Do Not Pick Up The Key [challenge/hard/short - now with bonuses in KS+]

Yay, Talps is making levels!

No (for my first playthrough of version 2) and yes (for my second).

Could you change "all the people of the opposite gender" to "many people of your preferred gender" in the first screen of the keyless ending, please? It's not perfect, but it's an improvement.

Despite at least five playthroughs and poking around in the level editor, I cannot find the roaring toast nor the way to get to the double jump, which seems to be totally inaccessible.

Could you put in some kind of reward for reaching both switches in the Room of Doom?

I am truly amazed by how much I have improved at this game. I remember having difficulty with some of the challenges when I played version 1; this time I beat the whole starting area without dying (and then died stupidly on x1002y998; evidently I am not making large enough sacrifices to Ortoslon). Maybe I should give Dark Sea II another try.

Yay!

Yay!

I don't intend to release another version of this for the foreseeable future. Also, you do not get to dictate the gender of your admirers/fans/stalkers.


I thought about that a lot, because I make a note of doing so every time I decide to recall how it feels to be a loser. Warps would definitely break the timing of the room but if I'd been prepared to make it a KS+ exclusive feature, well... I don't actually know if I could have done it with triggers.
It would definitely be a Very Hard challenge and I was leery of putting such a thing in the level. I think it'd annoy as many people as it would gratify. Also, I don't know what the reward would be - it should not allow escape or stop the room from being ultimately lethal. In the end I decided to leave the reward as it has always been - an oddly hollow sense of satisfaction to know you have achieved great things but ultimately are still incapable of bettering the dreadful situation that you have woven about yourself.

Well done!

Given the difficulty rating, I most likely won't be playing this level myself...

...But I'm curious why you're so adamant that the language in the ending cutscene has to remain heterosexist. Does that enhance the ending somehow?

(You mean 'Heterosexual'.)[/grammar_police]

In context it makes more sense as it is because the comment has no bearing on the sexuality of the reader, only on a theoretical crowd of admirers. You can't choose who likes you, only who you like. Changing it as Chrys suggests wouldn't make sense, and therefore would weaken the joke.

If it really bothers you, feel free to read it as '...there are about a thousand people who...'. Changing it would be surprisingly complicated and I hate-reuploading levels. It took me two and a half years to remove a game-breaking bug from this one.

No, I meant heterosexist. (And I may be a bigger grammar-Nazi than you are.)

'Heterosexual' refers to people who are attracted only to people of a different sex and/or gender than their own, or to behavior involving two people (or animals) of different sex / gender. Words can't really be heterosexual, any more than a brick or an algebra exam could.

'Heterosexist' refers to words, actions, thoughts, rules, etc. which privilege heterosexuality over other sexual orientations, or which deny the existence of orientations other than heterosexuality. Heterosexism is cognate with both sexism (which privileges maleness and/or masculinity over other sexes and genders) and cissexism (which privileges people who are cisgender at the expense of people who are transgender, genderqueer, agender, intersex, etc.) and, like so many -ism words, is not a good thing.

Given that, at most, only 60-80% of humans are entirely heterosexual, the idea of a thousand "admirers" all being both "of the opposite gender" and heterosexual seems unlikely, absent some explanation for why some of them wouldn't be the same gender as the player (or belong to some other gender entirely).

That's exactly the kind of unintentional erasure people belonging to privileged groups often create, not out of any intent to offend, but because, as part of a socially dominant group, they just don't have to be aware of non-dominant groups, and so can easily forget to include them. Most media that fail the Bechdel test didn't set out intending to.

This is why, for example, it was so refreshing that Nifflas decided to include brown-skinned characters and characters with disabilities in Knytt Underground, including (but hardly limited to) the player-character Mi, as well as non-heterosexual characters. Inclusion is great, especially for people who are used to not seeing people like them represented in media -- whether the media in question is a videogame, a fiction book, a nonfiction book, a film, an advertisement, etc. And it also helps people who are part of privileged groups learn not to expect everything to be about them all the time. 

[/social-justice rant]

Edited to add: I found the toast! Now that I know where it is, I remember finding it in the last version.


the Jack:

You got a star!

You are not a "grammar-Nazi". Grammar Nazis throw innocent sentences into concentration camps for containing split infinitives and shoot sentences that begin with "and". I, on the other hand, am a Heirophant of the Dread Triune Gods of Yn Glysh. Come, friend, join us in our worship!

(You think I'm joking, but I'm not. I've been publically declaring this for some time.)



Talps:

In context it makes more sense as it is because the comment has no bearing on the sexuality of the reader, only on a theoretical crowd of admirers. You can't choose who likes you, only who you like.

I don't get to dictate the preferences of my admirers, but telling me about the ones I'm reciprocally interested in gives me more utility. The praise is more effective at making people feel good if it talks about their preferred gender.

Phrasing this sentence well is very difficult. Firstly, sex and gender are not equivalent, and each is a multi-faceted concept; sex, for example, includes (amongst other things) genetics (which is much more complex than XX / XY), hormone balance and physiology, while gender includes internal perceptions and a wide range of learned and non-learned social behaviours. Gender is obviously heavily influenced by sex.

Secondly, sexual preferences add another dimension (this isn't even a very good term, since one can be romantic but asexual, sexual but aromantic and so on). Most sexual people care about the external appearance of others (the primary, secondary and tertiary sexual characteristics they display), but many also care about more than this. Many people are uncomfortable with transgender people, to such an extent that a frightening number of post-op transgender people are murdered by partners who find out that they were assigned the other sex at birth. Some people are specifically attracted to genders: for example, someone might be attracted to sterotypically masculine behaviour, irrespective of the genitalia of the actor.

