Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

Sunday, December 11, 2022

My (Mental) Life and How It Is Falling Apart: a Rant and History

Let me start this by just saying that I really hate my mind… It's been a pain for many years now but it just gets worse and WORSE. (I really won't ever understand how someone's own mind is this self-destructive and unstoppable!)

Please read this, as it'll tell you the history of my frustrating mind and how it's nearly completely ruined my life mentally.

🫠 HISTORY OF THE ANNOYANCE 🫠

Back in “the Michael years”, my mind tried various methods to mess with me, whether it's trying to annoy or worry me. Though it tried many things (rendering scissors trying to cut my eyes, making me think that blinking and other automatic functions wouldn't happen, and even forcing me to see the weird, distorted faces of crying infants), it eventually settled on one method, somehow creating its own itches.

Again, somehow, it can rapidly “poke” at the same area of my skin, making it sensitive, then from there can somehow create a pulse that grabs my attention, for seemingly no good reason and for unknown gains. For proof these are not “the thousands of itches you naturally get a day”, they usually always appear wherever my mind forces me to focus on a split second before it happens. Also, they're suspiciously absent when initially waking up from any dream. If they were “natural”, wouldn't they be there immediately?

Anyways, let's get back to the history of this annoyance. After we made it out of those endless motels, we lived with other people for some time after that. With the daily worries of hotel life and possibly becoming homeless home, my mind reverted back to its annoying behavior.

I started fighting back at this point; I had enough of it endlessly poking at me instead of letting me be productive and concentrate like any other human being can. (Ah, the curse of having a “intelligent mind”…) The instant itch thoughts are basically impossible to prevent, being “out of reach” mentally, so while I initially kept quickly looking at something in whatever room I was in or trying to force my focus to shift, I later resorted to forcibly blocking my mind from thinking about ANYTHING by somehow pushing on my forehead mentally (but not physically), known as “fogging” my mind.

⚰️ THE DEATH OF MY BRAIN ⚰️

After moving into our camper for a couple months, I decided that enough was enough, and began aggressively trying to stop the itches using that method. I assumed that at worst, this would only cause a BIT of mental destruction, nothing major, so I began to fog the mind constantly, holding off the onslaught of itches.

Over time, I noticed the itches became a bit less of a frequent occurrence, and at times I could actually relax without that unnecessary constant poking. Sure, my mind was getting foggier, but the brief peace was more worth it to me.

On the other hand, things were also getting worse in my brain… I noticed my mind wouldn't automatically think of things anymore, instead only thinking about a lot of things if something that I heard or saw triggered an impulse that led to the next thought/bit of data in my head.

That alone is a massive downgrade, limiting my vocabulary and ideas to a minimum. This has also caused me to basically forget what memories remained in my mind of my younger better years and bits of knowledge, as now barely anything comes to mind automatically anymore!

Do you want to know the worst part about all of this? The itches are still surviving. Yep, that's right; Despite more important parts of my mind being so foggy that even a flood light wouldn't pierce it, it still knows how to make those annoying itches, the only reason why I did that risky crap in the first place. Also, even if I fog my mind and escape the itches for the night, they're back the next morning, but my increased fog remains! This world feels like it works in reverse from how it should in many ways, and let me say this is one of them; If I fog my mind to get rid of an annoyance, that problem should be the main thing that gets affected by it, not the only part that survives my counter-attack.

This and the next problem might not sound like much to you, but believe me, I feel these mental problems are ruining my one life, and it's amazing that your own mind can destroy everything this easily.

🥱 RUINING SLEEP 🥱

For the longest time, I haven't been able to sleep like a normal human (though my ideas of an ideal human may be tainted by fictional media like games and cartoons that usually show people sleeping perfectly from night until morning). The first time that I would fall asleep, I'd sleep for like 3 hours or so, but any additional attempts to sleep would only give me an hour at a time.

