Uploaded May 2023 | Updated September 2026, 10 hours ago

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every single thing about this level took too long lmao

0:00: Showcase (botted by Temnai)
2:00: Verification (played by me, obviously)

Here it is, my third solo level, after over a year of on-and-off work, and probably the single best thing I've done in anything at all ever. Not that it was very easy though.

This level started off in autumn 2021 as a layout. Back then I was in the middle of building BLRPL LGHTS but I still needed other things to do as small side projects.
I got very inspired by distraught by alkali & more around then, so I made a layout with very similar gameplay, and I called it dismay because obviously. Already back then I had decided that if the layout were to be decorated, it would be primarily blue, and that is only because the song is Sidestep by Aeronmusic, and the old 2.0 level Sidestep by ChaSe (which also used that song, just a different part) was also blue, at least in the beginning. So I already just associated that song with the color blue. The addition of purple was just to spice things up, mainly inspired by Blade of Justice.

Almost immediately after I released BLRPL LGHTS, I wanted to get to work on a new level. Alcyone was considered (and is being considered now again), but I settled on dismay. A few attempts went by until I got a design I liked, so the entire first third of the level was practically made back in spring of 2022 (though I went back and added a few small things of course).

As I approached the drop came the first dip in motivation though. It didn't actually linger for that long and I kept going throughout the summer with the drop. Back then I was pretty proud of it, but I always knew it wasn't that good. It was only around autumn 2022 where I actually felt like I was making really good stuff again. But around the start of 2023 came a really bad demotivation spike, as I fully realized how inconsistent the quality of the level was.

So I resorted to my usual method: deleting a third of the level and starting over with a better idea of what the hell I'm doing. And it worked wonders, I was making very fast progress throughout the new drop parts from scratch and I think I did super well. That efficiency kept going up until the completion of the level.

Handed it over to a lot of playtesters, notably ked (who gave me a lot of extremely valuable insight, sorry for being rude to you but you're right about everything here lmao). Then I started verifying, and realized just how damn hard the level actually was. A few parts were nerfed a lot, and I also took the chance to fix a lot of bugs (and add an ldm which I had apparently forgotten to do before).

And now we're here :)

If you legit read all that, thank you. And thank you anyways if you didn't. This was a ride, but what might be the greatest creation in my life so far is now complete. And I can't thank everyone I interacted with enough, both inside GD and outside.

Level ID: 90953648
Pass: 6420 (6 hours, 42 minutes, 0 seconds of recording in order to verify)
Difficulty: High end insane demon I think.

Song: Aeronmusic - Sidestep
youtube.com/watch?v=pq6Z0hK4njs
newgrounds.com/audio/listen/639309

Aeronmusic's stuff:
youtube.com/channel/UCAVl2rASCFAstsdDseMpOVQ
aeronmusic.newgrounds.com