Fiction in Reality #2 - Hug-tan's Baby Mug

Welcome back to Fiction in Reality, the series of blog posts where I look at something from another universe and show how it was brought into reality! In this post, we'll look at a strange cup that I found when looking at Hugtto! Pretty Cure!

Fiction in Reality #1 - Kaori's Melodica

I'll admit, I'm a strange man. Based on things you may have seen me write in the past on websites, you may think I'm just seemingly obsessed with anything that goes in a person's mouth such as straws or musical instruments, but really, it goes further than that. If I see a fictional character hold or use an item and said thing is cute, I'll probably buy it so I can own it...then rarely use it.

Whether that's the intention of the show (like Pretty Cure) or not, I have a strange desire to bring those items from fictional universes to reality, to own (and use) them myself. In this new series, we'll look at items from anime and sometimes video games, show my real version, and in some cases show what the items were based on but not mentioned due to unfortunate legal brand restrictions.

To start this series off, let's talk about a neat instrument that never fully got my attention until my aforementioned obsessions took over. Get ready, this is a long one!

Fiction

Many years ago, I got WarioWare DIY, which I consider one of the best games in the series because of how it allows you to create your own microgames, music, and comics (though I only use the first two). I started remaking commercial music (badly) and video game songs in it, and at one point, I was looking through the instrument list. Said list has five tabs with eight instruments each, which have small icons to represent them.

See that blue thing? The upper-right icon? Yep, this was my first encounter with it!

One of those was a light-blue, rectangle-shaped object with piano keys on it, named the Melodica. It sounded like a harmonica (and the real instrument I own does have a similar sound), but its scratchy sound discouraged me from wanting to use it in any of my music. I don't know if there's a single song I used it in, though I think Atmospheric Glide's WWDIY version would use it now due to the recent instrument change.

No other melodica appearances were sighted after that game, until around 2018. I don't know what I was doing, but somehow I stumbled upon screenshots of the first episode of an anime named Your Lie in April, which showed a blonde girl playing that instrument again!

At last, the melodica isn't just 16x16 pixels! It's clearer now! Thanks, anime girl!

Of course, by now, I had forgotten the name of that instrument, so I read on a wiki and found out that the blonde girl was named Kaori and she was playing the melodica, even though that isn't her main instrument.

After I found out what it was, I searched on Google Images for melodicas meant for Kaori cosplays. Some looked pretty close at this point, but the thing is, I don't stop at "close enough"; I kept searching, looking at every screenshot I could find of her playing her melodica so I would have more references before continuing my search for the melodica. In two screenshots I found, a black handle could be seen on the back of the instrument, which is where she held it with her left hand, shown below.

Ignore the subtitle, please.

At this point, I knew they had to use a specific melodica for reference when drawing it, as it was seemingly drawn very precisely, with a consistent 32 keys visible, the aforementioned handle, and the random circle at the end of the instrument. With all of this, I went back to searching, and stumbled upon the Yamaha Pianica series of melodicas. I looked at various pictures of a blue-colored Pianica and it strangely had all of the details they drew on Kaori's melodica! The black handle, the circle cleaning button, the 32 keys...all of it was there!

Reality

Finally, this is the part everyone's been waiting for, the part where I show its real counterpart. However, I believe I chose the wrong Pianica. It's definitely the same series they used for reference (and are the same ones used in Japanese schools), but I went with the newer P-32E rather than the P-32D, which has indented parts on its backside that match Kaori's perfectly, which were moved on the P-32E to around the middle. For those wondering, yes, the blue Yamaha Pianica P-32D is what Kaori's melodica was based on, and is what they use in real Japanese schools as part of music class, where kids have to learn to play it. This is probably why Kaori is randomly not playing a violin here.

With that said, let's get to the comparison! Ignore the slightly brighter blue they use; For whatever reason, they overuse bloom or something non-stop, causing colors to look overly soft. If that effect wasn't in the anime, it would probably be the exact same shade of blue.

I know hands are a nightmare to draw, but whose fingers look that weird...?