That's already pretty messed up and inconvenient, but it's even worse when you realize that every single time that I wake up, I'm at the mercy of my stupidly annoying mind potentially creating itches to force me awake! (That happened this morning and I've been awake since 8:20AM because of it!)

Since the mental fogginess has gotten pretty thick, now it's even affecting my ability to sleep; Gone is the initial 3-hour sleep, as now seemingly every attempt at sleeping is merely an hour-long nap!

Additionally, even THAT is worse now, as very often, I can only stay asleep for less than an hour, like 30 minutes at a time! This leaves me vulnerable to those dumb itches even more often, and can lead to be being forced to stay awake earlier; Once I've slept enough times, my mind becomes aware of it and starts trying to wake me up. (I'm starting to wish I could take prescriptions that forcibly knock me out with no option to stay awake; That's how hard it is to return to sleep!)

😔 CONCLUSION 😔

I worried about a lot of things in my earliest Facebook posts but those were child's play when compared to this mind-threatening problem that's taking over me… At last back then I had more brain cells left, and could think of ideas reliably, even with the small amount of natural mental fog that I already had before the fight began.

I took it all for granted, and somehow didn't think it would get this bad. Let this be a warning to you, the person reading this; Don't think that you can escape your mental annoyances by trying to block all thoughts, through self-fogging or another method; It may screw you over for life like me, and once you make the mistake, you'll never get back the intelligence that this will take from you.

I think I deserve a second chance, and should have my former mental health come back to me, with my acknowledgement that I made a terrible mistake and shouldn't attempt that again; Sure, my mind won't let me work or concentrate like I should be allowed to, but at least then I would be able to think again instead of fearing that I'm getting amnesia at least and at worst that I'm gradually forgetting everything like an elder, and I'm only 27!

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

The Fears of an Ambitious Indie Developer

Whoa, this blog hasn't been updated in months now! With that last blog post, you might've assumed I went insane due to fears of color association or something. Well, despite a certain infamous game's "gremlins" showing me how dumb this world can be with restrictions and morals (which kinda discourages me), I haven't disappeared...though I now have fears that if Magical Mary were to become popular, that people would scrutinize every line of my code and hate me for the slightest offense, though people should be more open to others in my opinion.

My recent (real) fears and frustrations with people aside, Magical Mary's development has definitely slowed down, and this blog post will explain my mind's ideas of plans that are way too massive to go through with...

Branching Out: the Growth in Tree Quality

Ah, trees... Believe it or not, they've been in Mary's Magical Adventure since its development began, in World of Kirbycraft v0.75! There's some cool things to talk about that I've been developing just within the last couple days, but first, let me tell you a story about the history of these leafy things...

(This post has an AI-generated voice reading video available. To hear it, play this video and read along!)

Out of Place Cutouts

In the beginning, trees were pretty basic. In fact, they were just like the trees in Doom, a game from over 20 years ago at this point! Just like in that game, they were paper-thin images that rotated to face you. The only thing that made these trees unique was the code ran upon each tree spawning, which gave it a random tree image. I would say these trees were fine, but really, there were two problems with them...

Ripped from Reality

World of Kirbycraft, even back in those days when the game looked pretty bad, still had some form of a cartoony "art style" in it. These trees completely contradicted that, looking like pictures of real trees cut out and glued to the ground, like the game's world is just something a kid and their parent threw together by cutting out pages of magazines... I don't believe I was going for that style, but looking back, it's like looking at early 3D games that intended to look realistic. They were fine then, but now look like a joke compared to unrealistic games.

No Originality

You may think I was just experimenting, seeing what worked and what didn't, but no. I started development of World of Kirbycraft while I was still making Doom II: The Monster Invasion's last iteration (which in my opinion was the worst).

When I needed things like objects and code, I'd grab it from that mod and slap it into World of Kirbycraft, and that's exactly what happened with the trees and grass.

While the "realistic" trees worked mostly fine in Doom II: The Monster Invasion, they completely clashed with World of Kirbycraft's style. Unfortunately, I didn't know any better until years later...

