music i made, mainly downtempo, from july 2023 to august 2023. the title is based on "Listen Up with Cabaret Voltaire" except instead of listening you are falling into a ditch. with me.

as always it is free. my target audience is people who fell into a cave and have limited cell service and can only download one album. this decreases the need for competition.

favorite track is Modernist (track 7).

some of the tracks are labeled "BONUS:" because they didn't fit into the track progression and have a different sound from everything else

play-by-play:
1. Sad People Don't Go to Manhattan (04:07). originally titled "good people don't get in situations like this" and then i fired the neurons and came up with this name. samples some noise from a vinyl rip, and at the end it incorporates some concert banter by they might be giants.
2. Worst Vilbel (02:18). named for, and samples, "Second Bad Vilbel" by autechre. bad vilbel is the name of a town.
3. Slowlife (02:01). very minimalist. i made this with the limitation of only using very small samples (less than 1000 sample points each).
4. Bogus (02:22). this one i previewed in the ljus discord not too long ago. spoken samples from Audio Active - Happy Shopper. this track is based on when i was listening to a track from my previous album, hippo, with my headphones on the desk and i only heard the percussion.
5. Music Isn't Real (02:53). basically just a bunch of weird short concepts bashed together into 2 minutes 53 seconds. includes a section in a weird time signature that i don't know if i actually pulled off. fun times.
6. Sky Music (01:35). made entirely with "homemade" samples i recorded myself (this time mainly weird environmental noises but also the iphone shutter sound).
7. Modernist (02:50). continuation of "music for modern homes" 1 & 2 from the previous album, with the same base samples and some more added. very melancholy.
8. Fare Collector (01:30). this is an alternate version of a cover of They Might Be Giants - Token Back to Brooklyn i submitted to a tmbg cover album.

made with openmpt.

This level reflects the general vibe I perceive in the song "marhide" by Autechre. That song is also used as an ambiance loop throughout the level, which makes this like the Knytt Stories equivalent of a music video.

The level is comparable to This is Not a Level but with more colors and less challenge.

Download.
(v2 fixes some graphical errors and a useless wallswim.)

In 2019 I was making a vanilla KS level! The concept was that I'd post it and be like "oh this is just my little way of getting back into levelmaking, nothing much" and it would be tagged [Small] [Easy], but then you'd play it and it would actually be this deceptively large and challenging experience with multiple endings. I even released a two-screen demo to determine if a jump was impossible.

This level has an interesting place in Wibi KS history. It:

• used a bendy version of Tileset6 similar to what would later be used in Reduction,
• reused an area from a level named "Fuj" I made entirely in the vanilla editor in study hall,
• incorporated a few things from a level named "Vegetal Gibber vs. Talps" intended as a sequel to "Talps vs. Vegetal Gibber" (namely, the revamped Dithered Temple tileset that would also be reused in Reduction, and the on/off power signs),
• lead to me making the "Simple Rooms" edit that was used in Depression Quest,
• and involved me wondering for 3 seconds what I should use as an "author avatar" which turned out to be an easy question with no additional connotations.

There was a plot that had to do with Juni defeating Dr. Cliche (as usual) but in a deconstructive way that involves how Dr. Cliche in the Knytt canon isn't just a generic badguy. Unfortunately, said plot turned out really pretentious and plot-holey, and I wasn't sure how to go about one secret that would reveal the lore, so I procrastinated a bit.

And by "a bit", I mean, uh. Four years.

After a while of drip-feeding information about it in the Secret Screenshots thread, today I finally decided this will probably never get finished. Aside from some incomplete secret paths and unfinished visuals in one part, this level is fully playable, and has 4 endings (though one is more apologizing for a lack of ending).


91mb because there's way too much custom music sorry.

Continued from LMB Occurrences.


The Store That Was Scary is a level where a weird enormous building pops up in Juni's neighborhood out of nowhere. The building is not a store. But there are two stores, one of which is scary and one of which is the store the title refers to.
Juni is an extreme misanthropist who has to put up with her two wacky roommates as she works out a one-sided relationship with a zany desperate guy. Along the way, she buys a rug, accidentally steals a plant, and loses her grip on reality. The plot is told primarily through in-game cutscenes.