First, can we stop and look at Kaori's weird hands? When she's playing the melodica, her fingers are always flying around the keyboard at insane speeds, usually hovering over unrelated keys that she never plays! All of this is done while she can't see what keys she's pressing, either! Trust me, in honor of Kaori, I play my melodica using the same orientation, and I literally can't see any of the keys from where my eyes are. She must be this good because she isn't real.

Who can dance and move their hands around a keyboard while controlling their breath? Fake girls.

Seriously, who can play this fast while being basically blind?

Anyways, with that aside, take a look at that picture. I couldn't see what my camera was pointing at because I had to hold the melodica with both hands to mimic Kaori's weird finger positions, but trust me, what you can't see is basically as spot-on as the rest of this fake melodica!

• Both ends are rounded, but suddenly change angles where the lines are drawn in the anime version.
• The mouthpiece is nearly identical, but the real version tapers off slightly vertically at the end that goes in your mouth. Light reflects off it just like in the anime, though.
• As shown to the left, the round cleaning button at the right end of the melodica is the same. On the real melodica, holding this while blowing into the instrument forces spit out of the back.

What are these random indents? Seriously, what's their purpose? A strap...?

Now, moving to the back... Whoever drew this scene didn't care about putting much detail here (unlike "it too hard..." picture above, which has the holes), but they did include the black handle and two dots. Why did they not draw the holes but drew these random indented parts? I'll never know, but this picture shows that this matches the P-32D.  You can even see the four "legs" it sits flat on! It's like the animators hated how Yamaha wouldn't let them legally use their name so they left clues like this behind for only someone as obsessed as me to follow.

Weirdness

Now, I don't know where else to put this in this blog post, but I feel I want to talk about this instrument here so I don't create a redundant second one in the future about it. What's up with the lighting on this instrument's piano keys? The sharp keys don't leave any shadows, but yet when a white key is pressed, a shadow is drawn that doesn't cover the whole key!

Also, Kaori's fingers don't have shadows, but one does when she is pressing the A# key. Strangely, the animator wasn't even consistent as her other middle finger doesn't have a shadow despite it doing the same thing, only on the C# key. I guess they were too lazy to draw the black key pressed down, so they just drew a shadow instead... I know, I'm no artist, but if I were in their shoes, I'd be questioning what I was doing as I drew this cute instrument and illogically-drawn finger twisting...but I digress, back to the main point.

Assistance

Now, I didn't get this melodica just so I could have something like the cute instrument Kaori plays. I also got it for Mary's Magical Adventure. During Mary's story, Mary will meet Princess Peppermint, which I brought up in a previous blog post. I wanted her to have an instrument she plays, and that her instrument-playing would be recordings of me playing the real instrument. The then-recent discovery of this melodica led to me making her instrument be it rather than the recorder, since the melodica is easier to play for a...pianist like myself.

The melodica can also be heard in Atmospheric Glide, though I added effects to my recordings there so it sounds more pleasant. I wouldn't call myself anywhere as good as Kaori when it comes to playing the instrument, but here's all of the recordings that will be used in the game for Peppermint:

Not too bad, right? I guess I'm good enough at playing this cute, comfortable instrument. I'm paranoid it will fall out of tune and no one may be able to get it back into tune, seeing how it's an instrument foreign to the United States where I am...

Anyways, that ends the first post in this series! Sorry if it seemed roughly written; I seem to feel tired or something and that causes me to write and even play Minecraft worse in my let's play!

The History of Mobile Mary's Magical Adventure

Has it really been months since my last blog post? Apologies, but I suppose I haven't felt like writing out detailed posts about things like my game, though two posts are planned for the future, once I get the item to show.

Anyways, if you've been reading this blog's previous posts about Mary's Magical Adventure, you've only been hearing about the main version of the game for computers running operating systems like Windows. However, in the past, I had plans to bring Mary's Magical Adventure to Android. It just sounds great on paper, to be able to take the game on the go and play the very same game you could play on your computer, or to even play with or against computer players using your mobile device!

