Official blog for "PinesQuest: (A Romance of) 2Dimensions)", or "PinesQuest 2D", a Gravity Falls RPG fan game.
VERSION 0.8.2 AVAILABLE NOW! See pinned post or downloads page!
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A little bit of behind-the-scenes artwork for you today, Fallers!
My original sketches of A. Tad Square from all the way back when I first started developing the game in early 2016. The first batch of expressions were actually drawn on paper in a sketchbook I carried around with me in college. The second set was sketched digitally, before both were digitally colored into the final artwork you see in game.
We also have my concept art for Nemm Lustre's battle images, for both the battle in level 10 and the final boss fight. I've always been really proud of Nemm's final boss form, especially with how the scarf transforms and symbolizes how Bill can't escape his past, the remnants of his homeworld still literally clawing after him.
After the events of the game, The Axolotl has sealed up The Snowglobe, making it so no one can get in or out. Can't have any more interdimensional kidnappings, or these two escaping to cause more trouble! So how do Nemm and Bill deal with being stuck inside a pocket dimension?
By playing some Dungeons, Dungeons & More Dungeons, of course!
Thank you so much to Mindscape for this adorable artwork! Please take a look at their ko-fi page and consider commissioning them for a super cute illustration like this one!
A gruesome event that would be the beginning of the end for the 2nd Dimensionā¦ Hereās a look at a chilling moment from Nemm and Billās past!
Due to how isolated from the multiverse it was prior to its destruction, many believe āThe Euclydian Massacreā was a single event. In reality, it was the culmination of a Great War, a nightmarish period of boundless chaotic carnageā¦
The inciting incident was the betrayal of the ruling class by a noble scion. They allowed their co-conspirator, a peasant triangle mockingly dressed in gentlemanly accessories, to infiltrate an esteemed gathering of elites. Together, the two mercilessly slaughtered the hosts and every last guest, painting the walls of the estate in mercurial blood. They then declared to the restless masses that soon, the world would be theirās, and at last, all would see the truth and be liberated.
As a little gift for you all, and to show my gratitude... version 0.8.1 of PinesQuest 2D has been released.
Download it on:
itch.io / GameJolt
Version 0.8.1 Changelog:
The first half of level 6, the Crystal Woods, is now accessible.Ā
Gideon is now playable and joins the party at the beginning of level 6.
Debug Room is now accessible, but you will need to find the password...
Once Bill has joined your party, new items will appear in A. Tad Square's shop.
If Bill is in your party, you can access a cutscene about the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel and Shermie Pines by examining the books in the hideout (hub area).
Certain items have been buffed.
Debug Room Features:
Talk to Bill to mark level 6 as completed. You can then go back to the Mystery Shack and talk to A. Tad Square to trigger a cutscene. At the end of cutscene, Bill will join your party.
Talk to Ford and he will join your party. Talk to him again to instantly raise your entire party to max level (99).
Talk to Dipper to watch some cutscenes from level 7.
Talk to Nemm to gain access to each character's ultimate weapons. Ford, Bill and Gideon's weapons are received automatically while everyone else's must be obtained from the secret areas in levels 1-5.
Talk to A. Tad Square to instantly get 999999 gold.
This will likely be the last version of the game I ever release. Through the full game document and videos I released recently,Ā I now consider the game to be "finished," even if the remaining 5 and a half levels aren't playable. I truly wish IĀ could make them playable but as I've discussed before, after years of trying, I just don't think I can make it happen. I did my best, but I hope you stillĀ enjoy what I was able to create.
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Today we have some breathtaking artwork based on PinesQuest 2D by the fabulous @sunnihope!
First is perhaps the most climactic moment of the game, where after the final boss battle, Bill finally makes amends with Nemm by showing them that last precious speck of their bygone home world...
And then there's Bill and Nemm, best friends once more, hand in hand as they can at last move towards a bright and sparkling future together! At least that's probably what The Axolotl is hoping. He's gonna need to continue to keep an eye on them, either way...
Thank you once again to Case (sunnihope) for these gorgeous pieces! Please be sure to check them out, give them a follower and consider commissioning them!
The most loyal friend and (2nd?) worst war criminal in the multiverse, meet @pinesquest2d ās main antagonist, Nemm Lustre!
Nemm is, obviously, based on me and my mascot/persona/avatar, to the point where they were actually originally just named Nova. However I wanted to give them more of their own identity, especially since while they are a character based on me, itās similar to say, how Dipper is based on Alex Hirsch.
This hexagram is a fun-loving free spirit who loves to create, with a particular fondness for making riddles, puzzles and games. Having despised their rigid noble upbringing, itās no wonder they found a kindred spirit in a commoner triangle who spoke of liberation through chaosā¦
Bill and Nemm have a lot in common, which contributed to them being such close companions, but Nemm balances Bill out in a way that he desperately needs by way of being the one to reassure him itās alright to be flawed. While they both made mistakes and paid for them in the blood of their home world, Nemm understands the only way to move now is forward, as difficult and daunting as that can be. Thatās why they donāt want to do it alone, and donāt want Bill to have to either.
