Rating Curve

touching that any creator ever had enough hope in their heart to believe anyone would play their level more than once

where are we with using levels to facilitate discussion of serious topics? if you had to ask me, not very far along at all. baffles me that this is considered "moving" and "thought-provoking" - and that's not to imply that there's something better out there in GD and this level was merely a misstep, rather that creators in general completely are totally incapable of digging any deeper than "ADHD exists" or "mental illness is real".

you guys have well and truly mastered summoning the vibe of profundity - next is figuring out how to communicate anything more in-depth without having to spell it out in plaintext to the viewer. the visual artists of the outside world cracked this years ago, so can you

sometimes I'll set the grid size in megahack to 1 and then doodle in the editor like I'm using a pen tool. hell of a lot of fun. yall should do it more often

-1 point for losing krazy's devil-may-care attitude, +1 point for letting me sleep in his basement

fascinated by the conflict between

a) "I want my level to be as spectacular and entertaining as possible, so I'm going to take advantage of length, intensity, color theory, dynamics, and other common design principles to appeal to the greatest quantity of players"

b) "I want my level to be an insane-extreme demon, such that the intended experience is only actually available to <0.01% of players"

and that's my ted talk as to why all the powerhouse creators seem to avoid making extreme demons

oxygen im i a joke to you

when you make an insanely quality 15 second tech demo and then try to parlay that momentum into an entire level

PS +1 extra-credit point for actually making it to the end of the song

this rating is dedicated to somehow getting 70% on this level on my iPad when I was an underclassman in high school. the amount of spam sections jeezus

something about this level's ties to Night Palace the [Mount Eerie] album has deeply rubbed me the wrong way since I first saw it. who listens to this album - dense with prose about nature, spirituality, colonization, ignorance, violence, wisdom, and all four elemental nations to boot - and comes out the other side with something this nonconfrontational? seriously?

the highly defined aesthetics of most of the game's updates definitely weren't any more than an afterthought by rob. during that initial year of consistent updates I'd imagine it was mostly a lot of "here's a good spot in my development to release this chunk of features, hit send", and very little "this is the precise way I want the game to look". and yet we've ended up in a community steeped enough in nostalgia that update numbers have become visual shorthand in their own right, these moments in history forever crystallized and internalized by creators as looking a particular way.

you probably have a very similar mental of image of 1.9 as everyone else, despite the diversity and wonder of the update, and you're probably sick of what you see because it's been drilled down so hard over the last 10 years (the way it shows up in the portfolio of every design creator trying to "retvrn to stripped-down arrangements" like they're taping for MTV unplugged). we are obsessed with the affects of that update probably a hundred times as strongly as rob ever was. and 2.0's awkward middle-child-syndrome vibe has been making similar waves, indicating it's not anything really special about 1.9 but rather a general affinity for the romantic past

you ever think about how it could've all been so different? if the move trigger was a thing in 1.1 rather than 2.0? if we didn't get access to the Newgrounds audio library until 2.2, 10 years later? if different block sets had been entirely rearranged and folded into completely different updates? imagine how one or two subtle changes in an update, a delayed feature here, a rushed feature there, would've radically altered the fabric of everything, perhaps uprooting the entire lineage of creating as we know it.

spanish love songs is a brief wormhole peering into that alternative timeline. seldom have I seen a stronger examination into the butterfly effect than here