In this blog post, I'll look back at the times I attempted to bring my game to mobile devices, and what I learned that I may put to use in the future...

World of Kirbycraft (D-Touch)

Yep, time to return back to those crappy old versions where I had no idea
where I was going with the game again...
(picture from World of Kirbycraft Development #3)

Back in 2015, I found out that Beloko Games ported Doom to Android. This was done before, but what made Beloko's port different was that it included GZDoom, the very same version of Doom's engine I used for my in-development game, World of Kirbycraft. Due to how awesome this was, I bought D-Touch and, with a bit of tweaking, managed to get my Doom mods running on my old tablet.

As shown in the screenshot above, it was successful; For the first time, I could see attacks from another player's perspective, and experience deathmatch in my game! The tablet's battery was running low at the time, so this experience was quickly cut short, but everything seemed fine, the usual flaws of touch screen controls aside.

After that video, I started adding CVARs (console variables, or settings) to the game that would, I believe, tweak how running works (xane_dtouch_controls) and reduce effects (xane_dtouch_lag). Even back then, I knew Android could not handle much before it started dropping frames like crazy. After this, however, I don't remember bothering too much to get the game running on mobile, as ensuring it ran and looked good on Windows took priority.

First Real Steps

A couple years passed, and by then, D-Touch's version of GZDoom was way too behind the official engine build used on computers, so there was literally no point to bother making my game compatible with D-Touch. However, in 2018, Beloko Games released a closed beta of Delta Touch, the successor to D-Touch, which came with an up-to-date build of GZDoom! When I saw this, I signed up for the beta, and Beloko Games gave me Delta Touch for free due to my previous purchase of D-Touch on Amazon.

After everything was set up, I ran Mary's Magical Adventure on Android for the first time, and seeing my newly-renamed game running on my phone gave me the inspiration to start bothering with mobile optimization again. Yes, just seeing what I recorded in this video made me excited for a mobile version of MMA:

Mobile Performance Troubles

Yes, it might not look like much, but that was the island Hell City level running on Android, which was "amazing" at the time. Though it looks really close to its computer counterpart, something might bother you, and that's the inconsistent framerate that is first encountered when Mary enters the "park" area with the big fountain. Of course, no one should be surprised that lag is there, given this is Android running essentially a PC game, but...well, would you be surprised if I told you it could've been worse than what that video contained?

Faux-Draw Distance

Basically, look at the beginning of the video and you'll probably see that things in the distance seemingly don't exist until Mary gets near them, like early 3D games did. I implemented this for similar reasons to what those games would've done, for better performance. If I disabled that, the game would try to render nearly the whole map, and the framerate would plummet to sub-one frame per second.

This is how that level appears with "render culling on (top) and off (bottom).

So, how did I pull off this weird effect, since I doubt any other GZDoom mod is going to (ab)use it? Well, basically GZDoom supports polyobjects, or moving walls that go from floor to ceiling. These are meant to be used for swinging doors or objects that can "crush" the player, but I discovered that the game doesn't render anything beyond these when I didn't put a texture on one of them.

Now, I couldn't draw a single diamond-shaped polyobject around the player, as that would create a solid object around the player, trapping them. However, by using two chevron-shaped polyobjects, I could place the player between them, then make them follow the player around the map. Back then, polyobjects were always solid, so a single solid object or enemy would stop them permanently until I removed the object, but later on, I modified GZDoom's source code to make "hurt on touch" polyobjects ignore collisions, creating the desired effect.

If you've ever looked out of bounds and wondered about the weird blue
squares with white diamonds inside, now you know what they are.

Why does this work? Well, you see, Doom's renderer was clearly optimized for the corridor-based, mostly-indoor levels in Doom, which had a lot of walls that went from floor to ceiling. When the renderer encounters a wall like this, everything behind it is not rendered. Polyobjects are also this type of wall, so they stop rendering, which is convenient for my game, which has wide open areas that Doom was never meant to render. Yes, if you stand behind a building on that island level, the game's still rendering everything behind it you can't see because unlike the Source Engine, Doom treats all sector heights equally, so if you can see through even the tiniest gap, the game will happily render everything.

