Alright time for a ton of comments!
I think the Ancient Cave was better when you had the black background, rather than the blue. For one thing, that's how it was done in Cave Story, and also the blue background makes the doors look weird. The doors now seem to be standing in the middle of nowhere with no doorway surrounding them. Also, when you open the doors, they appear transparent, and you see the background through them. It would make more sense if the "open door" sprite were black instead of transparent (if you used a black background, this wouldn't matter because black and transparent would be identical).
Another thing about the Ancient Cave that I didn't notice before is that there are a few "flat spots" where you forgot to put the "gravel" tiles on top of the ground. This is not a big deal, but it looks sort of unprofessional. Here's a couple screenies so you know what I'm talking about:
There was one other flat spot I noticed, but I didn't get a screenshot. It was in the path to the place where you find Quote.
You should make the Life Capsule in the Tunnel/Egg Corridor place +4 instead of +3. For one thing it's difficult enough to get that there needs to be good incentive to get it. Also, the Fortress in the Grass Hills is a real pain in the ass at the moment, but if the Life Capsule were +4, then you could survive being hit by one of the eyeball things once.
There should be a savepoint at the beginning of the Sunken Ruins, right now the distance between savepoints is pretty insane. Especially since almost everything between Jenka's house and the Pyramid is a one-hit kill. The obsticals aren't that difficult, but it is really difficult to travel such a long distance when one dumb mistake and you're dead.
Awww, still no pyramid music?
I love the storyline btw, and it sounds like you're really going to flesh it out well. I also like the cutscenes like the one Linknight mentioned with the "shootout" in the tower.
It gets kind of boring fighting the same boss three times, maybe you could change the form each time, or at least add some sort of extra feature to the later fights like spikes maybe. Oh I know you could have the third fight be in really tight quarters, I bet that would be a challenge.
Linknight said:
If your gonna have Quote in your mod. He shouldn't talk.
I disagree. The fact that you don't ever hear Quote talk in Cave Story isn't because he never does talk, it's because Pixel wanted to leave what he said to the player's imagination. And he doesn't just respond, either, he actually does initiate conversations. Think of all those times in Cave Story, when you walked up to someone and pressed the down arrow, and started talking to them. It seems like Quote is the one starting the conversation in these situations.
I like the idea of using the gaudi AI for the killer robots. However, the death sprite looks kinda awkward, because the robots are still almost standing, I think you should improve on the death sprite.
The elevator is a creative idea. I'm trying to think of a better way for it to look like it's moving though, because the current animation (just using <QUA) kinda bugs me. My only idea is to add two additional tiles to the "Almond" tileset which are variants on the standard 1x1 block. One of them would look like it was "scrolled" 1/3 of a tile up, and the other like it was "scrolled" 1/3 of a tile down. You could then cycle the wall tiles repeatedly between these three tiles to make it look like you're moving relative to the walls.
The camera motion is still jerky in spots, and it's really bugging me. I think I'll investigate what's causing this on my own and tell you.
The farthest I can get is this random dark-gray box near the top of the command tower. I haven't found the Korons yet. Is this the end of the current demo? If not, what do I do? If so, great job so far!
