The Snow Day [Small/Challenge/Scenic]

There is one secret to find.

Atmosphere inspiration comes from Quincent Cartographer. In fact, in my mind, the city featured herein is the same city we see in A Walk at Night.
The ending was inspired by Noozles and A Wrinkle in Time.

Special thanks to Sergio Cornaga for fixing the end credits!
Special thanks to Vegetal Gibber for fixing the music!

I noticed quite a bit of audio distortion in the music tracks, probably caused by the low bitrate used in the compression. If you want to cut down the file size without sacrificing too much quality, consider using any audio editor (Audacity is a nice free option) and lowering the sampling rate a bit. If you drop from 44KHz to 32KHz, the difference will be very hard to notice and this will let you use a lower compression bitrate while keeping audio distortion to a minimum. Also, converting a stereo track to mono reduces the bitrate requirement by half, although some tracks might sound weird and/or lose too much detail by doing that.

I downsampled and re-compressed one of the music tracks you used as a quick test. Here's the resulting file. If you like the result, I can re-compress the other tracks for you.

@Fubaka, yes, I have trouble making jumps of a "moderate" difficulty using the standard tilesets because, let's assume Juni has the run module, a jump of 3 blocks wide is too easy while a jump of 4 blocks wide is just a little too hard. I feel like I need "half" blocks, which tilesets support but others don't. Maybe an invisible half-block or quarter block would be a good custom object to put on edges just to take the, erm, edge off a little.  :huh:

@Purple Ink, I am glad you liked the music! You may want to watch The Snowman, by Raymond Briggs, a colored-pencil animation with mostly instrumentals including the piece this used covers for.  :)

@Sergio, I had most of the level done and I was trying to figure out the ending for a while. In The Snowman the protagonist goes to the North Pole and meets Santa. I couldn't figure out a way to make that work here, so I dug into my memory and remembered some 25-year old fragments from both A Wrinkle in Time and The Noozles about a father/grandfather being trapped in a crystal.  :huh:

@Vegetal, Thanks for the 'sound' advice! I didn't even notice the distortion until you brought it up... I would appreciate anything you can do for my other tracks, and I'll release a "cleaner" V2.  :D

@CWolvie, I don't know why there aren't more snow levels.

There were also some interesting platforming ideas in your level, like that one "decoy" platform in the ice cave that the player could basically ignore while actually using the umbrella from a higher point (I hope you know which one I mean  ).

@Sergio Cornaga: Thank you so much for the updated end credits. They DO look much better now! I also took the opportunity to fix a few credit/intro screens I wasn't 100% happy with.  :)

@egomassive: I'm glad you enjoyed the level! And thanks for the heads up about the fair use, I'll have to be extra careful about that in the future.  :/

@McGloomy: It's nice to have a fan!  8) I think with all my levels, I really just do it stream-of-consciousness. I sort of just do it one screen at a time, and wherever it takes me, I end up. The "decoy" platform, yes, was just that. You can't even use it!  :shifty: