Winbrick 2023 Level Pack - 1.0 Release!
Hey there! For all 60-ish of you who downloaded last year's pack (which is frankly a lot more than I ever expected), I'm back this year with another twenty levels. I can't guarantee this actually will become a yearly affair because these take time, to both come up with ideas and execute them, that honestly is probably better spent elsewhere...but you know what? We went to all that effort - Firebird_Man getting us a full release on Reddit, HexadecimalMantis getting the level editor working, and me bringing the whole thing together - and it would've been a pretty big shame if that's where it started and ended. So here's another twenty levels. Will there be a Winbrick 2024? I wouldn't count on it, but who knows. For now, let's get into this year's offering!
Levels
Winbrick 2023 has 20 additional levels, for the same reasons as last year's pack (which is to say, that's how many it took to be accepted onto the creator's website, back in the day). These twenty levels are just as haphazard and random in theme last 2022's. This time, my girlfriend is actually my fiancé, and as before she was instrumental in coming up with a lot of ideas. You might even be able to guess which ones were hers.
-An open book (since my fiance is a librarian). I had a lot of fun with the 3D effects on this one
-A teddy bear (one of those generic cute ones intended for the missus)
-Kanohi Calix (The mask of the leader of the Toa Inika, more relevantly for me from Bionicle Heroes, for which I also just released another major mod here. Maybe this should have been an avohkii? Maybe next year.)
-Car (you know, one of those things we drive to the local maccies and back)
-Camel (another one for the missus. When you see one of these which looks suspiciously well put together, that's because I looked up a reference for pixel art and followed it)
-Castle (this is one that is one of the closest in ideas of mine to the original game)
-Chop Goblin (a game the missus got me this year which we both like quite a lot)
-Dog (another cute one, and another one I used Pixel art as reference for)
-Fish (well, who said animals aren't evergreen?)
-Globe (This one I actually did just hand-make from a picture of the world map. You tell me if I got the shapes right. If you squint, at a distance, after some drinks, maybe)
-Greek letters (yeeeah, this one didn't quite go how I'd like, but this sort of abstract theming probably would've worked better in one of the 2D arkanoids instead)
-Lightning strike (I came up with this one and then legitimately didn't really know what to do with it, so, there you go)
-Portals (there has truly never been a better use of the "flags" feature in Winbrick I think)
-Van Gogh's Starry Night (this was pretty tough, but I think it kind of actually works, and I didn't use pixel art for this one - just the original painting)
-Train (this one is, I'm afraid, more pixel art reference, but it's actually quite fun to figure out how to adapt existing pixel art to the winbrick way of doing things, and putting down all of the bonuses after)
-Portal Sentry Turret (Well, last year and this year I spent a lot of time in and around Portal because of Portal RTX and Portal Prelude RTX, so this felt relevant)
-Unicorn (guess who this one was for)
-Warblade Ship (I still aim to go back and do more for Warblade - and I've come across a lot of interesting discoveries lately that make that seem more possible than usual)
-Winbrick 2023 (that be this here mod again, innit)
-Winbrick .exe icon (I'm a little surprised this one didn't already sneak into the main game somewhere, given the idea seems pretty neat.)
Conclusion
So, that's another level pack for this game - getting my "money's" worth for the work we did last year chasing after this game and making it moddable. If you want to see how that all works, you can follow this tutorial here to get involved yourself. And meanwhile, I'm just happy to have gotten another weird little thing out the door. As I mentioned, I have no guarantees I'll do a 2024 pack. I can never be sure what takes my fancy and what ideas emerge. But the tools are all there and have been for people to make their own packs, and apparently almost 70 people played the last one, so if that's you - here's to another level pack, another year, and a good time for all.
