#02 Deja Vu All Over Again (fists only)
#07 Roots and Radicals (fists only)
#08 The Tangent Universe
#10 Heart of Fusion (fists only)
#16 Killing the Giants as They Sleep (staff only)
#18 The Living Receiver
#26 Eat S’pht and Die
#27 Second to Last of the Mohicans (staff only)
#28 The Manipulated Dead
#29 Third Rock from Lh’owon (staff only)
#30 Flight of Icarus (fists only)
#33 The Incredible Hulk
#34 Babylon X
#38 The Ensurance Trap
#45 Deep Into the Grotto (“success branch” exit, secret route)
#48 The Philosophy of Time Travel
Let me know if any of these freeze up – I think there were some encoding issues.
Wall of text incoming regarding the official release:
- I very much like the snow in the chapter 4 levels and the ashes in “Eat S’pht and Die”.
- I really like the ability to wander around the outside of the Marathon, should the player choose, at the start of “Déjà Vu All Over Again”. I’d almost like it expanded even more for 1.3, where the player can explore every exterior region before teleporting in. There are several areas that are unconnected to the starting point that could be connected by similar bridges to the one the player can wander underneath already. Granted, the player would only have so much oxygen, but still.
- The new path through “Deep Into the Grotto” is actually a lot less time-consuming than I’d have made it, but it still suffices in making it much less of a gimme. Too bad for players who’ll have run out of AR ammo, but at least they can still explore the area after the Pfhor come in, so it’s not really a case of Guide Dang It. (And really, why would you be using AR ammo in chapter five before that point?) I also like that the area has much higher ceilings than I’d used, I think, although it does raise a bit of fridge logic with why the area wouldn’t be visible from the start point – but it’s a secret, so it’s easy to write that off. (And “S’pht’ia” has the same problem in some parts, which can be written off due to limitations of the engine.) Now that I’m thinking about it, I might overhaul the area a bit more for 1.3 by adding some water, in the style of the other secret I added to the level.
- The new failure dreams are also good. Subtle changes that completely overhaul the routes. It’ll take me awhile to get them memorised. I now wonder if it’s possible to do something for the success dreams to make them more distinct from one another without making them annoying.
- I didn’t know enemies would explode from Jjaro weapons. I understand, am completely OK with, and could even learn to like the wave motion cannon blowing up enemies, since it’s basically the game’s equivalent of the rocket launcher and in essence a weapon of last resort.
However, my honest reaction to having the gravitronic blades blow up enemies is similar to the Doctor’s on redecoration, and I’m leaning towards hoping it will be changed for 1.3. I might learn to live with having those behave like fusion and causing Hunters to explode (it short-circuits their armour, say), but even this kind of bothers me for difficulty reasons. I have additional logistical objections to having them blow up Fighters and Enforcers, though: it just looks weird. I see no logical reason why what essentially looks like a lightsaber should explode those enemies and destroy their weapons. Even if a story explanation has been concocted for it, it simply feels counterintuitive.
The exploding Hunters also add some extra difficulty to a chapter I’d spent a lot of time balancing. To be fair, I’d worried that I’d erred slightly on the easy side for that chapter, but if I’d known this change was coming and would affect gameplay that severely, I’d probably have had something to say even during my least mentally lucid periods. I’m a bit less bothered by the added difficulty than I am by the nature of the challenge: I simply don’t find it enjoyable. Essentially, it necessitates a great deal more weapon switching, and given that enemies can sneak up on you very easily in chapter five, and Banshees strip roughly one-fifth a bar of health per shot and Nightmares roughly one-third, there’s a bit more luck than I care for involved here, unless you simply hug the rechargers, which is annoying for its own reasons.
I will admit, however, that some of this is also because I’m borderline obsessive about item collection. Except when speedrunning, I go to great lengths to avoid blowing up or frying enemies that drop items. This will now mean that I have to go to much greater lengths for every chapter five level that has Pfhor. Obviously, most players aren’t as obsessive about item collection as I am, and that’s fine – the chapter undoubtedly has enough fusion ammo to blow up all the Hunters you’ll encounter from a distance. I did this deliberately, in fact.
