I'm the creator of this level, and it's been about about 3.5 months since I released this level as of me writing this. This isn't really going to be a review, more so a retrospective writing. I'm giving myself a 9/10 (cue Obama giving himself medal image) because I'm overall really satisfied with how this level turned out even though there are a few things I would change.

I had the idea to make IWTS after I beat Eon and loved the level so much but wished there were more levels like it. At the same time, Cacola's album The Angel, The Demon, was one I was listening to extremely heavily in the later half of 2024 to get me through a really rough time and for that it's one of my favorite albums of all time. With those two things in mind, I got to work making a level using the song [...], one of my favorite songs off the album. Something I leaned on very heavily for inspiration while designing the level was something Cacola wrote in a reply to a YouTube comment where she explained the meaning of the song. I'm not gonna retype the whole thing here, but you can read the whole thing in the reply to the pinned comment on this video. This writing gave me plenty of ideas of what to do at different parts throughout the level to represent the song, and I even named the level after the name Cacola gave to the ambient section 10-14 minutes in.

Initially, building the level was not a huge priority and I felt the idea of building a level this monstrously long was an impossible goal for me, someone without a whole lot of building experience going into this. I also had a lot of doubts on if this level would get rated, if it were to be finished. However, as I kept chipping away at it and gaining more confidence in my ability to build, I began to realize that I might actually be able to finish this level. For the main portion of the song, I'm really satisfied with how I was able to represent the song and a lot of what I was able to make in the first half came out very similarly to how I was able to picture it in my head. I even had a positive feedback loop where my friends would give me great support and share their excitement for my level which in turn got me to keep working on the level. There are some minor things in the 4x speed and the ambient section I would change, but they're minor things so I'll just move on.

I'm gonna skip ahead to the midi section of the level since if there was one part I would rework the most, it would probably be this stretch of the level. I had the meaning of the song in mind again here, but this part of the level is also based on a dream I had once where I was playing the level with this part of the song. I remembered the level had these vivid colors and these blocks that looked like standard blocks from the older updates, but over time it started to all feel off and fake. The block designs started looking warped and distorted, the colors felt wrong, etc. The part of the level looked and felt very strange, but I knew I wanted to make this part as accurate in how the dream felt as possible. I also just liked the idea of this part having that "false sense of security" feeling. And unfortunately, I feel like I was unable to really replicate it to the best of my ability. This stretch of the level has received some mixed reception, with some who really like it but others who don't think it represents the song that well. The way I went about some of the block designs feels way too subtle at times, and I also spent so much time adjusting color & shader triggers to try and get the background to look the way I want, but I also feel like I wasn't able to get that fully right either.

I'm also partially unsatisfied with how I did the last 2 minutes. I was almost constantly adjusting the shader triggers and how they change over time, and this was really time consuming and I had to rework the sepia & grayscale triggers enough to look right and feel natural, but I still feel like around the middle of the section it shifts into grayscale too fast compared to before & after it. I also felt the gameplay here was a bit subpar, I already struggle with making gameplay in bordered gamemodes but at this point in the level after having already built so much of it I was getting really dry of gameplay ideas. The UFO part also used to be extremely rough, it initially was normal sized and making it mini was a last-minute decision. I would've liked if it started with some other gamemode that wasn't UFO due to the UFO being really hard to accurately control at 3x speed, but it had to be via process of elimination: swing copter would be even harder, I couldn't use the wave to start because of the sync system I was using (I'm currently writing a script for a YouTube video about this horrid bullshit), and I wanted the level to end the same way it started with the ship in the void. In the end, a lot of people still really like this part, so that's good.

One final thing I wanted to say about the last 5 minutes I couldn't really tack onto the other two paragraphs was that I feel like doing such a major stylistic switch-up in the level stunted the quality of the last 5 minutes. I had sort of gotten into a rhythm with how the first 14 minutes was more-or-less one section that constantly builds upon itself in different ways, so much so that I felt like I was doing a lot of things wrong when I tried something else that was similar but also drastically different; I was significantly less optimal with my trigger usage, as well as color channel & group usage.

In spite of all of those things, I'm overall really satisfied with how this level turned out and the 9 months I spent building it were nothing short of amazing (aside from the 1 month I spent on the sync machine...). I feel like I accomplished pretty much everything I tried to do with IWTS! I'm so endlessly blessed that this level was able to get as far as it did, and that I even got my first rate as well as the 2nd longest rated classic level in the game??? I don't even know how the hell I would explain where I am currently to 16yo me in 2023. If you really enjoyed my level, thank you so much, I'm so glad I was able to deliver such an experience. If you tried it and didn't like it, I still want to say thank you for giving my level a chance in the first place.