The Crappy Image Legacy

In World of Kirbycraft v1.4, Hell City was introduced. As it was a complete ripoff of Kirby Air Ride's City Trial map, one area was a forest with many trees. Predictably, those were the same exact trees used in every previous version. There's not much to say other than just how out of place they still look.

Just when World of Kirbycraft got renamed to Mary's Magical Adventure in v1.6, the trees were thankfully changed to use better images. Mind you, they still didn't completely fit, but were more cartoony. The best one was the one on the right in the screenshot above, which came from a Terry WAD. It was just too pretty of a tree sprite for me to let it get wasted in a stupid waste of time like that!

Despite getting these new, better images, unfortunately these trees were only used in two places:

Hell City's island - In the park
City Street Run - Around road corners

Apologies for the short section, but I really thought I did more with these better trees. However, neither version can beat what I've done to the trees lately!

The Perfect Trim

Am I...seeing things? Are these really 3D? Nature finally looks right!

When Mary's Magical Adventure's next version is released, oh, are people in for a massive tree upgrade! For once, trees actually feel like they belong in the game's world, with more 3D, detailed designs that are actually interactive! Let's show what makes these new trees really cool, one point at a time!

"3D Graphics!"

Only a video could do this justice, so...just watch this video of both new trees and admire how 3D and believable they are now. Don't question the weird music, I like messing with Guitar Hero songs' individual channels.

Yes, you're not seeing things. Mary's Magical Adventure's trees are made like more modern games now; The tree itself is a 3D (voxel) model and 2D leaf cluster sprites are placed on top of parts of it, giving it a 3D look voxels alone couldn't give. This is seemingly the same thing a lot of games do for trees, like Oblivion and Sims 3(?), bringing Mary's Magical Adventure into a more modern time, unlike...some things.

I said these are interactive above, and you might not expect all that you can do with these trees. For one, you can knock leaves off of the trees with nearly any attack. If you hit leaves with a hammer, they will scatter and float through the air, but hitting them with a fireball will catch them on fire, making the leaves turn brown, drop to the ground, then turn into flames. It looks good in motion and is satisfying to do. In the future, there will be more of a reason to randomly become a pyro.

Only you can prevent wildfires...if you can resist the urge!

If burning leaves isn't good enough, how about the whole tree? Yes, if you damage the tree itself enough, it'll lose all of its leaves at the same time then collapse. Burn it enough and instead, every single leaf will start burning, then the tree dramatically falls down. If either of these events happen, the tree stays gone, even if you leave the area.

Now, don't worry if you like trees; You don't have to destroy fictional vegetation, but if you want to force all leaves off of a tree without permanently destroying it, just hit it with a cold attack like an Ice Ball and it'll start shaking then jump as it loses all leaves. When this happens, the tree survives and will re-grow its leaves back when you move far enough away from it.

This video shows all three tree deaths:

Now, all of this interaction comes with a cost, and that's a sprite render time increase of 0.02 per tree rendered in "high quality", which is what was seen in the videos. To counter this potential beauty turning into a lag source, all trees are drawn as a single image at far distances, just like the older trees. This results in the game rendering a single image instead of many leaf clusters plus a 3D model, and this is what saves the 0.02 sprite render time mentioned above.

This is actually something games do, more common on games with a continuous open world like Oblivion. I came up with the idea to do this before watching that video, so I had no clue it handled things the same way as my game. Oh well, I guess I can say I did something like Bethesda now. Whether that's good or bad's up to you, because...oh no, does this mean now I'll leave many game-breaking bugs in the final release? I hope not!

Anyways, if you don't like the trees abruptly changing between images and 3D models, you can adjust the distance by changing the r_objdrawdistance CVAR, which is a multiplier that defaults at 1.0. Increasing this will change the distances at which many decorative objects switch to lower quality, though it changes everything, not just trees. If on a lower-end system, it's recommended to decrease this to 0.5 or similar, given you can tolerate more obvious object pop-in.

Anyways, that's the latest update! There's more changes, but the new trees deserved their own blog post.

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Magical Mary History #2 - v0.75 Part 2 (Early Monsters and Unused Oddities)

World of Kirbycraft's original monster lineup. Some may look familiar from Mary's Magical Adventure...

Welcome back! Last time, we looked at the intended but very flawed gameplay that I thought was fine back when I developed this version, plus the "test levels" in the game. This time, we're going to look at list of monsters that are in this version. Yes, I said there were none in normal gameplay, but oh, there's a small list fully programmed into the game at this point in development.

The Bestiary

Though not a single monster appears in this version, there are some programmed in /Decorate/kmonsters.txt, Some are from the Kirby series for obvious reasons, but others aren't. Here's the full list, in order of when they appear in the text file, from top to bottom:

"Mouse!" Silence this noisy thing and it'll become worse...

Scarfy (KDog1/KDog2)

Just like in the Kirby games, this innocent creature happily shows its true "dog" form when you hit it once. The only way to avoid seeing the "dog" is by dealing a lot of damage at the same time. This isn't considered a monster to the game until it transforms, so if you can resist the urge to shut it up, you have one less to worry about.

Gordo

Another common Kirby enemy, a spikeball with eyes. If you get near it, it will start flashing. Touch it, and it will yell "Mouse!" at you and send you flying away! This enemy is indestructible, so your best bet is to avoid it.

Wheelie (KWheel)

A wheel with an eye at its center that somehow maintains orientation while it rolls around. Wheelie is a dangerous and unpredictable enemy, slowly moving until it gets into the perfect position to run over you! Its speed (and really bad weapons in this version) make it pretty dangerous, taking three hits from Arthas's hammer to make this wheel's rubber explode!

Cyclops Troll (Troll)

This big, blue cyclops may look intimidating, but he's only a threat up-close, conveniently the only distance your weapons work at! When approached, the troll raises his arms then slams the ground below him, which causes damage to everything in the area. Compared to his appearance in Mary's Magical Adventure, he isn't as powerful here, plus doesn't have random arm-brace colors.

Huge Troll (HugeTroll)

This larger, red-colored variant of the Troll may look like he should be able to hurt you from longer distances, but in reality, he's nearly the same as his normal-sized counterpart, only 3¼× bigger! Unless you cheat or team up with a friendly monster, you will be here all day with this big pain.

Tiger

This aggressive animal is more complex than any other enemy in this version. Once it sees you, it changes its behavior based on your distance. Get up close and it'll prefer to try pouncing on you, but run away and it'll really speed up to catch you! Your best bet fighting this beast is to stand near it, wait for it to pounce, then strike it while it's down!

(Interestingly if you look at its back foot, it looks like I erased some pixels of the sprite without noticing all this time... This is probably still in the latest version.)

For those that want to see fights against all of these enemies, here's a video I recorded.

Strange Unused Content

All right, time for the really technical things that literally can't be gotten to in-game. These are mainly just sounds, but these sounds alone give a big impression that I really didn't know what I wanted from World of Kirbycraft back then, as if the whole game didn't give that away with its generic grassland level...

Inside wok_x.pk3's sound folder, a bunch of unused voice samples and "music" can be found. In the voices/Monsters subdirectory, enemy and player sounds are stored, but take a look at that directory's contents. See those WOKGUY sounds? Those were intended for common enemies that didn't deserve custom sets of voice samples. The tiger uses the last set, but every sample above that isn't used!