It's also a movie parody that's both too specific and too shallow.

It's also a challenge level with random areas and aesthetic pastiches incoherently stitched together.

There will be bonus content, probably. Like how a movie DVD has the movie itself, and then outtakes, and deleted scenes, and trailers, and stuff. Or how the Johnny Yesno VHS was an hour long, and about 25 minutes of it was the actual movie, and the rest was an alternate cut that was a bunch of random shots flashing incoherently and music videos for Cabaret Voltaire.


Points of comparison:

• Consequences (1977), an ambient instrumental concept album/sardonic British audioplay/art-rock concept album/commercially unviable guitar effect pedal demo triple-album about nature revolting against humanity. Immediately flopped by virtue of being released the same year as "Frankie Teardrop", which had one thing to say and said it.
• A Scanner Darkly (1977), particularly the scenes where everyone is laying around stoned out of their mind making chit-chat. And the other scenes.
• Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), a groundbreaking horror film shot on low-end equipment that set the standards of the genre and is regarded fondly even today.
• The 2.5 giant Wibi levels that were canned for being too much effort or too awkwardly executed. (2017-2022) Generally most Wibi levels become what I refer to as a "palace of dreams" and everything about the level pales in comparison to "what it could be"; garnish with scope creep. I have tried to deliberately invoke this in hopes that the level will not release, time will tell whether that succeeds.
• Juni Jones: Ace Attorney (2012).

Releasing in October. Maybe.

(see here for revised versions with better positioning & walk cycles)

i could just say "hi here's 3:13 and 3:12 and a robot with no arms as custom characters" but because i am actively evil i am going to waste your time and leech brainpower that would be better spent reading any other text^[1] and explain what these characters were originally made for and why, even though you can repurpose them for anything.

VG (3:13 Eskimo): from 2019 project "Vegetal Gibber vs. Talps" Which was intended to be a sequel to the amazing "Talps vs. Vegetal Gibber" featured on Corrupt-a-Wish and include pastiches of various VG and Talps levels but ended up having like 10 screens finished in total. VG is 3:13 because he was 3:13 in LpChip 100 Stars Level which at the time was a reference to a level that might never release. janky dumb-looking walk cycle.

Wiz (3:12 Eskimo): from 2019 project "Maneuvers" (which used to be named something else, like "The Wizard" or "The Wizard King", i forget which) about a wizard king who all the people love who turns out to be a fascist dictator who starved the townspeople and produced propaganda and children's books about how great he is, and the plot is that juni is causing a revolt and he has to go and stop juni but at the end juni kills him. it was a sequel to the Press A to Slow Down Zone portion of The Cursed Gallery but also had an area where you could just go around a town and talk to NPCs and there was a secret ending where you meet "Be'esem'naat, Ruler of the Infinite Realm of Suspended House Interiors" if you clip out of bounds of the inside of a house by using that trick Glip demonstrates in Prison Break where if you're falling and then shift to another screen with solid tiles in different places then collision is ignored for 1 frame although i found it separately and also that secret ending was like 50% of the work put into the level it was pretty incomplete this is a sentence.

Scrimblo: aka "Scout". from a 2022 project where Juni builds a robot to interact with the outside world because she has People Problems and the robot meets some people who are assholes so Juni immediately warps it back home and is like "see i was right" and forces it to shut down. very cheery. later reused for another project in the cutuplevels canon where Juni and her peculiar friends live together, and one day she leaves behind a note that says "i'm taking a one-week vacation also you guys are weird", and Scout and another character named Void (collectively "the Remnants") have to go find her because Scout insists she was kidnapped or something and drags Void into it. it was meant partially as a pastiche of Devil's Triangle, and the two characters have different powers and can swap in certain places. both of these projects died pretty quickly. "abagail" is a name with significance in the NCR Lore ("significant in the NCR Lore" is a good way to refer to things no-one wants to talk about). also it has no arms and it detaches its head when it uses hologram which is pretty neat i think.

