· Game Boy AdvanceVECTOR v0.43: the camera moves, and there's THE TOWER
Same demo, new build. There are still twelve rooms, but they aren't the ones from before: all twelve have been rebuilt, and the engine grew a camera.
The look around: you walk in, and the window goes to see the far end before it hands you the controls.
The camera. Rooms used to be exactly one screen, 15 blocks by 10: the whole room was in front of you from the first frame, and so was its answer. Now the background is 512 by 512 instead of 512 by 256, the window follows you, every room is two screens wide and the last one is also two screens tall. A room can no longer be read from the doorway: you have to walk into it.
The window never cuts. When a portal throws you across the room the view slides after you, braking as it arrives, and it never lets you leave the frame. That sounds like a detail and it isn't: a hard cut on a teleport makes you lose where you are, every single time.
The look around. Widening the rooms created a problem I hadn't seen coming: you walk in and half the room is behind you. The door, the button, the waterfall: you can't know they're there. So now, as you enter, the camera goes to look: the window sweeps to the far end, holds a beat, and comes back to you; in the tall room it goes up as well. It takes a little over two seconds and the buttons are dead until it's done, because otherwise you start walking blind and you're in the acid before you've seen anything. It doesn't replay when you die: you've already seen the room, and watching it again on every mistake would be a punishment, not a help.
THE TOWER. The last room is 30 blocks by 20, the first in the game taller than the screen. A drain at the very top pours a waterfall that falls the whole height and crosses both floors: for most of the room it's the only thing you can see from both.
The whole tower, the one that doesn't fit on screen: two floors, the waterfall crossing them, and the mezzanine with the gap to plug.
On the ground there's a tub, dry, fifteen blocks from where the water lands. Portal on the ground where the water falls, portal in the ceiling above the tub, and the water crosses the tower. The full tub is the switch that never comes back up: it opens the door upstairs and raises the lift that plugs the gap in the mezzanine, two things that happen off-screen and that you find out about on the way up. Upstairs the door sits on a shelf four blocks above the floor, out of reach of any jump: and it's the same two portals doing it again, the panel in the left wall taken at an angle from below, then the panel in the floor shot at your own feet. You fall upwards. The first time the portals move the water, the second time they move you.
And the first six rooms are no longer the tutorial they were. They teach the same six things in the same order, but each now has a second problem hanging off the first. In the portal room the acid is twelve blocks wide and only one good wall is left, at the far end: the other portal has to go on the floor. You drop in and come out of the wall, already on the far side. That's the rule the whole game is built on, and there it gets said out loud. In the cube room you go through the floor, come out of the ceiling and steer while falling, because the shelf is only reachable by holding right on the way down. In the turret room the cube is both your shield and your only weapon, and you can't use it as both at once.
A clean run of all twelve is now about two and a half minutes. It was one minute thirty-eight before.
Three things fixed, and the first is the most instructive. The waterfall used to stop in mid-air: the jet was built from seven sprites, covering 224 pixels, exactly enough for a room one screen tall. In the tower the fall is 288, and the water simply ended, with air underneath. Now that number is measured against the tallest room in the game instead of the most common one. Ivy grew in the clean rooms: the empty slot in the plant table was marked -1, and the game only skipped slots below -100, so every tidy room quietly stacked fourteen creepers against its left wall, and at a glance they even looked like they belonged. The moving bridge used to walk you off its own edge: it has a wider deck and a parapet now, and you can hold forward for the whole ride.
The updated cartridge is below. It runs on emulators and on real hardware with a flashcart, and the build number is written at the bottom left of the title screen, so it can never be a hand-typed lie.
Since then 0.44.0 has come out, which doesn't touch the puzzles but redoes the walk: it's told here. What you download is always the latest build.