STOCKAHH - Interestingly, this is the stock scream heard in games like Twisted Metal 3 and 4! I'm not sure why it's here, as no enemy ever used it. The Wilhelm and Howie screams were used in Doom II: The Monster Invasion's second version for zombies to use at random, so perhaps a similar thing was planned for World of Kirbycraft...
WOKGUY set 0 - I love reversing songs with lyrics because they usually break down into hilarious nonsense, such as the notable "Can't Help Mice!" and "No No Heat". However, in this case, I think I used my laptop's microphone to record something, possibly an iPod or something, playing a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, which I then spliced and reversed for these samples. Most of them suck, but I like sample #4, where he sounds like he's saying "Stop that...!", which is assigned as a pain sound.
WOKGUY set 1 - For this set, I think I recorded myself talking, then reversed and slowed down the recording over an unknown song. Parts of this overall larger sound were used as the samples here. I think this set was meant for strong, mysterious enemies like flying enemies firing magic projectiles at the player. In the end, it was never used, though it fails to sound threatening with lines like "NOM NOOOOOM~!" and "Pandora... PANDORA...!" (Yes, I listened to Pandora, that's why that's randomly here.
WOKGUY set 2 - This, like set 2, is just my voice reversed, but with no speed adjustment. In this set, it sounds like a man who thinks the player is a mouse (like the Kirby enemies) and even yells "A MOOOOUSE!" sometimes upon seeing you. This was briefly used for the Fighter enemies in Mary's Magical Adventure until I recorded their proper samples.

The other subdirectories are arguably stranger, so here's another list:

weird - This is, contains, fittingly, the weirdest two samples in the game, which sound like very slowed-down beeps with their bass increased a lot. I think these were supposed to be used in scary areas to mess with the player's head, like those "beats" I can't think of the word for that make you get certain feelings.
dynamic_music - Hey, all of the cool games do it, but it's a a shame ZDoom isn't capable of dynamic music, which picks different parts of a song based on in-game activity. It didn't stop me from trying using ACS in a test level that I haven't found in any version of World of Kirbycraft yet.

This folder contains four WAV sounds that play different sections of a basic song, which would be chosen based on where the player was located in the test level. It would've been cool to keep this, but due to ACS being limited to the tic-rate of ZDoom, I could only use tempos that were synced up well enough with it, which would've limited how varied my music sounded.
ambient - "Wait, the ambient sounds were planned from the very beginning, Xane?" Sorta. The sounds in this folder are weird ModPlug Tracker recordings that used a strange, "organ-like" instrument. The first three are the raw recordings while the latter three have a reverb effect on it.

I think these sounds would've come from an organ in a castle level, but clearly that never came to be as the sounds were removed after this version, and my plans changed by the time Mary's Magical Adventure became the game's new name...

This video plays most of these unused sounds, minus the "weird" ones, since those are barely audible without editing. Since I forgot to include it in the first post, Mary's voice acting is included here as well, specifically the lines that never got used or were removed in later versions due to the removal of beams and cup-based weapons. Apologies for how long it took to finish this post, which was supposed to be done months ago!

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Magical Mary History #1 - v0.75 Part 1 (A Terrible Start)

Yuck! What's this visual throwup? Magical Mary 1's past was a visual mess!

Magical Mary 1 has been in development for years, possibly dating back to 2010-2014, when it was just called "World of Kirbycraft", after the movie series I was making. As with any game, things weren't always as they are today, so it'll be fun to look back at each version and see how the game improved with time, and today we're starting with the earliest build I've found, one dating back to 2015, which was only seen in my third development video on YouTube! Let's dive into it, after the cut!

Intended Gameplay

Bad initial impressions

Since this is the start of a blog post series, let's establish the general layout. First, I'll talk about gameplay and the player's overall experience, then follow up with info about unused content and interesting miscellaneous stuff. As this is the first post, everything is new, so it'll be giant. Later versions will naturally have smaller posts written for them if they reuse things from a previous version.

With that said, let's start with the first thing the player sees upon starting the game, which at this point was just GZDoom with Freedoom as an IWAD, the title screen:

MY EYES! They're bleeding! This isn't Freedoom, game!

...wow. This title screen doesn't give the best initial impression, with a messy, incorrect-looking Freedoom title screen and an overall Doom-esque menu. That skull used for the selection cursor isn't helping, either! Anyways, on this menu, the iffy logo used for the World of Kirbycraft series is visible, so let's take a look at that...

