Don't eat yellow snow (v1.1)

[pixelator]

This is my level that I made for round 2 of the VVVVVV Discord 100 member event contest. It got second place, scoring a total of 8.73/10.

This specific forum version has some changes, including:

• fixing the player becoming cyan in the first lava room
• making the outside area at the end a lot less difficult
• expanding on the ending to make the level end less abruptly
• removing the flash from the shield spike protection
• adding an intermediate "shield breaking" sprite for more aesthetic
• adding as many tofloor commands as freakin' possible to the ending cutscene and making the trigger smaller to avoid glitching
• Modified tiles3 so the bg colors more accurately match the text colors

Screenshots:


Update 1.1:

• Fixed the trinket vanishing in "Corner"
• Added back some MIA corner tiles to "Corner"
• Changed the sound effect for the shield activating in the opening cutscene to match all its later activations
• Slightly modified the ringing phone sound to match the one from Mission Polar
• Added the bottom-left corner of the ship to "First Blood"
• Added icy overworld tiles to the tops of the first three ice cave rooms
• Made the lava at the top left of "It's Extremely Unsafe" not suddenly become a wall when transitioning into "Corner"
• Added special wall tiles to avoid cutoff in "Magma Cube Cavern" and "Ice Block Cavern"
• Added "wall with lava upside down edge" tiles and lava corner tiles to fix minor cutoff
• Fixed the player becoming light blue man if they died right after the opening cutscene
• Censored the opening cutscene (lol)
• Made the two rooms from the opening cutscene hidden when you gain control
• Actually added the shield breaking graphics to the download, whoops

Download

[Balneor]

Is the intermediate "shield breaking" sprite supposed to show random ennemies/main game sprites textures ? Looks pretty glitchy to the eye.

(Pic 1, left to right) You can skip the cutscene by immediately moving right when entering this room. It's pretty harmless despite skipping the checkpoint.
(Pic 2) This is a much bigger concern. This one trinket shows in the VVVVVV editor, in Ved, and when you are located in the right part of the room... but suddently vanishes as you enter the actual trinket path ?? making it impossible to collect. This wasn't the case in the submitted version either.

                                                                                                                              

The showcased mechanic here is innovative, but far from perfect when using it; Maintly because of this one small delay when hitting spikes with the shield that can make some parts *slightly* frustrating to pass. If you can't fix that, then another effective approach would be to adapt the room's layouts to it so that it doesn't become unfair. All in all I found the whole mechanic pretty rough to control, but that isn't too much of a problem here.

The other problem which is more on the visual side of things, is about that one-second annoying white flash that occurs when dying from spikes (while being equipped by the shield)... which mostly feels more of a glitch than intended behavior, and is unsettling during play.

One final note about the graphics. Overall it is very well-made, but it seems to not go too well with tight gameplay, due to their round shape and appearances (Pixel-ledge-jumps, which are not rare in this level, are a bit harder to do per example).

In any possible scenarios this is totally worth giving a shot, at least once in a lifetime. Congrats on top 3

[Info Teddy]

does this version still have the awkward platforming because of the unnecessary delay

[pixelator]

Hmm, the trinket thing might be caused by me changing the ID of the retextured coin to 1. Now that I think of it, that could be why it didn't show up for me in the last version, since it and the first trinket both had an ID of 0. I'll definitely fix that for the next version.

does this version still have the awkward platforming because of the unnecessary delay

stop

[moth ✨]

• making the outside area at the end a lot less difficult

woo! i had to use the editor when i played that part in the original so i'll def have to check this version out 

[Info Teddy]

stop

well, you should really fix it. honestly you can maybe get used to the delay, but its still a big issue

[Bruce Michez]

"Magma Cube Cavern" was a fascinating room, but also much too hard, actually approaching a 333333 level of frustration for me.  Maybe cut down the number of enemies on that screen?

[Balneor]

"Magma Cube Cavern" was a fascinating room, but also much too hard, actually approaching a 333333 level of frustration for me.  Maybe cut down the number of enemies on that screen?

Actually, the only hard part in this room is the very last bounce into the spikes before the next screen (Because of the delay when hitting spikes with the shield). Since the rooms resets whenever you're in a checkpoint or in those minerals textures (Elecaniums story-wise), those ennemies will always have a fixed path, and become pretty easy to avoid if you find the correct movement path.

[pixelator]

yay update

download here, or in the original post

[Balneor]

Alright, this version is fine.

[allison]

"Magma Cube Cavern" was a fascinating room, but also much too hard, actually approaching a 333333 level of frustration for me.  Maybe cut down the number of enemies on that screen?

I remember feeling similar when I played it. It was super difficult, but I came away thinking it was really clever. The outside rooms afterwards were even tougher, but the patch notes say that was fixed so hey