This is my map for Secret Santa 2024. I'd suggest you play the map without this video, since it has a fair amount of routing in it, and I'd double suggest seeing the map before reading the rest of the description.




The day is the 10th of September. The invitations for Secret Santa just got sent out, and we got access to our private channels, the information about who we were mapping for and what we were making waiting for us. I open the channel to see that I was making a map for Salted Salmon, a very good friend of mine, and she wanted a "Input Dense Nyoom Map, preferably midlevel grandmaster, ideally with something chasing you". My immediate reaction was that of excitement, quickly followed by the realisation that I had no clue how to make a nyoom map. So, I opened lonn and start looking at entities I might want to use. I saw black holes from Galactica Helper, and I seemed to remember those being very jank in Galactica but also having some potential, so I threw those down in the palette. Portals could be cool, I thought, forgetting about Heart of the Storm. And then I saw the reverse bunnyhop controller and everything fell into place. I added the Every Jump Is An Ultra extended variant to the mix, and that same day, I had a draft of the first room in the map. I then get the organizers to ask Salmon if going above midlevel grandmaster was fine, to which she said yes, which as you can see, I gladly accepted. I then put in a code request for the oxygen system, which is a bit of a doozy to use since you have to add triggers wherever you want your oxygen to be regained, and that gets very tedious very quickly in the bigger rooms.

The following months were pretty gruelling, between having to somehow try and convince Salmon that I wasn't mapping for her and the fact that mapping with this combination of entities feels like you're trying to tame a pack of hyenas. One day, when in voice call with Salmon and Don, I decided to get the organisers to ask her how important the whole having something chase you was, and the reply she sent her mapper through the organisers was very soft ball, however in vc she was complaining about it maybe not getting followed. So, after Salmon left, Don and I spent a few hours working out what we'd do. We ended up landing on the shockwaves. So, one code request, one audio fx request, and two asset requests later, the seeds were planted. Massive thanks to Lyra for taking up this headache of an entity, and also to Chaotick for coming in clutch with the visuals for the emitter. I cannot stress how hard it is to work with these shockwaves. They're so rigid and yet the gameplay around them is necessarily somewhat dynamic, since forcing perfection in these rooms would make the map impossible. I don't know if this entity will ever go public, but if it does do yourself a favour and never touch it with a 10 foot pole, its miserable.

Decorating this map was also painful. After decorating Stellar Steampunk, I decided to not use pipes for deco again. Ontop of this, after seeing Gamation's decline while doing crack deco in shattersong, I decided I'd never use those either. I guess exceptions can be made if the vibe asks for it enough and its for a friend. Huge thanks to Spooooky for decorating the rest area and to Bred for "weaponising autism to deco many rooms", I genuinely don't think I would've been able to finish the map without them.

So, after all this, you're probably thinking I hated every second of this and wish it'd never happened, right? Well, no. This is easily the most rewarding thing I've done in this game. I'm so incredibly proud of this map, since I did a vast majority of the work myself, from the gameplay to the visuals to the music to the fucking conlang I made for the map to even some decals. And then, on top of the immense personal satisfaction, seeing Salmon play through this was just fantastic. I didn't make this map with the objective of it being a map that the community liked, I made it with the objective of it being a map that Salmon liked, so seeing her freak out about everything was pure bliss, from the intro cutscene to the reverse bunnyhops to the absurd speeds to the shockwaves (and some other things I'm not going to mention to keep them a bit more of a secret), the whole thing was fantastic.

I also would like to thank everyone who was around while I was making the map. Tear, Don, Socks, Alice, Lyra, Spooooky, Phant, Orchid, Citrea, etc... You were all of such help, even outside of any technical assistance you provided. Just you guys being in the channel and being there to bounce ideas off of was so invaluable.

Last but not least, I want to give one last thank you to everyone who worked on the map and also credit them in this description, so:
Tear (Gameplay)
Aiden, Lyra, SunsetQuasar (Code)
Bred, Spooooky (Deco)
Tear, Don, Socks, Eki (Playtesting)
SunsetQuasar (Stylegrounds)
Citrea, Salted Salmon, gjkf, Don, Tear, Socks (Moral Support)
Alix (Video Thumbnail)