You saw this coming, didn't you? This is so low-effort and...why did I distort the Kirby logo?

Yes, I bet you're face palming right now; The logo is just World of Warcraft's logo with Kirby's logo slapped over it. It gets worse the more you look at it, as a weird rectangle is around the Kirby logo, and even that fails to cover up the word. Back then, I used CoreFX rather than Adobe Photoshop, which didn't have a healing tool I could use to get rid of the text cleaner.

This very logo also appears in the movies, but only during its very brief, strange-looking intro. However, the logo is constantly changing position/size, so it's hard to get a close look at it. Anyways, let's select a difficulty and start the game.

How? This build doesn't even have a single enemy in it!

Like Doom, difficulty levels can display messages, usually used to warn the player about how unfair a difficulty is. Here, hard difficulty shows the message above. Insane difficulty says this:

This is the highest skill level. Not recommended unless you're experienced.

It doesn't matter what difficulty is chosen in this very early build, as there are no monsters in the one area you can visit, a place I've come to refer to as "Stupid Hills", a level I scrapped for being just...too boring!

"Early Installment Weirdness"

This is the whole playable area, shown on the automap and in-game!

In this version, it's very incomplete, with only the first area and cutoff paths off to the sides. The only thing here that makes this build interesting (and recognizable) is the random grey beam with animated pink light inside it, which is a Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric reference. This was a character-specific gimmick, which only allowed Mary to stand on it. If Arthas would land on it, he'd get forcibly thrown to the side.

I voice acted unique lines that played any time Mary would land on the beam. Though some are just random noises, two include some of Mary's longest voice lines as of then. One of them mentions school, which hasn't appeared in the game at all! I'll include all samples of Mary talking in this version at the end of this post, but here's transcriptions of the more important lines:

Oh...OH, I made it...and it's a beam! Let's balance! Weee~!
Oh...oh...OH, I've been waiting for this day! In school, I went to gym class and...I practiced this. Now it's time to put that practice to the test! Yay!

There's one more thing that makes this build unique from later ones I publicly released: Mary uses restaurant cups as weapons! When Mary drinks the liquid from them, she temporarily powers up and performs attacks based on the color of the stripes on the straw. If the player uses the weapon enough, Mary will revert to holding the cup and will talk about losing her powers.

Now, this might sound cool and unique, but overall it wasn't that exciting to fight enemies like this. Mary had to stop and drink from the cup multiple times a minute, plus the attacks pretty much ironically only hurt yourself unless the projectiles don't touch the monsters directly! Here, look at this video and judge for yourself if combat looked fun in this very early build:

With how tedious the combat in that video was to record, I have to question how back in 2015 (or possibly earlier) I thought anyone would enjoy that combat. The attacks behaved uniquely, but sometimes it isn't best to reinvent the wheel; Projectiles exploding when hitting enemies is nothing special, but it is more of what the player expects than fireballs sticking to enemies, waiting until they hit the ground to bounce into the air...

Clunky Gameplay

This is common to all of the versions of Magical Mary 1 that have the "World of Kirbycraft" name, but I'll say right now that the gameplay doesn't feel as polished as it does now. Mary's Air Dash practically requires mashing the jump button, and it can arbitrarily not work in some situations. As for Arthas... His Kirby Puffs are also inconsistent but on top of that common problem also requires you to wait between jumps (a'la Kirby Air Ride) and doesn't give you any control once you're in the air. I fixed both of those when Xane replaced Arthas, but...just look at how iffy Arthas moves here:

Hiding the Secrets

Uther's Lab

Ah, this lil' building had much potential, but alas, it wasn't to be...

Well, now it's time to go beyond what I intended the player to experience in this version. No, I didn't look over anything above or I would've written about it. If you followed the water down either generic corridor, you'd be greeted with a wall in your face. With any in-development level I make, this is a common sight, but usually levels I make don't cut off less than a minute after they load!

