and/or looked like RL versions of common design elements in KS levels. I've attached a few of the most KS-ish images for posterity / people who can't view BoredPanda for whatever reason.

_{* Viewing images will most likely not force anyone to take up residence in another country against their will.}

Image credits:
"Red Rock Valley at Yuntaishan" by Wiwat Navakanon
"Zhang Jia Jie" by Jumrus Leartcharoenyong
"Photographer in the Cave" by Woosra Kim
"Autumn in Wuyuan" by Raymond Peng

Honestly, some of these make me want to just re-create the whole landscape with gradients, tilesets & COs! And even the ones that wouldn't necessarily translate directly into KS very well could still serve as inspiration for getting a similar feel in a level.

I was fooling around trying out some different techniques for gradients for a level I'm working on. None of these were really what I was going for, but I figured someone else might be able to use them (or even just get inspired by them).

Feel free to use, edit, fold, spindle and/or mutilate in any KS levels. If you want to use any of them for something else, please ask -- I'll almost certainly say yes, I mostly want to know what's being done with it. For commercial uses, definitely ask first, and use only after I give permission, thanks. (Yes, that was basically a Creative Commons license in plain English.)

So, without further ado:

Hey, what do you know, there's a character limit for topic subject lines.  

I'm surprised nobody has posted about this game yet! The designer, who goes variously by Anna Anthropy, Auntie Pixelante, and Dessgeega, is responsible for several well-regarded Knytt Stories levels, including Fossil, The Oubliette, and Under the Crack. And her latest game is an exploration-heavy, non-linear platformer firmly in the tradition of Nifflas games like Knytt and Knytt Stories, and their old-school platformer forerunners including Metroid.

Redder casts you as a tiny, pixel-art astronaut who's forced to make a landing on Mars (or some other red planet? But I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a reference to it being meant as Mars on the designer's blog... if, perhaps, an old-old-school, pulp-SF sort of Mars) when your spaceship runs out of fuel.

Screenshot links (they're links instead of emedded so as not to steal her bandwidth; Dessgeega's been posting choice screenshots from Redder throughout its development, and only stopped once the game was released):

one left
four left, two down (outside)
four right, one down (inside)
five right, four down (not every screen is dominated by red!)
four left, seven down (green seems to be the secondary colour after red)
one right, five down (there's also some soothing, earthy brown)
five right, eight down (try and tell me that falling animation isn't adorable)
two left, nine down (classy)
six left, nine down (busy)

All the screenshots are described by their position in relation to the starting screen -- that's Anna Anthropy's choice, not mine, so if you feel that would be too spoilery for you, don't follow the links

The controls are your basic, simple-platformer left, right, jump. Holding the jump button (I was using the arrow keys; I neglected to check for wasd or any other control scheme, but up-arrow definitely works) prolongs your jump in a way that feels right for a comparatively low-gravity planet. You don't get as much horizontal jump distance as you do vertical, but the controls are simple enough that you'll get the hang of what you can and can't do quickly.

Savepoints are generously scattered through the game -- at least, they are while you're still fairly close to the starting point; I haven't beaten the game yet -- and triggered when you go past one with the astronaut touching it, though they're usually (?) easily jumped over should you prefer not to save your game there.

You'll need those savepoints, as there are a variety of things that will kill your astronaut and send you back to the last savepoint used. In addition to at least two kinds of switches which change the game state in ways you'll easily figure out so that you can get past switchable obstacles, there are at least one kind of passive-death danger, one kind of moving enemy and one kind of automated-intermittently-firing weapon that can each warp you back to that last savepoint if you should come in contact with them.

The intro sequence shows your spaceship's "fuel gauge" as a slowly emptying grid of glowing, diamond-ish energy crystals. The goal of the game, beyond exploration for exploration's sake and not-dying, seems to be collecting replacement crystals so that you can presumably take off again. (The "green" screenshot linked above contains one of the crystals.) Despite the lack of text instructions, everything in the game seems to be either immediately straightforward, or something quickly learned after you get warped back to your last save point.

By all indications it's a good-sized game, with plenty to explore -- the designer says it's her largest game ever -- though not huge on the scale of Knytt. Jaded platformer players may find it too easy; LoCP members like me will find it challenging, but not necessarily unplayably so. Whatever your skill level, though, Redder is old-school fun.

Play Redder here (at Newgrounds)

edited to shorten subject line as suggested

I downloaded the tilesets rescued from the Public Tilesets thread on the old forums a while ago, and finally got around to looking at using them today.

Among the tilesets I'm looking at using for the Round Robin/Tundra group level, I found two by the same artist with less than half the tile space used in each, and which are visually compatible with each other. It would be simple enough to just copy and paste the tiles from one into the other, and edit the info line to reflect both sets' titles in addition to the artist's name. (There are, I noticed, many such... not necessarily incomplete, but definitely sparsely populated, tilesets among the ones Gaeel is so generously hosting.)

Unfortunately, the artist who created these particular tilesets, Johnny Chthonic, apparently hasn't been to the new forums at all. A forum search turned up a discussion of whether he was going to finish a level he'd been working up, but no comments by him -- unless he's using a different username now, but that seems like something that would've come up in the aforementioned discussion.

Since the questions my specific situation has raised also apply to other tilesets and other level designers wanting to use them, I decided to ask them here instead of PMing a mod to inquire after Johnny.

1) I know the tilesets on that 'Public Tilesets' page are usable without needing to request permission in advance (hence 'Public') but can they also be modified without getting the artist's permission?

2a) In general -- that is, not only wrt the tilesets on that page, but any tilesets released for general use -- is it considered 'modifying' (and thus requiring permission, in cases where the artist hasn't specified that any and all editing are fine) to simply combine two tilesets by the same artist when this doesn't require leaving any tiles from either set out?
2b) What about putting a smaller number of tiles, say 1-6, from one tileset into a tileset with as many or more 'blank' / unused tiles by the same artist?
2c) I presume that regardless of permission requirement both tileset titles ought to be referenced in the info bar of the combined set, in cases where both entire sets are included; would both -- or potentially 3+ -- titles have to go there in the second case also? (That could be tricky to fit...)

3) I'm certain this has been answered (repeatedly, even) elsewhere, but so it's here with the other questions... Is the policy when an artist is AWOL and has released tilesets (or other level elements: music, COs, etc.) for public use but either not mentioned whether it was editable, or said to ask permission but can no longer be contacted, to "go ahead and use it with the understanding that if they come back and say no you'll have to take your level down and either replace their element(s) with something else or give up on re-releasing it"? Or is it, as with copyrighted / trademarked content from places like other (non-Nifflas, he seems reasonably easy to contact for yes/no permission purposes) commercial games, non-free songs, etc., the policy that "you can't use that without permission, and if you release without permission and are thus violating copyright, your level will be removed from the archive by an admin?"

The particular tilesets I'm looking at, for the curious, are Johnny Chthonic's 'Glass Maw' and 'Frozen Highlands'. If possible I was thinking about putting a handful of tiles from 'Dead Plains' and/or 'Underground Forest' that seem like they'd tie in nicely with the barren crystal/ice theme and also fit in the space still left over after combining the first two.