All in all, it might be best to just drop the line, since there isn't space for a better version. I do recognise that this is a lot of work for a relatively small benefit, though.


There's another problem with the quote above: sexual and romantic preferences are not directly choosable. It is firmly established that important components of preferences are genetically determined: responsiveness to pheremones, for example. We clearly see that some individual animals display sexual and romantic behaviours exclusively homosexually. Moreover, those parts of preferences that aren't essentially fixed are rarely consciously controlled, as most people simply don't notice how their preferences are shaped by their environments (and couldn't easily change their environments if they wanted to). Consider lip plates: they are abhorrent to most of us, but one cannot really say that a Mursi tribesman has much choice about what he is taught to consider desirable.

'No' Just played the enhanced version today with KS+. Randomly moving soldiers were a nice touch.

[/social-justice rant]

Jack, please.  Not only is there a lot wrong in this paragraph, but it's also completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.  What's worse is that the only reason you posted it in the first place is because of a tiny little sentence in the victory screen that wasn't necessarily 'all-inclusive'.

Listen, okay.  It doesn't necessarily matter what your orientation is.  If you are perceived as attractive, folks of the opposite gender will want your number whether you are actually interested or not.  If that offends you, then you're just gonna have to spend your entire life offended, because that's human nature.

All in all, it might be best to just drop the line, since there isn't space for a better version. I do recognise that this is a lot of work for a relatively small benefit, though.

I personally think there's no reason why he should drop this line.  As far as I can see, you guys are deliberately picking on what would otherwise be a completely insignificant afterthought in a rock-solid level, in order to try and morally one-up the level designer.  Either way, this isn't how we make friends.

My advice:  Let it go.  Go get some fresh air.  Take a nap.  Remember all the lovely sounds and tilesets in this level.  Remember that lovely, shiiiny, purdy key that errr... some of us didn't pick up.

Hey, Fubaka. Pretend that I'm insulting you right now. Something that you take very personally -- I dunno, saying your mom is fat, or your level sucks, or your pet hates you, or you're a child molester -- whatever. It just has to be something that would matter to you.

Now, anything that's significant to one person, is going to matter not at all to someone else. Even things that most people consider important, having access to clean water for example, there's going to be someone who lives far away from anyone who doesn't have access to clean water and who just doesn't care about anyone outside their own family or community or country or whatever.

But not everybody thinks my hypothetical insult up there is a big deal, or anything to get upset over. And if you say you were insulted, maybe even try to explain why my mother / level / pet / molester comment was so hurtful? There's going to be somebody who doesn't just think it's no big deal, but accuses you of bringing it up just to get attention or some other ridiculous reason. And maybe says something to you like "Let it go.  Go get some fresh air.  Take a nap." -- as if your feelings about your mother / level / pet / molestation history can just be gotten over like a mild case of heartburn.

That said, since you apparently think you don't have a horse in this race, but rather think you're an impartial third party? Please, take a day before you respond to this. (Maybe you spent the two weeks since the subject was dropped here carefully crafting your response, but it at least looks like you just discovered the fortnight-old conversation today.) And please do it elsewhere than in this topic, where I doubt Talps wants it further derailing discussion of his level. You might also consider that Talps does not need you to 'defend' him from me or Chrysophylax, and we were actually all getting along fine before you butted in.

If you do decide you want to continue this conversation with me (and/or Chrysophylax and/or anyone else who cares to join in), and find an appropriate place on the forum to continue? It will be... interesting... to see you try to back up your claim that anything I stated in my previous post on 29 July 2014 at 19:06:35 was factually incorrect. Serious ^{[citation needed]}, there.

Guys, please can you have this conversation somewhere else? No offence but it's very off topic to this thread and I kinda don't want it here.

(Glad you like 'em Ego - more of that to come in 'Dragon Myth'.)

Played v2. Still a great level. Where is "Pick up the Key?" I remember you hinting at?

Also, did you add the impossible-to-get Double-Jump tease for v2, or was that always there?

If you're referring to my considering making a sequel for this, I dropped the idea as it was a bad one. If you really think about how  a sequel to this would feel, I think you'll agree.

It was added for V2. I like adding save points and the like in unreachable tunnels as scenery; I feel it makes the areas feel more connected, less like scenery, and therefore makes the whole thing feel more like a real world. Adding an upgrade, however, may have been a step too far. I dunno. Live and learn, I guess.

If you're referring to my considering making a sequel for this, I dropped the idea as it was a bad one. If you really think about how  a sequel to this would feel, I think you'll agree.

I dunno, I almost think it'd be funny if you had a sequel called "pick up the key" where everything tells the player to pick up the key, but then if they do, they "lose" and the level lambastes the player for being an uncreative, unthinking sheep.

It was added for V2. I like adding save points and the like in unreachable tunnels as scenery; I feel it makes the areas feel more connected, less like scenery, and therefore makes the whole thing feel more like a real world. Adding an upgrade, however, may have been a step too far. I dunno. Live and learn, I guess.

Whether it went too far or not, though I will say that I _almost_ decided to go through the level again to try and find the "secret area" I missed. I wisely checked the editor first.

Also, I tried to get past the ghosts at x1010y992 for about 10 lives or so on today's initial go-around before realizing it was a futile effort.

YES!
I realize that this game is a little old, but I only just discovered it and I must say that I am way impressed! KS is a pretty good platformer. but I only really fell in love with this game when I discovered this level. (and the one from uncle sporky with the mushroom) Thanks for the fantastic game Talps! it was loads of fun!

Thanks

Nice to be thought of as on par with the most famous KS level of them all!
(And hey, I don't mind you posting in any of my topics, no matter how old they are!)