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1. except the script of The Giant Spider Invasion (1975)

I am making a game (have been since October 2021) that is currently ridiculously unpresentable because 90% of the work I'm doing on it is engine stuff. I recorded a video about it - actually, I recorded 4 videos about it, but the first 3 I interrupted or got off-track - but I forgot to keep the microphone on my headset in front of me in the latter half of the video, so 50% of it you can barely hear anything I'm saying. A bit pathetic.

It's a LÖVE clone of Maddy Thorson (developer of Celeste)'s very old Game Maker game Jumper 2, and its editor version Jumper 2 Editor. It's called Jumper 4 Real because: 1. Jumper 3 exists and this is kind of like a fanmade entry in the Jumper series, 2. "Jumper for real" sounds totally gnarly, 3. OMG, Jumper 4 REAL?? (NOT CLICKBAIT), and 4. I've had the idea to make a really robust Jumper fangame since I was younger and couldn't really program anything, and now this game is gradually moving from imaginary to real.

Currently very few elements are in, and no actual permanent levels have been made yet. A lot of the work is on backend stuff because I wisely chose to reinvent the wheel (mostly because I prefer to work with my own code and, come on, this is my first game). Pretty much everything is made from scratch in the LÖVE framework - the only things I've borrowed so far are a very simple metatable-based object class system, and a string split function.

It's going to be highly editable, like Knytt Stories. In fact, you can also have an open-world levelset like Knytt Stories, with the introduction of multiple level exits/entrances, and a special "tag" for Ogmo that lets it preserve the momentum and position of the exiting Ogmo from the previous level.


(In the above screenshots, the resolution varies because the editor mode has a larger resolution than the rest of the game. Also, levelsets can define their own window width/height, which is honestly probably not going to stay and is mainly a kludge since I created a showcase levelset for the initial 512x512 resolution and then realized the main Jumper games use a 640x480 resolution. Also, the last screenshot is of HTML Help. )

No download yet because there's barely any levels and the editor is far from finished.

Post rewritten on April 20th now that April Fools is... well, over.


Reduction is an unusual production. Since January 2022, I had been working on a level far in advance for April Fools (creatively named The Machine April Fools Level 2022, or TMAFL2k22) where the joke would be you download it expecting just some crappy memes, and you get something twelve times larger and more polished. It would've been like an independent KS+ take on the idea behind Alternate Reality Machine: make a level with the same general structure and size as The Machine, but with each area having new screens and its own unique gimmick. Plus a new overarching plot and impromptu NPCs. Development started on January 25th, and come March 20th, it was barely halfway done, and still had a lot of cutscene work, area design, decoration, and scripting left, and I had lost all motivation to work on it. (There were also a lot of pretentious undertones that bothered me, and I'm normally pretentious to the max.)

So I decided: "Who cares if TMAFL2k22 is already a variant on The Machine? I want something in time for April Fools' and TMAFL2k22 is a lost cause, but I don't just want to copy and paste rooms from it and call it a day. What if I were to create a Medium-size level with assets, area themes, and gimmicks taken from the doomed level, but with all new rooms again - effectively a variant on a variant of The Machine?"

And that's Reduction! This level started development on March 20th, released on April 4th (just over 2 weeks!), and... turned out pretty well. At first I thought it would probably be dead in the water as well (prompting Reduction: Reduction?), and there were a few days I felt no motive to work on it, but I pressed onward, and somehow it actually turned into a full-sized level.

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(Side note: The main joke behind TMAFL2k22's Nifforum post would've been that it had these fake low-quality grainy screenshots with a massive features list, and then quietly bait-and-switched you into playing something of much higher quality, where the features list is actually a bunch of half-truths. For Reduction, I went with a different joke that TMAFL2k22 had definitely been released and wasn't in limbo at all and you could compare Reduction and TMAFL2k22 side-by-side to see the similarities. It didn't occur to me until I started writing this that "I developed the awesomest biggest level ever but then I got burnt out so here's a smaller level inspired by it" could also be mistaken for an April Fools' joke... and would be a pretty good one. Will keep in mind.)

This is my newest level, The Machine. It's about a machine that drains life from the world around it, and Juni's long-winded mission to turn it off. This is intended as a default level for new KS players, and has no custom content.


Download here!

When you go to the info screen, you may get an error saying that you're using the wrong version of Knytt Stories. Unfortunately, I don't know how to fix this.