Dimension SIMPLE (v1.2)

[allison]

the great updatening part 4. this level insists on having zero story whatsoever, and almost no dialogue. it's meant to be a simple, back-to-basics response to some elaborate levels that were coming out at the time. despite this, there's some flourishes that were new to me: it's my first level that used direct mode (mainly one-way tiles). it's even my first level to use internal scripting! it uses it only once, to surprise the player. having long forgotten about it now, and expecting there to be nothing like it here, it kinda felt like getting punched in the face lol.

now let's talk box checkpoints! these were originally used in 3 different rooms, in the Slightly Less Generic Laboratory Place zone. basically, most checkpoints have a set direction: up or down. these ones, though, have no set direction. so instead, whether you respawn flipped up or down depends on what direction the last checkpoint you hit was facing. if you spawn directly at one with no direction set, you end up in a weird glitchy state. i ended up removing 2 of these checkpoints in the initial release (or possibly 1.1?) for fear of this glitchy state. i started spreading the word: don't use box checkpoints!! if you save at one you softlock!!!

however, i hadn't tested this by actually loading a save, only by testing from the editor. when you save, vvvvvv will actually save your flip state at your checkpoint. this means the softlock described won't actually happen: you can save and reload on box checkpoints as much as you want. i sincerely apologize for the disastrous box checkpoint-related misinformation i spread in 2015.

also they don't have to be boxes at all. any sprite that isn't one of the default 2 will work. i just went with a box because it looked nice.

this level came out in 2015, but to be honest it kinda feels older than that. it is a deliberate throwback, though in truth this was the only type of level that i'd actually finished up to this point. i just liked simple levels with charmingly stilted humor. culturally, that era was defined by levels with lots of use of fancy internal scripting and oc characters. the biggest level of this type was Dimension Open, a real tour de force of a level. it has tons of zones, tons of cutscenes, and brings in ocs from many different levels. it's basically the avengers of uhh vvvvvv fanon. it was a big collab project, and i actually worked on it a bit! i don't remember what most of my contributions were tho.

it felt to me like you had to make this type of level to be prestigious. 000000 was my 2014 attempt at making something in this style, but i never finished it. it was frustrating how difficult it was to make, and my heart wasn't really in it. so i scrapped it and made Dimension SIMPLE instead. a defiant stand against the new school. for the next level, a collab with one other person, we'd make a level with (relatively) high production value that stuck out in an entirely new style of its own! that level, for better or for worse, is probably still the project im most known for, but it's a post for another day.



i had trouble fitting this into the main body of the post, but this era was also culturally marked by a lot of horrible toxicity in the community. lots of harassment, lots of 4chan neo nazi type shit. thankfully this atmosphere didn't leak into the level at all, and this thread is extremely tame, but there is still noticeably more rudeness going on than in my level threads from 2012 and 2013. i personally know two of the people in this thread and they're very much chill now, but yeah. not sure what else to say about this here but it sucked.

this post ran long! it turns out a lot of big shifts in design sensibilities happened from 2013 to 2015. it's funny that this, my first solo level after that span, stubbornly refuses to acknowledge these shifts. it is, perhaps, the least useful case study for this era possible. oh well lol

[Flux3on]

Really fun level ! 

There's one warp that really annoys me tho