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Even though my web show, Ancient DOS Games, is mostly about taking a look at old DOS titles, every few episodes I take a break and do a short "filler" episode that can be about anything I want it to be about. Considering VVVVVV's recent update to include level editing, and my creating a custom level for the game, I felt it would also be a good idea to take a quick look at the game itself!

So, here's a link to the video I just uploaded for those of you who wish to watch it: http://www.pixelships.com/adg/epf008.html

Again, it's a very short look at the game, and really, I just wanted to make it so I could make my fans aware of VVVVVV's existence and to help spark more interest in the game. I'm going to guess that almost everyone reading this thread already has the game!

Hello, everyone! For those of you who do not know who I am, my name is Kris Asick, though I generally go around the net as Gemini. I am the person behind the shareware game company Pixelmusement and host of the web show Ancient DOS Games, now 54 episodes strong!

But, I'm not here to plug that stuff. I happen to find VVVVVV to be a very fun game and I felt a good way to show my appreciation to the devs for making such an easy to use editor (even if it still has a few kinks to work out) would be to create a small, but satisfying adventure, dubbed: Reactor Disaster!

The story is that one day, Captain Viridian and his crew were cruising along while Dr. Violet was performing some subspace communications tests. All of a sudden, everyone found themselves scattered throughout this strange space station! The captain begins investigating only to quickly find a reactor that's destabilizing and needs to be shut down ASAP!

So not only do you have to rescue your crew, but you have to deal with the reactor too, and seeing as I scripted the heck out of this map, expect some surprises along the way!

As for the difficulty, it's not incredibly difficult, but it's not easy either. Many of the challenges have unusual, simple solutions, and while this is not a long adventure by any means I hope it satisfies and that the story and jokes presented are true to the VVVVVV universe!

And in case that wasn't enough: There's TWO endings!  ; D

Click this link to download the map and try it for yourself: http://www.pixelships.com/files/vvvvvv_reactor_disaster.zip

And here's some screenshots!

(VVVVVV Developers and Map Makers: I have some technical notes on my editing experience below the screenshots.)



Technical Notes:

1. Ending any script line with a ":" character causes everything past to be chopped off into its own script. o_O

2. It would be nice if other characters could speak. You could accomplish this by having a crew(lines,name) command. If that particular crew member is on-screen, the message box would be focussed around them, otherwise it would be centre-screen.

3. It would also be nice if you had faceleft and faceright commands for the sake of story telling.

4. destroy(warptokens) and destroy(gravitylines) is nice, but I was also hoping for destroy(enemies) and destroy(scriptboxes).

5. If you place warp lines and change the room's warping mode, the warp lines stay.

6. I found that many crashes could be avoided simply by saving before testing scripting changes/additions.

7. If a script has ANY dialogue in it at all, even if ifflag() commands or such prevent the dialogue from being reached, the game still goes into dialogue mode. I found the workaround presently was to have a script at the beginning that sets a bunch of flags on, then I can check the state of those flags in one script without dialogue that jumps to scripts with dialogue when appropriate. I also made my flag-setting script self-aware with its own flag so that it only ever sets them once per play.

8. You should make silentsad and silenthappy commands that change Viridian's mood without sound cues.

9. You should also be allowed to change the mood of crew members that are in the area, commands such as crewsad and crewhappy. Maybe give them silent variations too.

10. One last technical note. Since the version update, my full-screen framerate has died... badly... yet running in a nearly full-screen window shows no speed issues... except that I can't move the window without it jumping past the bottom of the screen. o_O