Cavern (MVM 9)

Fifty times? Wow, I definitely think you’ve played this even more than I have! That's awesome! Thanks so much for playing so much and thanks even more for giving feedback! 

• I’m glad that someone found this bug and played around with it in exploration! I noticed it near the end of the jam limitations, and since it wasn’t actively detrimental to normal gameplay, I opted to leave it in rather than spend precious time fixing it. Besides, I love speedrunning tricks and I thought it was pretty entertaining, just mashing the jump button into the ceiling XD
• Thanks for giving me the heads up on this. I took a look at it, and then poked around a bit with it, and have since discovered that this is a pretty major bug that happens in a lot of places! It seems like any time that you are in the “shrink” state, you are able to trigger the scene transition on the left side of a room if the left wall is only one tile thick. I’m kinda surprised that no one ran into this (or at least reported it), because it can easily get you permastuck. I’ll note it in the description above.
• Yeah, the heart power-ups are a bit messed up. As far as I can tell, I made an error in the pointer math when trying to save/load the heart states, so picking up the hearts can accidentally flag another as already picked up. You are supposed to be able to collect all of them (and I believe there might be a pick up order that still lets you, as I thought I had done so in testing?), but in practice, they don’t spawn correctly unfortunately.

On the matter of updates, I do want to get back around to this someday as this version was incomplete from my original vision. I had to cut some content due to limitations I ran into, such as sprite table limits, that I imagine I can fix or find workarounds for if I have the time to do so (which, with it being a jam, I did not back then). I really would like to make a ‘DX’ version with the additional content, maybe even a GBC mode, but unfortunately at the moment, the original project files are on a computer stuck in storage across the country so I am unable to until I can get my hands on it again (which is also part of the reason I never got the source code up on GitHub like I told Zalo I would try to do). Hopefully that day is someday soon though.

On the dev room comment, yes, this is a dev room! It was used to work out the jump heights and distance when I first started working on the project. The reason that you are entering it here with the clipping glitch you found is that it is the default room that the engine loads if it cannot find any other room to load. Since there is no room overlapping the space left from the top screen of this room (unlike further down, where you ended up out of bounds), it loads this room instead. At this location, you are restricted to the left half because the engine tracks where you are in the world and, if I recall correctly, this room is loaded in such a way that the left half is always on either the odd or even column in the world, so once you cross back over the half, it reloads into the room you came from. If you are interested in checking out the full room, you can head to the vertical room to the right of the starting room, then use the shrink clip to go through the left wall at the top of it. That will load you on the right half and since it overlaps no rooms, you’ll be able to see the whole thing (fair warning though, that means you might be stuck there, though I have managed to escape using that shrink clip again as well as some awkward out of bounds movement). There’s not much to it, but I figured I'd let you know in case you were curious to see the full thing.

Thanks again for playing the game and giving feedback. It’s always nice to hear that someone has enjoyed something I’ve made enough to put so much time into it. I will be sure to let you know if I manage to get around to making any updates to it in the future, or do anything else with the project. Take care!

I finished it!