Unfortunately for the Pines family and friends, none of this means they see āsimpler lifeformsā like humans as anything but useful pawns at best or irritating pests at worst. Why not uproot them from their dimension and place them as pieces on what is, to Nemm, a far more important chessboard?
Neither of their parents were hexagrams! Instead, their father was a hexagon while their mother was a pentagon who married into the nobility. This was slightly uncommon, as itās typically expected that one marries a shape with the same amount of points, but marriages between the high class and nobility or the high and middle classes did happen occasionally. However, marriages between shapes with a large gap in class, say for example a noble and a triangle, were forbidden outright.
They did NOT get along with either of their parents, to put it lightly, though they had a slightly better relationship with their father. Said father, meanwhile, also didnāt get along with his own parents due to the fact he married a pentagon, which Nemmās paternal grandparents didnāt approve of.
Because it was frowned upon and sometimes even punishable by 2nd Dimension nobility to fraternize with peasants, Nemm would often sneak out to meet with Bill. They frequently communicated through letters written in secret codes theyād both created. Nemm would even sometimes hide the letters or other things they sent to Bill inside of puzzle boxes to keep them from being discovered by anyone else.
They personally witnessed the deaths of both their parents and Billās during the war. Their parents were captured and publicly executed by isosceles factory workers. However, if you ask them how Billās parents died, theyāll refuse to answer.
During the war, they only killed Circles and other nobles, though they were forced to kill a few squares and triangles in self defense. As for how they went about executing those Circles and noblesā¦ You ever watch Saw? It was kind of like that.
There was one exception to the last factā¦ The only non-Circle/noble that Nemm ever willingly killed was a five-sided doctor who Billās family took him to in his youth. This doctor barely gave Bill and his family the time of day, since they could hardly afford him, however at the relentless insistence of Billās parents he prescribed their child a liquid āmedicineāā¦ which was actually poison to make his sight worse.
They were the last survivor to leave the 2nd Dimension after its destruction. They stayed until it was no longer possible to inhabit, in order to collect the celestial remnants they weaved into their scarf.
Part 2 of the video is here! Be sure to check it out after watching part 1!
This project has truly been a labor of love and after 8 years, I'm so happy to finally see it "completed." Even if it wasn't in the way I originally envisioned, I hope you all enjoy it nonetheless.
The first part of "PinesQuest 2D: The Gravity Falls Game That Almost Was," a massive video taking you through the whole game from start to finish, is now online! Part 2 will be coming tomorrow, Friday, August 9th! Thanks for watching and please look forward to it!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
ā Live Streamingā Interactive Chatā Private Showsā HD Quality
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You can watch now watch a lyric video for PinesQuest 2D's final boss theme, "2Dimension Dream Fever"!
a HUGE two-part video about the game titled "PinesQuest 2D: The Gravity Falls Game That Almost Was" is coming soon! The first part is already complete, but I'm waiting until I finish the second part to upload it. Once part 1 is uploaded, part 2 will be released the next day.
First and foremost, I hope everyone reading this is doing well and keeping safe and healthy during these exceptionally unprecedented, difficult and stressful times. Take care of yourselves and remember that things will get better. Weāre going to make it through this.
The current circumstances are one of, but far from the absolute only or even the primary reason(s) I need to make the following official:
PinesQuest 2Dās development is now on indefinite hiatus. The game is NOT cancelled, however it is beingĀ āshelvedā for the time being. Should the situation allow, the earliest I could see development of the game resuming is late 2021 or early 2022, as (after returning to finish my education/degree) this is around the time Iām currently planned to graduate from college.
During the past four months, when I was able to find the time and means to do so, I did my best to look into resolving the main issues that were impeding progress on the game, and was unable to find any tangible solutions. Despite this, I donāt think these problems are unsolvable; Iām just not capable of solving them right now. Therefore Iām simply putting the project aside for the moment, with plans to return to it in the hopefully not too distant future.
Itās been an unbelievable experience making this game since the Gravity Falls TV series wrapped up in 2016. Iāve gotten so many comments and emails of overwhelming support from fans who have played the demo and thoroughly enjoyed what Iāve created so far. Itās because of that Iām eagerly awaiting the opportunity to resume work on PQ2D, at a point where it becomes viable that I can finally see the game through to the end and give it the full release - the complete Gravity Falls follow-up story and retro RPG experience I envisioned.
