· Game Boy AdvanceVECTOR v0.44.0: the robot didn't weigh anything
Same twelve rooms, same puzzles, same file. What changed is the thing you do between the puzzles: walking. A tester put it plainly: the robot didn't weigh anything.
It's the kind of criticism that sounds vague at first and turns out to be the most concrete of all, because once you go and measure you find it has a precise numeric cause. Three of them, actually.
He was running the whole time. Two points per frame, for a figure twenty-eight points tall, is four and a half body heights a second. That isn't a walk, it's a sprint. At that speed his foot hit the floor ten times a second, and no drawing and no sound can make ten footfalls a second feel heavy: whatever stride you draw, what you see is a patter. On the ground he now does 1.25 points per frame. Six footfalls a second instead of ten.
The jump I didn't touch at all. In the air the ceiling is still two points per frame, and anyone who jumps while walking launches at the full speed. That isn't a flourish, it's a requirement: four blocks of jump is the measurement half the rooms are built on, and if the leap got shorter the levels would stop working. It also happens to be right to look at: a heavy thing doesn't go from a step to a flight, it gathers itself and throws.
The knee isn't drawn any more, it's found. The old leg had a fixed length: the ankle sat five points below the knee and stayed there, always. With that constraint the foot could never leave the ground and the knee had no reason to bend, so what was left was a torso sliding forward with its thighs moving slightly.
Now the leg is two bones, and what I move is the foot, not the angles. For half the cycle the foot is nailed to the floor while the body passes over it; for the other half it flies forward and lifts, with the heel leaving before the toe. The knee isn't a number I write: of the two possible positions it's the one a real knee would use, the one pointing forward, and it bends by however much is needed because the leg cannot stretch. The body sinks two points when the feet are far apart, which is also what lets the leg reach that far, and is what a heavy thing does where it puts its weight down.
And the feet no longer skate. This was the real fault, and it was measurable: the drawn stride opened to six points, while the game advanced the cycle as if it were thirteen. Those seven points of difference at every step came out of somewhere, and they came out of the planted foot sliding along the floor.
The fix isn't retouching the drawings: it's changing what drives the cycle. Now it's driven by distance travelled and not by time, so the drawn stride and the travelled stride are the same number, and the foot stays where it was put at any speed.
And now you can hear him. Landing used to be completely silent: you could leap half a room and touch down with nothing, no sound, nothing moving. A thing that lands in silence weighs nothing. There are footsteps now, on the two frames where the heel actually plants, so the sound tells you which drawing you're looking at; and the two feet don't sound the same, because nobody puts both feet down with the same weight, and above all because two identical noises six times a second are a rattle, while two different ones are a gait. There's a thud on landing, the same noise held much lower and much longer: the weight arriving all at once instead of half at a time. The window jolts and settles over six frames: the thud says he landed, the jolt says how much he weighs. And he takes the hit: for two frames after landing the figure is drawn one point lower. One point reads as legs absorbing; two would already read as feet sinking into the floor.
Three things fixed. Outside the room there was nothing: with the window jolting a few points past the edge, a black band would have appeared along one side, so now the map is filled with wall as far as it goes, and the wall simply carries on. It costs nothing, because the whole map ships in the cartridge anyway. A shot that hits something that isn't a panel now says so: it throws a spark, in the colour of the portal you were trying to place, and it tells you two things at once, that the gun fired and that it doesn't stick there. Room 4 has panels again: the acid can still be crossed by waiting for the shuttle, the way the room teaches, or you can drop into the portal on the lip and come out of the far wall, already across.
A clean run of all twelve is now about two minutes fifty. It was two thirty. The extra twenty seconds are all walking, which is exactly what they were supposed to be.