Illvelo Swamp: Happy Together

[m.sniffles.esq]

Since this is technically a different game, I'm going to be bold and give it it's own thread (if the mods disagree, they can zap it. That said, if the leaderboards are any indication, not a whole lot of people are playing it anyway. So it may just sink like a stone)

For those who don't know, it's a sorta/kinda sequel to Ilvelo Swamp released three years ago (the game itself calls it an "AI update" which made me laugh), with two major differences from the original. First, it's a single stick affair, whereas the original was twin (so the sorta sequel can be played with an arcade stick). And second, there's a whole new mode called DEV mode, which is more of a traditional, linear, score and survive deal. While the original was more focused on doing various specific tasks to unlock different branching routes

Anyway, the original campaign is still there. Albeit, with the new ship, and with the routes all unlocked from the beginning (you just select which one you want to follow before you start) so it plays more traditionally than in the original.

DEV mode, on the other hand, while the gameplay itself it pretty straightforward, it's intricacies are very... vague. To go into these at all would require me to preface pretty much everything with "I think" or "it seems", as I'm not 100% certain about anything. The one thing I am certain about is that it gets very hard.

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Now that the preamble is out of the way, I'll get to the point of me making this:

If anyone is playing, and has figured out what the indecision/decision sliders in the map under DEV actually do (or even what you think they may do) I'd love to hear it. I've tried every available combination and haven't noticed any discernible differences in the gameplay itself.

Also, does the "conversations with the developers" have any purpose other that spitting out cryptic nonsense? I know the actual developers love their cryptic nonsense, but it still strikes me as a bit strange to have an entire menu item devoted to it.

tia!

[mojilove]

i do intend to do a video some time soon, but for now, the "decision" setting is actually a setting for drugging up the brains in jars (see meaning 9 here). the higher the number, the more relaxed the brains will be, and the easier the stages associated with that brain will be. i made a table listing the brains, their associated route in the regular mode, the stages in dev mode associated with them, and the stage gimmicks thereof, but i seem to have misplaced it. i'll make a table here later
you can set the number up to a max of 3 for each brain, but you can only set each brain to 3 after making progress in each route in the original mode and/or making progress with the "debug report" things in dev mode.

the conversations with the devs are for getting to know the world better - i haven't read it all but i don't think those messages have any gameplay hints

gl!

[m.sniffles.esq]

i do intend to do a video some time soon, but for now, the "decision" setting is actually a setting for drugging up the brains in jars (see meaning 9 here).

Ha! I have never heard 'decision' in that manner before (or even knew that it could be used in that manner).

you can only set each brain to 3 after making progress in each route in the original mode and/or making progress with the "debug report" things in dev mode.

Okay, that actually answers another question I had (I have a lot). As to what were the keys are even for anymore, now that all the routes are unlocked from the get-go. It's all (kinda) coming together.

One thing that's been bugging me, is that it seems that the scoring is kind of... messed up in DEV mode (at least thus far). In that, my top score is from the second or third time I played, and didn't really know what I was doing. Since the mode seems to have ranked up (I'm guessing because of progress), it's much more difficult that the first few times I played. So it seems that the more progress I make, the worse my score is becoming. Which just feels kind of backwards of how it's supposed to work.

Anyway, it's good to know I can just crank those switches up as they become available. I wasn't sure if the spike in difficultly was due to me playing with those (although they didn't seem to be, I wasn't entirely sure)