Yes, all of that was just for one optimization; There are more of them, but they seem to be more effective on computers. However, there are other things that will cause Android to slow to a crawl than just rendering a open area without hackish invisible things blocking the renderer's view...

What Makes This Renderer Tick...in a Bad Way?

This is basically not an issue for computers and their high-quality NVidia GPUs and Intel(R) CPUs, but on Android's little ARM processors, the smallest things can cause frame drops. One of these things is slopes. Take a look at this video and notice how the framerate drops every time Mary looks to the left. Why is it dropping? Notice the island and volcano in the background? Yeah, the game's rendering all of those slopes and is lagging as a result.

That may seem understandable, but I've also seen that Android can't handle additive-rendered mid-textures, such as the fake lighting effects seen in City Street Run in the HCPD HQ's bathroom or the windows in Xane Corp.'s light testing room. If the game ever renders a single one of those, the framerate is basically guaranteed to be cut in half.

Overall, pretty much the only levels that work well in Delta Touch on even the high-end Google Pixel 2 are indoor corridor levels that don't use additive-rendered textures and don't have too many slopes. Man, that sounds boring. That sounds like...the original Doom, which Mary's Magical Adventure aims to be nothing like... What to do?

MMA: A New Hope

Well, an idea came to mind yesterday while I was sitting in bed, about to go use the bathroom. What if the mobile version was its own standalone game, separate from the computer game, with its own short storyline and simplified gameplay? Hear me out, this sounds like the best way this could be handled.

Think about it; If I used Mary's Magical Adventure's levels in the mobile version, they would be too open and would probably use too many of the lag-inducing things I mentioned above. This would require me to butcher the levels, adding render-blocking sectors and turning the levels way more linear. That would work better for mobile, but at the same time would probably feel like a bad imitation of a good game instead of an official mobile port.

Therefore, making mobile its own game would allow me to start fresh, with new, more linear levels and simplified gameplay. It would still feel like the computer game, but would be (nearly) made from the ground up to work better on mobile without compromising and possibly ruining anything from the computer version.

The story of the game would take place during Mary's Magical Adventure's two stories, beginning at the end of Xane's story. You would play as Princess Peppermint, the dark-skinned princess of Cumulus Peaks, who is tasked with killing the remaining monsters from the first invasion. However, as she finishes "cleaning up", the Origin Master accidentally releases more monsters, some of which land right near where Peppermint is. One of these monsters catches her off-guard, knocking her off the clouds down to whatever's below at that point in time. Now, Princess Peppermint needs to make it back to Cumulus Peaks to get rid of the new wave of monsters and save the place she rules over!

Yep, no Mary or Xane, just Princess Peppermint. I believe the inventory system would be simplified and any items Peppermint would walk over would be auto-activated, closer to Doom. Also, no upgrades or Jane's Hut, as Peppermint doesn't have the item to warp there. Now, if you've read the previous post, you might be wondering about her magical instrument. Yes, that will be one of her weapons, where pushing buttons would cause her to play different notes from her melodica, which would hurt enemies.

I wanted to add this to the computer version of the game as a mini-story, but with how big and overly-ambitious as my game's become, I think using this story for its own smaller game would work well for mobile! It would be smaller with less content, so perhaps it'd have a chance to actually get finished!

Anyways, with that said, that's the current plans for the mobile version of Mary's Magical Adventure. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!

Introducing the Princess from the Clouds!

On this blog, I've only talked about Hell City, as that's the only location that's actually in the game, unless you count the Fourth Dimension, better known as the Special Stages. However, I still have plans in my head about other parts of the game, the most recent ideas being for the levels that take place in the clouds. Yeah, the clouds, y'know, that place that I composed a song for a long time ago but still haven't gotten around to adding to the game proper?