This is what you get if you think running into a cave will save you from the ugly graphics, a dirt wall!

Despite this level's stupidly small size, there is an area out of bounds meant only for Arthas's intro cutscene, Uther's Lab. If you turn around when starting the level, you'll see the lab in the distance in a field, but trying to fly out there will kill you! To make matters worse, that building out there is just a really flat imposter, not the real interior.

To go inside the lab, bring down your console using ~ (tilde) and type noclip2. Fly up a bit so you don't touch the insta-kill ground, then move towards the fake building. As you enter the open field, turn right and go through the glitchy black wall. Welcome to Uther's Lab.

Yes, this is the really basic room where the first part of Arthas's intro would take place. Though it looks grey and empty here, it became more detailed with blue lighting in later versions...though still wasn't ever used! In fact, it's normally worse than this, because the Arthas and Uther cutscene objects aren't normally here. (They only move around and talk, so I can't recreate the cutscene, or I probably would.) I'll explain Arthas' intro here, since it was never made:

Arthas and Uther are in Uther's Lab, standing around. Uther recommends Arthas goes out the back door (left side in screenshot above). Arthas initially refuses, but Uther forces him out. Arthas trains outside (which is just a glorified tutorial), then walks back in to check on Uther, not approving of the tutorial he had to go through. Uther sees an odd blip on the radar, pointing straight ahead. Arthas, knowing what he has to do, starts running out the front door. He runs down the path then jumps down to the starting point. No, I don't remember what enemy Arthas was off to fight, but I know it wasn't the Origin Master. I don't know how far I went with it, but Xane might've been planned to help Arthas, though over time, only Uther was heard talking to Arthas during gameplay.

Unused Levels

Now, Uther's Lab was within the level, but there are two levels the player never visits within MAPS.wad, named TEST and SND_TEST.

This is a foreshadowing of my obsession with cups expanding in later versions...

At first glance, TEST is just strange. The initial area is a narrow corridor with grass textures on the walls that has no gravity. Going through the wall to the left, you will end up in an area with a giant fruit punch "juice box" from Sims 3 Seasons. This area also contains character-specific areas and a broken end-of-level area that takes you to the normal level, since this area was used to test those mechanics before later making their ACS scripts global.

The more interesting part is on the other side. It's a big, open grassy area with paths and houses. It's better than the normal level in this build! What's going on? Well, this area was made to be used as the background of a Touhou-esque shooter section. Yes, I'm not joking, this was to be used as the background behind a boss battle where you'd fight Reimu, but due to technical problems (and now obvious legal issues that would arise), the whole idea was scrapped.

Y'know the weird first room the player starts in? Well, bring down the console and type in puke 102 to enable "Touhou mode", as the script calls it. When in this mode, you teleport to that room, and get locked into an area visible on the left side of the screen. The controls are the same as normal, except for your "run" button, which instead puts you in focus mode and reveals your hitbox, just as it would in the Touhou series.

SND_TEST is a more logical level...or rather, would be if any of its music played! I assume this map was created before the three soundtracks that are already present in v.0.75. Well, this gives a good idea of the random songs World of Kirbycraft would've used in my original vision, minus Famous by Puddle of Mudd, which would've played during the final boss, and probably would still be, if the legal system was wiped from existence...

It seems I originally intended for the game to use music from various sources, mostly Mega Man games. Here's the song list in the sound test, each linked to YouTube so they can actually be heard, unlike in the game proper:

Based on that list, I can only guess I threw in every song I liked at the time, like the overused "Lucky Star Mush" song that I played in the background of some of my older YouTube videos. The SNES songs had static in place of their cymbals, which rarely made any of the songs sound better. This can be heard in one of my development videos, where I make fun of the noises.

Well, this is giant as-is, so I'm going to split this post in two. Hopefully later versions I look at don't have so much stuff to talk about!