Glad you guys enjoyed the level
I really appreciate the comments and feedback!
@ego:
Interesting, I didn't expect anyone getting the secret ending before the regular one. Perhaps I should've added one or two extra screens showing Juni running back to the first screen :P2
Did you have a hard time backtracking from the blue key screen or was it not that big of a deal? Since the level is pretty small, I wanted to give players some degree of freedom for exploration instead of telegraphing the intended path too much. It seems this can easily backfire, though, so I might make a few more minor changes to avoid potentially annoying situations.
: Apparently, I've become incapable of making a level without adding those shading tiles everywhere
I'll probably post the auxiliary tilesets in my "custom KS content" thread at some point, although I may try to fill up some of the unused space with additional tiles before I do that.
I didn't want to go too far with the challenges since I was originally aiming for a "Normal" (maybe leaning a bit towards Hard) difficulty level, even though I ended reclassifying it as "Hard" as helvetzia suggested. I did intend to make the challenges in the secret area a tad bit harder than the ones in the main level, but just enough to compensate for the fact that the player would have already collected all power-ups by that point. My ability to assess the difficulty in KS challenges may still be a bit off from my experience with TDT, especially its Lunatic area :oops:
: It's a very versatile and beautiful set, and I've actually been thinking of using it for quite a while. The only things I really missed were alternate colors for the walls (I always like mixing at least two different types of walls in my screens), which is part of the reason I made that auxiliar tileset. I did notice that the set was quite bright, so instead of trying to build a dark "forgotten cave/temple" area, I decided to go for the complete opposite and make a very shiny scenario to take advantage of that.
I probably should have held a quick betatesting round, especially for balancing out the difficulty and minimizing the pointless backtracking. I didn't do that because I wanted this to be a small project I could finish and release quickly. I'm going to need all the energy I can muster for those upcoming DLC packs
@LPChip: Thanks for giving the level a try. Glad you enjoyed the aesthetics! It's a shame your first experience was that frustrating, it seems I definitely understimated the difficulty level here
Here are a few hints in case you're curious and want to give those challenges another shot:
There's a jump you can make in the screen with the springy plants and the green bouncers. It's a pretty precise jump, but you can reach the plant on the right if you jump from the white ledge.
The jump to come back after collecting the eye power up is rather difficult. You're supposed to grab the white wall next to the crystal and double-jump to the left side of the cyan "column" from that position. I may add a small ledge somewhere to make the jump a bit less precise, since I definitely didn't want to step into "Very Hard" territory with this one.