Anyways, getting to the point, I didn't have ideas for the sky levels, just planning to make them open areas where you have to do precise platforming, jumping from cloud to cloud. Not even the boss was planned out, just the music that would play in these levels, Atmospheric Glide (formerly "The Skies"). However, recently, an idea started coming to mind, the urge to create a new third little girl who'd be found in these levels, with her being a part of the overall story with her own unique things about her. Everyone, meet Peppermint!

Yes, I know, she has that skin tone...

This is Princess Peppermint, the first dark-skinned character I've created! In my game's universe, the darker-skinned humans originate in the sky, where their skin tone makes it naturally easier to see them on top of white clouds. Lighter skin tones originate down on the ground, respectively. Unlike American TV shows that just shoehorn in dark skin tones to indicate their racial diversity, Peppermint was created just due to my personal want to design a girl with this skin tone.

She has strange green hair with curly bangs and two oversized peppermint circles attached to it with two long bangs going down the sides of her face. This, along with her skin tone, was done to make her look foreign compared to Mary and Jane, coming from a different part of the world than them. Her normal outfit is a light-yellow dress with red stripes that go down the front then spread out similar to the lines on a peppermint.

Her dress is different than Mary and Jane's outfits, as it has short sleeves! These and the dress itself end in soft, cotton-like white stuff, which makes the dress more comfy. Her shoes don't have as much detail, but they are the same light-yellow color, with green gems on top of each, which match her hair color.

Princess Peppermint lives in Cumulus Peaks, located in the clouds. She is the current princess there, though during the story she isn't found at the big place the royal people would be found at, but rather guarding a path that leads to there. She doesn't have weapons in the traditional sense, unlike Mary or Xane, but she has another way to protect herself...

Peppermint has a magical melodica, given to her as part of being the princess, handed to her on the day she was declared one. With it, she can play small "melodies" that cast spells on her target, whether that is an object or another person. Though these spells are nothing major compared to the Origin Master's powers, things such as stunning her enemies and forcing them to move in a certain direction are possible thanks to her instrument.

At the moment, the melodica is basically the real Yamaha Pianica P-32D/E, a light-blue rectangular instrument with 32 piano keys on its front side and a black handle on its backside. A small mouthpiece is attached to the left side, which Peppermint uses for more reliable airflow when playing melodies. To the left of the keyboard Cumulus Peaks's insignia, a light blue circle with a round, yellow sun placed near its center. A long, white cloud overlaps the sun, placed at an angle, hanging off the edges of the overall insignia.

As stated before, this is based on Yamaha's 32-key Pianicas, melodicas that use piano keys rather than small buttons. I was inspired to bring this melodica into my game when I saw an anime girl named Kaori playing it in Your Lie in April. I didn't watch it, but seeing that odd but neat instrument gave me the urge to replace the magical recorder that was planned for Princess Peppermint to use previously. That will still appear in the game on display in one of the buildings in Cumulus Peaks, but it won't be used by her.

After I made this 3D model, I got a light blue Yamaha Pianica P-32E myself! Why would I be after this harmonica-piano hybrid? Well, four reasons:

• It's a neat instrument I haven't heard of much. Sure, I saw it in WarioWare DIY, where it looked like a light-blue Pianica (and sounded like a harmonica), but I didn't see it in high-quality until Your Lie in April included it.
• It looks kinda cute, like a little light-blue piano with a mouthpiece on the side. It's probably the "toy-like" color that gives the Pianica its cuteness, but unlike others, I like its color, even if a pink one would've fit Kaori's pink dress a bit better.
• Just like how I like owning the weapons magical girls like the cute Pretty Cures use, I wanted to own "Kaori's melodica" myself. (Unfortunately, since I got the P-32E, the back of my Pianica doesn't match Kaori's melodica. That melodica has two markings on the back near the mouthpiece, which are positioned exactly the same on the P-32D. I guess I didn't think those indented parts would be moved in the latest P-32-series melodica...)
• Of course, the biggest reason for getting this melodica is because I plan to have Princess Peppermint's instrument-playing to be recordings of me playing the real instrument. As they are only short series of notes, I won't have to play much. With the way Kaori, Peppermint, and I hold the melodica, you can't see the piano keys, so I won't know what keys I'm pressing!

