Chrisoft::Ballance

Landfill in the Clouds

云端掩埋场

中文版

Overview

The first level to my knowledge that forces you to take a different path in each playthrough.

Calling this level trash would be a compliment instead of an insult, thanks to how it’s named.

You would think I’m done with scripted levels after the release of my previous work. But no, that’s not even close to the truth. I have a small text file stashed away on my computer where I put down all my ideas of making use of scripts in a level. Not any kind of script usage – only those which can be somewhat seamlessly integrated with the original gameplay. (Despite the fact that I said “you can literally change the gameplay completely” when I first discovered the way to inject scripts into custom levels, I decided against doing that in my own levels. On a side note, other people have done that already.)

This level is the result when I felt the mysterious, irresistible compulsion – the same kind of compulsion that made me work on a modern OpenGL rasterizer for Ballance – of doing some level designing earlier this month, plus the coincidence that urged me to test out an implementation of one of the ideas listed in the aforementioned text document.

Did I mention that this level is also modelled exclusively with Blender?

I felt like this level, together with my previous level, has set the tone of my own design style: bizarre and somewhat fantastical, with a strange touch of minimalism. And of course custom scripting is something that I won’t let go. My goal is that the players would still be able to tell they’re playing the familiar Ballance in an instant, but realize it’s Ballance with more and more twists as the level progresses. I have no way to tell whether my own assessment is accurate though.

That’s about everything I want to say. Enjoy the level! Until next time my compulsion comes back, later.

Important Notes

• The vast majority of the level is randomly generated. The generation will change each time you spawn in.
• It is strongly recommended to play this level with an instant respawn mod installed. BMLPlus has this feature built in. Thank me later.
• If you do not want to bother with installing mods, you may want to enable the “lifeguard” feature of the level. Read the first message in game for details.
• Turn on your game sounds for the full experience! (There are no jumpscares… in this regard.)
• This level is tested and guaranteed to work with the following setups:
  • Original CD installation, with the Level 13 DLC patch applied
  • NewPlayer 0.3.2 + BMLPlus 0.3.3
• Unlike my previous scripted level, the scripts in this level are fully FPS-insensitive. It should work whether your game is running at 60 FPS or 6000 FPS.
• Due to the sheer amount of objects used in this level (over 3000 in the final sector!), older computers may experience performance issues in this level. For your reference, this level is developed on a laptop with an Intel i7-1185G7 using its integrated GPU. Most parts of this level will run at 300+ FPS on this computer.
• If you are running a custom rasterizer, this level may cause the game to crash. In any case, reverting to the default DirectX 8 rasterizer should fix the issue. If you don’t know what a rasterizer is, you may safely disregard this note.
• The sector skipping feature found in BML/BMLPlus won’t work with this level at the time of this release.

For additional hints, spoilers, technical notes and ramblings, click here.

Level info

Additional credits

• Dumpster model based on “1/18 scale Garbage Dumpster” obtained from thingiverse, used under the CC-BY 4.0 license.
• Buzzer sound effect derived from “Wrong Answer by -Andreas” obtained here, used under the CC-0 license.
• Explosion sound effect derived from the following sounds:
  • “Coachgun_Fire2.wav by PhreaKsAccount”, used under the CC-BY 3.0 license.
  • “cannon.round.wav by alienbomb”, used under the CC-0 license.
  • “paper_debris.wav by themfish”, used under the CC-BY 4.0 license.

Download

Click here.

How to install custom levels.