[Challenge][Lunatic] - Caged In

Thanks guys!  Glad to hear all of you liked it!  If I had the time, I'd go all out and make longer levels like my older ones, but man.  Busy James is busy!

I loved the art and the style. The story was certainly resonant. And the way the level was put together was really cool. I'm not very good so I did have to cheat in the editor to finish the last challenge room but I'm absolutely terrible at Knytting.  The repetitious music didn't really bother me but I started to get a headache from playing it with the desktop blacked and the white screen flashing because I kept dying so much. And anyway,

So, to continue, these aren't complaints but more a bit of advice (should anyone care, or you if you ever make another level) and these are based on my own findings having done the exact same things. To that end, they're certainly not bugs or errors just things to make a level more solid and smooth.
When you do a sticky shift, make sure you use a square type shift because you can nudge yourself into not being able to use the shift. I had to restart at the last save once because of the spot shift on the first interlude with dialogue because I got stuck having moved awkwardly into the sticky spot.
Also, if you can, using layer 2 as a redundant image of the overlaying 6/7 custom objects means that things won't pop into each screen. I mean it's certainly inevitable that you can't do something like that for the moving clouds (nice touch, by the way) but the bars through the level could have been done with a redundant image of the bars at layer 2 and then moving through screens means when they pop in it's much less noticeable if it is at all.

I'm not suggesting you do these things just some advice to anyone who's making levels. Again, good level.

Thanks for playing and analyzing, plural!  I'll be sure to take your advice, especially on the sticky shift situation, if I do ever make another level.  And I can see where you're coming from with the bars, but man, I was already tired of working on the level, lol.  I was going to have this be a pretty big world in which you had three areas to choose from and which ever you chose gave you a different ending, but I just couldn't find time and the want to do it after I started it.  So I just did what I know I'm decent at, making a lunatic level.  lol

Thanks again!

Fine level. It didn't feel Lunatic to me, more like Very Hard.
The COs revealed a KS bug - they stop appearing after some number of screen switches.

How in the name of BAGELS do you get past the screen with the red spikey thing that chases you? Normally I'm good at challenges like that, but nothing I try will get me up the first section.

And I especially enjoyed this one, it required both speed and perfect timing.

The COs revealed a KS bug - they stop appearing after some number of screen switches.

I dug into this. KS 1.2.1 leaks memory at an alarming rate when COs are in use. I created a level where Juni could fall through two screens and Warp back to the top. These screens had a total of 45 COs between them. My task manager revealed that KS was increasing memory usage by 12 MB per minute! I also tested the latest mods. KS+ leaked 0.2 MB in the same test, and KSEx leaked 12 MB.

I didn't see the failure myself, but I remember seeing it before with a different level. It seems the only way to reset the memory usage is to close the program and reopen it. Deaths, Cutscenes, and Resets don't fix it.

Turns out Animated Picture object's Destroy doesn't free stuff. I wonder why your mod eats up only 2MB. Might be MMF2 version, mine is really dated.

@GrayFace: I couldn't say which version of the extension I used, but the MMF2 I used was old. I had a lot of trouble updating it, and when I finally succeeded it was incompatible with my extension library. Oh, the leak was only 0.2 MB in KS+.

I did some more testing. KS 1.2.1 stops displaying COs at around 5000 objects, but it continues to leak memory as if they were working. KS+ climbed to over 10K objects without failure, at which point I was too bored to wait any longer.

KS+ probably uses the last version of that extension. Anyway, the issue is now fixed in my WIP version as well.