New Stream Archive, In Which We Brave Everything To Save Our Friend Wastelands, Heavy Machinery, Wild

new stream archive, in which we brave everything to save our friend – wastelands, heavy machinery, wild beasts… and science experiments.

most of my remaining blog posts for the year are written – all the "favorite games of 2023" reviews are done, and two of the remaining four blog posts *after* that are written too. i just need to write the other two, add images for two of them, and then i'm DONE writing for 2023

new pre-stream archive! in which I talk about my recent successes with streaming, some exciting streams in the pipeline, and my advice for somebody who wants to get started with streaming 💖

dev commentary time! every good SMB1 style level pack has a secret hidden over the top of the screen, so why would Retrush be any different? Kolache Keep was the perfect candidate for a secret challenge, because i had already planned around the possibility of players going over the top LONG before secret challenges were in the cards…

Bowser should probably patch up that roof sometime.

this section in the middle of the keep was directly inspired by a castle from SMB1 – endless platforms with a hole in the ceiling to make platforming easier. in original drafts of the level, you could just jump over the top of the screen and run past the rest of the level… boring!

the time gates each have a region trigger that i can adjust the size of for each checkpoint. normally i want this to be as large as possible, but in this case i moved the region down below the ceiling so you can't get the extra time when running across the top.

the little gap between the region trigger and the ceiling is to account for the marginal possibility of Mario falling into a portal and touching the region through the roof.

so now, when running across the top, there's not enough time to get to the exit!… for casual players. i still wanted it to be possible for speedrunners! so i fiddled with the amount of time the last checkpoint before the ceiling gives you, so that it's just a few seconds too short. but with good timing and precise portaling, a clever speedrunner could still make it across the top in time!

this is more precise than it looks!

long story short, this route was built into the level from the beginning, so i wanted to leverage it for a secret challenge. but as you can see from the gif, it was kind of… too hard. canonizing this as a secret challenge meant that i had to once again make it doable for casual players, without making it too easy.

in the long term, this solution ended up more brittle than i hoped; it's too easy to get caught on the platforms, for example.

my first thought was to set up a portal fling, so that momentum could carry the player to the goal. only problem is, there's no wall to fling from over the ceiling! i had to extend the ceiling to make it possible to fling across the top.

old vs. new. in the original SMB1, none of the ceilings reached up to the top of the screen like this, as not to obscure the HUD.

once i did… the ceiling stuck out like a sore thumb. is this too obvious? it's the only raised spot on the ceiling! it doesn't look anything like the castles from SMB1! surely someone will notice, right?

luckily, that's what playtesting is for. i handed it off to my playtesters… only to find that all of them tried to do something completely different!

hope you've enjoyed looking at the same section of the same level several times in a row~

first found by @qwerbey, the idea was to place a portal on top of the ceiling, take the normal way to reach a gate with more time on it, and then portal back to run across the ceiling with the extra time. what an incredibly clever solution!!

…that i hadn't accounted for, so it didn't work during their testing. oops!!!

once my playtesters informed me, though, i immediately rearranged the way that the challenge is handled internally to make the solution work. it's just too clever to pass up! so, now, there are three ways to complete this challenge – using brute force, a portal fling, or the time extension from a later gate. gotta love a good puzzle with multiple solutions~

the other good news is, nobody thought to use the portal fling in testing (at first), so the raised ceiling wasn't obvious after all. honestly, it was probably only obvious to me because i was used to seeing the lower ceiling for the last several years…

the takeaway here is that it's pretty hard to design a puzzle like this for players who have never seen the solution before – but the best way to get around your own designer bias is to watch people solve it and rework the solutions from there. playtesting is one of the most powerful tools a designer has!

Secret Coin 3 (Kolache Keep) | Retrush

According to the third secret mural, there's a way to clear this stage by going over the ceiling. But wait, there's not enough time on the clock to just run across! We'll have to be extra clever…

new stream archive, in which we unwrap some surprise gifts from the Christmas SAGE Expo! we only had time to get to a handful of games, but they are all high quality and very fun 🎁

my 3rd favorite game that i played in 2023 is...

Freedom Planet 2

i was originally planning to wait on this one until the console version came out in "summer 2023." after it was delayed to the end of the year, i decided to grab the game on pc so i didn't have to wait… and i'm glad i did, because the console versions have been delayed a second time??

(i do not envy their situation and i hope the console versions are better for taking their time. honestly, i'll probably double dip anyway!)

the original Freedom Planet was a formative game experience for me during college. there was something inspiring about the way it shot for the moon – full voice acting, a fun cast of characters, a lived-in world with political intrigue, a focus on adding fast-paced combat – all trying to prove that it's more than just a Sonic fangame in new clothes.

and it worked. it gripped me and never let go! i must've replayed the story half a dozen times, speedran the levels dozens of times each. that's the reason i decided not to wait on the sequel any longer after the first console delay; i grabbed the game on pc and hit the ground running.

one aspect of what makes Freedom Planet special is its level design, and the sequel delivers – every single level is massive, open-ended, and absolutely GORGEOUS. the unique gimmicks, secret collectibles, and speedrun strats are what encouraged me to endlessly replay the first game, and each of those categories has been expanded here into some of the beefiest and most explorable levels i've ever seen in a 2D platformer, hands down. i'm so glad the sequel took its time in the oven, the levels alone were worth the wait!

to me, though, what really makes Freedom Planet stand out from other Sonic-inspired games is its fast and fluid brawling. enemies in each stage take a few hits to defeat, and every stage ends with a grand, bombastic boss fight – you get a handful of moves to tackle these fights with, and each character has very different fighting playstyles! crucially, though, there is no contact damage, meaning you can run circles around enemies while whacking away at their health bars with momentum-based attacks.

it's an incredibly fun and well-thought-out combat system, and its complexity is right at that sweet spot where it feels deep but not overwhelming. honestly it reminds me a lot of kirby's combat, which is one of my favorite combat systems in any video game! (that RtDL remake very nearly made my Top 5 this year…)

Freedom Planet 2 augments the combat system of the original in two ways. one is the addition of a spot-dodge, which feels so perfectly at home that i'm shocked it wasn't in the first game to begin with?? every game with combat benefits from the addition of a dodge, of course, but in this game especially it allows you to keep your momentum while attacking in a way that just feels so natural. there's nothing else quite like learning a boss's attack pattern enough to spot-dodge directly into a powerful counterattack!

but there's also nothing quite so discouraging as getting the boss's health down to a sliver… and biting the dust. here, too, is a place where the sequel shines: if you lose a life, you can choose to restart from a checkpoint with all your health recovered, or you can get back up on the spot with just 1 HP. the push and pull on this system is incredible – you risk getting a game over and having to redo the whole stage… but you could clutch out a victory at the last second! it has the capacity to turn near misses into huge successes, and it saved my ass countless times over the course of the adventure.

tying this all together is a great story that isn't quite as Big and Grand as the first game, but instead serves to deepen the connection between this loveable cast of characters by exploring their history and personalities in more detail. i'm still floored by the fact that these games have full voice acting – it truly makes the characters feel more alive, their personalities shine! the style of VA isn't everyone's cup of tea, i'm well aware… but as someone with fond memories of saturday morning cartoons, i find that it's very genuine and full of heart in a way that most films and AAA games don't really hit me. it's obvious that everyone involved had a ton of fun!

my one regret is that i haven't returned to the game since my first playthrough – i'd really like to replay those levels and see how fast i can clear them! and try out the other characters, and see what the arcade mode is like, and go for the achievements, and…