Yes, I know how to play the piano, so that knowledge can transfer to the melodica, but I have no clue how Kaori seemingly knows exactly what she wants to press with her limited vision...unless it's because she's an anime girl that doesn't exist.

...I bet I just made someone start crying about her, so I'll end this blog post here!

Development Worries and Updates

This post is pretty negative compared to my usual post, so read only if you wish to see the bad side of game development.

Whoa, how long has it been? Sorry, but sometimes, I forget to update this blog. I believe I'm becoming too lazy to even write a blog post lately, even though that's easier than other work I haven't been doing, working on Mary's Magical Adventure. Anyways, let's get to the updates about the game! It's been a long enough wait for this!

Indie Game Troubles

Work, Work, Work...

 Let's just start this blog post with the negative, as I have to get it off my chest. If you want to develop your own indie game, take it from me: It's way harder than photography and, "music theory" aside, even harder than playing music on an instrument you aren't familiar with! You'll start off with many ideas, things you can't wait to put into the game. Sure, at first it's easy because there's barely anything in your game to keep track of, plus it's easier to take it easy at that point.

However, as you start really developing things, you start raising your standards, like improving the game's textures, lighting, and overall look. Problem is, doing this only increases the amount of work you have to do from then on to put something in the game, as placeholder art and basic shapes would look very out-of-place beside finished assets. This is one thing that affects me, as I've done just that over the years, adding and improving textures, even redesigning Mary. This isn't even mentioning the music, which initially improved with song after song, beginning with The Nightlife for Rooftop to Rooftop. However, since the music is so high-quality, like the textures, this presents me with a bit of work that I have to look forward to doing, which I rarely do.

All of this has made me too lazy to add much before hitting the invisible walls that an artist hits when in an "artist block". As a result, not much new is here for those who have been checking the Xane's Development group on Facebook or kept up to date with the Facebook and Google+ pages. For readers of this blog, it will seem like I've done more than I've really done, due to these blocks and laziness. Hopefully this can be bypassed and work can resume going full speed, but with how I'm a single developer with no team members, this will be way slower to finish, and will probably take a big chunk of my life to finish, to earn barely any money to make up for it.

Legal Potential

No, don't worry, no companies were dumb and threw a cease & desist letter at my face, thankfully, but, you see, I read /r/gamedev on Reddit and people on there mention that any indie game developer should get two things before releasing their game, an accountant and a lawyer (and said lawyers sometimes make posts there). The first, I assume, is just to make sure your money is all in order. However, the second one made me really start thinking: I have no lawyer. This would be a big problem, should Mary's Magical Adventure get released then have legal trouble for whatever reason. Additionally, lawyers can handle getting trademarks registered, so things like "Mary's Magical Adventure®" can be used, like Intel®'s legal symbol obsession! There's a third thing lawyers can help me with, and with how lazy I've become, I'll probably need it...

Work-for-Hire Contracts

Yes, they can write legal contracts in that confusing Legalese English variant that somehow is more legally-binding than actually-understandable English! Since I barely seem to feel like doing work lately, I'd like to pay others to make things like character art, animated parts of cutscenes, and even music for me. It sounds straightforward, but trust me, reading that subreddit reminded me that even if the commissioned person gave me their finished work, they still own the legal rights to it, so they could backstab me after the game is released and cause a lot of trouble and wasted effort from me. With a contract, this is eliminated, as their legal rights are forcibly transferred to me, so I can use them in my game with no problems, the way it should be by default (but isn't, unfortunately)!

Anyways, hopefully you understand the problems in my head now, knowing I have a lot of work ahead of me if I want this game to be released but I don't feel like working enough anymore... How about we move on to updates?

