[KS+] Old Yeller

Old Yeller will be a collision of meme level and actual attempt at good level, like most contemporary ncrecc/canteven/12000usernames output. (Hence the last two levels being both released on April Fools.) It will feature, at least:

• Fully voice acted cutscenes (in-house)
• A space opera storyline
• Freeform level design, running mostly but not entirely separate to the aforementioned storyline
• Shoehorned humor
• Wildly varying quality
• Characters you don't know
• Characters you sort of know, but don't
• Cusses
• Music
• May accumulate scope issues and be abandoned without warning at any given moment (the ncrecc guarantee!)
• No relation to the Newbury Honor recipient Old Yeller
• Very confusing
• Vaguely simulates attempting to make KS levels as a persecuted member of society
• I got oral surgery yesterday. It was my first time with laughing gas, and I was in a relatively coherent mood when they put me on it and I actually stayed pretty coherent. So, on average, I'm more coherent on laughing gas.

I pretty much just got started on this a few days ago and am planning to tease new things as I make them, hopefully without revealing so much that the level feels redundant to play compared to reading this topic. (Ideally there will be either no or highly ambiguous value in having played the level.)

On April 6th, 2022, I was in a mental state comparable to smoking marijuana but which was more a mix of existential crisis, a little something I call "advanced not giving a shit," and discovering Bug Powder Dust and immediately playing it on repeat. That's when I made a small lineart-only drawing program named shitart, inspired by the revelation that 1. drawing programs actually need a connect-the-dots algorithm in order to draw unbroken lines and 2. I can make this algorithm whatever in Samuel Hill I want. Ultimately, it ended up being more about applying filters that affect what the presumed start and endpoints are and drawing lines based on that. I made this screen for an unreleased level on April 13th using a filter that extends the distance of each line (and, of course, paint.net):

Being the post-apocalyptic wasteland raider I am, I'll probably snag this for Old Yeller.
(Note that you can get an even more natural "scribbly" style by also applying a filter that randomizes the position of the start and endpoint by up to two pixels away in each axis, but I hadn't come up with that filter at the time, and in practice it makes using the fill tool in other image editors way harder since that filter inevitably results in broken lines and spots where contagious fill can leak out.)

Good old old-fashioned level preview! Yay!

The level sounds very interesting (space opera?  ) and I hope it gets finished. I like especially the 2nd & 3rd screenshots in the first post and the scribbly one in the second post is also nice.

Not much updates (or doing anything) because wisdom teeth removal + anesthesia aftereffects = kicking ASS (mine).
But I did find an aesthetic that goes pretty hard, if not a bit subtle. What you do is you use paint.net (duh), draw something at full scale, scale it to 50% using the "Super Sampling" algorithm, then scale it 200%, back to normal size, with the "Nearest Neighbor" algorithm. The result is it looks like your original drawing but lower-resolution but also with a lot of gray on the outlines. You use global fill tool to replace some of the gray with black, and voila:




Greenshirtguy's text there is on a different principle; writing text at a small font size with no AA, then scaling it up with the Bilinear algorithm and replacing a bunch of colors with black.

(Also yes NCR Inc. is returning because NCR Inc. is eternal.)

A space opera you say? Count me in.
The screenshots look promising (and I personally like Castle Shades).
I hope it's on par or even better than Reduction!

Also "Fully voice acted cutscenes"???
Like Doden Vantar?

Going to be frank; Chief; I have not heard of what "Doden Vantar" is, but you can think of it as like the VA in "The explore challenge" but with deliberately worse microphone quality and more soul-touched emotion. (Or less, on occasion.)

Doden Vantar by James Vaughan is the only level (not counting demos) made for the "KS Advanced" mod by BloxMaster (an early mod in which "Falling too far kills you").
Its cutscenes are voice acted.

You can think of it as like the VA in "The explore challenge" but with deliberately worse microphone quality and more soul-touched emotion. (Or less, on occasion.)

That sounds funny.

I got KSA and played some of Doden and it was pretty cool. The era where people could make good art and a decent if not mildly cliched plot. Old Yeller is a lot more cynical and I'm still working on the plot.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially when it's deliberate.

Hmm. I think I should make a preview too since it may take a long time to release my first level (even if it's 70% done).

This is only about 10% done (or less), but this is going to be an extremely cursed level. It alternates between "dense and wacky" and "strange and depressing" on a dime, features Juni as an antagonist who stabs someone in the chest for being annoying, and will be very haphazardly handling real-world themes with the subtlety of an anvil. I've thought about discontinuing it several times, but my justification to keep going has mainly been that if people will play levels openly endorsing white supremacism and transphobia, then anything that doesn't do so is at least slightly justified in existing. And possibly that I just want to create something extremely annoying that will confuse people while also being an excuse to draw stuff and make screens. Also, Powerhouse was at least as deranged at this, and it's one of my favorite levels.

Some CGA stuff stolen from Sergio and VG. First one also turned out a bit Last of the Salad Days-esque.

NCR Inc. Scrunklies always forever.

I don't actually like this level. It's a fair amount edgier than any of the screenshots are showing so far (mainly in the cutscenes), except the amount of edginess varies a bunch, and it's some intentional parody of edginess or a vibe or something else weird that I haven't decoded. The satire part is also mainly just showing people saying really bad things, contrasted with "man, people who think these bad things are good are silly, but also I don't have the guts to explicitly speak up against it!", and a bunch of random self-deprecation. Granted, not all things need to be "decodable" and emotionally coherent, but sometimes this level just crosses over into having to take it for granted that it's not in bad faith. It just feels like a concealed emotional breakdown in level form. Also... it's really annoying, and not in the humorous way.

I'll probably keep working on it anyways since there's nothing else to do.

There's a spider, so that could save it if every screen is just a spider.

The more you trashtalk your own level the more I'm interested in it. I'm not sure whether it looks good or bad but it definitely looks interesting. Love the last screenshot.