Regardless, I find the change frustrating. If people had felt chapter five needed greater difficulty, I’d have preferred to raise the respawn rates for some of the enemies by, say, five or ten percent. I get that the blades are really powerful and it might’ve seemed appropriate to give them some sort of drawback, but the enemies you’re facing in chapter five are no slouches themselves (again, the Nightmares’ projectiles do one-third a bar of health in damage), so it felt fair already.
If you really still want the gravitronic blades to eliminate Fighters and Enforcers’ items, I think it would be better to implement something like Rubicon’s disintegration effect rather than outright blowing them up. Obviously, Rubicon’s disintegration effect was a replacement for the flaming death sequence, but it’s almost certainly now possible to do something like that with Lua/MML without scrapping the flaming death. If it’s a change people want, I will look for a way to implement it in 1.3.
Still, I liked getting items from enemies killed with the blades. I rarely used them, but I liked knowing they were there. - I’ve noticed a few weird glitches. For the precipitation branch, I didn’t think to provide code that causes precipitation to disappear when it hits media, since when I was working on the game, none of the levels had precipitation where it would fall into media. This is no longer the case, given “Eat S’pht and Die” and “Babylon X”. It looks quite silly to have snow falling underneath the surface of sludge or ashes falling underneath the surface of lava. It’s a bit late for the 1.2 release, but for 1.3, here are the relevant lines from my precipitation scripts in Chronicles:
And, for context, the entire Triggers.idle() function:Code: Select all
if e.polygon.media then if e.z < e.polygon.media.height then local x, y, p = uniform.xy_in_triangle_list(Level._triangles) e:position(x, y, p.ceiling.height, p) end end
(I am not going to try to figure out how to integrate this into Eternal’s precipitation scripts at the moment, as I’m fairly sure I had read that Lia had also made some changes to them.)Code: Select all
function Triggers.idle() if scenery_cleared == true then build_pool() scenery_cleared = false end local pool = Level._pool local position = pool[1].position local phase = precipitation_phase local gravity = phase * precipitation_gravity local wind = phase * precipitation_wind local phase_match = Game.ticks % phase for i = 1,precipitation_count do if i % phase == phase_match then local e = pool[i] position(e, e.x - wind, e.y - wind, e.z - gravity, e.polygon) if e.z < e.polygon.floor.height then local x, y, p = uniform.xy_in_triangle_list(Level._triangles) e:position(x, y, p.ceiling.height, p) elseif e.z > e.polygon.ceiling.height then local x, y, p = uniform.xy_in_triangle_list(Level._triangles) e:position(x, y, p.floor.height, p) end if e.polygon.media then if e.z < e.polygon.media.height then local x, y, p = uniform.xy_in_triangle_list(Level._triangles) e:position(x, y, p.ceiling.height, p) end end end end
- Also on the subject of precipitation, it would be nice to figure out a way to make it dependent upon either frame rate or graphics settings instead of having an entirely separate map file for it – that way there wouldn’t be a necessity for a whole different branch. I have some ideas to this effect but have no idea whether they will work.
- There are some motion glitches in the AI cores in “Roots and Radicals” and “Heart of Fusion”. Nothing game-breaking, but strange. I will look to solve these for 1.3.
- A few walls in “Third Rock from the Sun” were not textured/retextured properly. I don’t care for the removal of the landscape sludge textures on the floor at the bottom of the level. It wasn’t that realistic, sure, but it looked really cool and stood out from the rest of the level (and for that matter, the rest of the game), and it seemed pretty Jjaro-ish. $lave doesn’t seem to like the change either. Also, one of the polygons somehow escaped notice and still has the landscape sludge texture.
- Also in “Third Rock”, some of the gaps between platforms and walls need to be lessened a bit, as you’ll see in my video for it. That one’s on me, since I was the one who made that change.