The Many Minor Updates

Compare Rooftop to Rooftop (1-2) and City Street Run (1-3) in both of these videos. The top one is the first video on the newly-created Mary's Magical Adventure YouTube channel while the bottom is the last gameplay video on my personal channel. You may notice most of it is the same, but there are some small differences...

There's really too much changed to be explained in a blog post, but I'll show comparisons of a couple things here, anyways. It's up to you to find the other differences between the videos.

v1.95 - Did someone paint the ceiling black? Nice try, whoever owns this place.

v2.0 - Now this looks more believable! Want to follow the coin arrow up there?

One subtle difference between v1.95 and the upcoming first demo is this secret room found in Rooftop to Rooftop, hidden in the room down the hallway with the three trolls. In the older version, the holes in the ceiling where panels are missing were just pure black ceiling parts, raised slightly above the panels that didn't go missing. Nowadays with how much more detail I put into levels, this seemed too simple, so I converted the ceiling into 3D floors then added an extra "floor" above, hiding a Powerup Coin and upgrade!

You can get up there with Mary's upgraded Air Dash, Xane's multiple jumps, and Mary's Hammer Jump upgrade, the latter used in the newer video. In case the player couldn't see this obvious secret, an arrow of coins was also added below the "ceiling" to encourage players to try going up there. Yes, in a way, this is now a secret within a secret.

v1.95 - A Gex tile texture was used for many floors in the third level.

v2.0 - Not only is this more legally-safe, but it's high-res and has nice reflections!

The second change to point out is...well, new textures. You see, like the legal stuff mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, using assets from other games could cause problems for Mary's Magical Adventure, so I've replaced some textures since the old video. For example, the checkerboard tiles seen around City Street Run, most obvious in HCPD HQ. Notice how nice and shiny that floor is! If you play MMA and want reflections like those, get the Materials Mod, which adds realistic PBR reflections to some surfaces around the levels.

v1.95 - Most textures here come from SRB2. Also, note the background.

v2.0 - This dimension is more realistic now! Goodbye, trippy rock sky!

This particular change goes even further than just replacing level textures; All Special Stage textures were also replaced, just in case Sonic Robo Blast 2's developers could legally do a thing when their game's not an official Sonic game.

v1.95 - Who cares about soap? We've got a meeting, guys!

v2.0 - Soap's on the table, in Mary's inventory, and more! Don't underestimate soap!

Returning to the video, there's another obvious difference that can be seen when Mary goes to the HCPD HQ: When she visits the meeting room, there isn't a Soap Box on the table! Out in the hallway around each corner? Same thing, no soap in sight! Soap Boxes were a recent addition, added to represent my fear of soap. In Mary's Magical Adventure, soap is harmless unless there's enough of it, in which case it becomes deadly! Soap Boxes are this game's equivalent of explosive barrels, but you can push these boxes around before hitting them.

You can also purchase soap boxes to carry around. This can be seen in the new version's inventory, which shows the Soap Box as the first item. Additionally, magic was added as both a form of ammo and a timer for Mary/Xane's transformation. Collect at least 25 magic and you can transform, but you will lose the magic gradually over time.

Well, there's more to talk about, but due to that intro section, this is already pretty long, so more development-related stuff will be included in a second blog post. See you then!

The Devil of File Sharing

You may have heard of the many iffy file sharing websites from years ago, such as Rapidshare, and may have thought they sucked, but I've been personally dealing with the worst one...and unlike other websites, they haven't changed one bit. That place is called 4shared.

Yes, during that first paragraph, you may have thought of them, as they had silly restrictions that make you question who would support their company, but as of recently, I've seen they are worse on the inside than the outside.

TrackMania 2: Lagoon Track: Lightning - Loop Cross

A couple years ago, TrackMania Turbo was announced as the next game in the TrackMania series, with multiple environments to race in, including a completely new one, Rollercoaster Lagoon. I was sorta excited for the latter, as it had rollercoaster pieces that allowed your vehicle to stick to the track. Ah, the possibilities for said pieces were basically endless, but only one thing stuck in my mind: "This really reminds me of another great game series..."