I hope you all are looking forward to then as well. Thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart, for following the development of PinesQuest 2D. Please never stop staying weird, my fellow Fallers š
Happy Holidays, Fallers! Somehow itās been seven months since the last PQ2D development update, and even more unfortunately I donāt really have a good reason for that which is able to be summed up as anything other thanĀ āLife happens.ā Therefore I wanted to make sure I got one more update posted before the new year, and since it has been so long weāve got a lot to discuss, so click the Read More to continue!
If youāve been following this game for quite a while, youāll notice its development has slowed down significantly during the past year and a half, going on two years now. I started what I now think of as the prototype for PinesQuest 2D in late 2015, however, I donāt feel I truly began developing the game as we know it now until spring 2016, when the Gravity Falls TV series concluded. When the official Journal #3 book released later that summer, the gameās story was heavily revised. That same summer I released the gameās first official demo, containing its first 3 levels, and proceeded to receive AMAZING feedback from players which helped to improve the game and my hilariously amateur skills as a game developer enormously.
A year later, I extended this demo to include the 4th and 5th levels, and estimated the full game would be finished sometime in 2017. This was INCREDIBLY stupid of me since how on Earth did I think I could finish the remaining roughly 60% of the game, when the previous ~40% had taken me more than a year, in less than 6 months? Because I thought as I went, the easier developing the game would be. The truth was it only got more difficult.
So I thought,Ā āOkay, 2018 will be the year I finish it.ā By the end of the year I only managed to give the demo its final update, addressing its various bugs, balance issues and making it better reflect my vision for the finished game. As you know by now, 2019 fared even worse, and Iām fully willing to admit this was the year I worked on the game the least since starting development.
Earlier this year I also shut down the PinesQuest 2D Discord server due to inactivity. Unlike a lot of other indie and/or fan games in development, there was no realĀ ācommunityā for PQ2D, meaning there wasnāt much of a reason to keep the server around. I decided Iād shut it down and simply make a new one once the full game was done, when there might be more of a use for it.
Now that youāre caught up with the gameās development history, you might be thinkingĀ āSo now what?ā because in all honesty thatās what I was asking myself too. Iād been rather unsure how to proceed because as I discovered, since around the start of 2018, Iāve been in an increasingly less of a good position to be developing a game on my own. Iāve found merely lending a hand as a member of a larger team, such how Iāve been assisting with programming on A Date in Time, far more viable.
As much as I hate to admit it, Iāve also been losing confidence in the gameās story and my own ability to write it in a way that measures up to the Gravity Falls standard of quality. Despite having a very clear idea of what happens in PQ2D for a long time now, actually writing it out in a way I feel properly conveys those concepts has proven to be unbelievably challenging when it comes to a few particular key scenes. Not to mention thereās programming issues which have arisen and are in need of solving, something thatād be simpler to do if the gameās engine wasnāt so limited without extensive knowledge of the otherwise rather useless Ruby scripting language.
After giving it a lot of thought, hereās my current plan for continuing development of the game in 2020: The next year is going to be a litmus test to see if completing the game is currently possible given the challenges facing it.Ā
Iām looking into recruiting some additional help from members of the ADIT team, if they are willing and able to lend a hand with the things that can actually be helped with, which sadly isnāt everything. A lot of this stuff I still donāt have much choice but to tackle on my own. Regardless, weāre gonna do the best we can in the next 12 months and see what comes of it. The goal is going to be to try and make significant, steady progress to the point where we feel like we can see the finish line. If that canāt happen, well...
I wanna be optimistic. Iāve put a lot of work into this game over the course of nearly 4 years now. No matter what, it wonāt go to waste as itās been invaluable experience, but only time will tell if my full vision for PinesQuest 2D can come to fruition.
Thank you so much for all of your phenomenal support and for following the development of PinesQuest 2D! Have a wonderful new year and see you in the next decade!!
I deeply apologize for not posting a proper PQ2D update to this blog or GameJolt for more than 2 months now. The game is as alive and well as ever, there unfortunately just hasnāt been much to discuss regarding it lately.Ā
Iām basically still working on the same stuff Iāve been working on for roughly the past year or so: refining the maps, turning my outlines into fully written out cutscenes and programming the dungeons in the second half of the game, now that the assets are all finished. Back in early 2018 I thought this would only take a couple of months... and I might have been right about that if this game was my full time job. Sadly itās not, as much as I wish it was!
You might be wondering then,Ā āSo why donāt you get more people to help you?ā I actually did for a while but it wasnāt producing results I was happy with. Thatās not to say the folks who were kind enough to lend me a hand were doing a bad job! I just realized it was too difficult to communicate a lot of specific details about what I needed, leading to a lack of consistency between the things each of us were doing. This meant Iād end up making adjustments to so much of what I got help with that I came to the conclusion I was probably better off handling it on my own, rather than wasting someone elseās time. (Fun Fact: Apparently something similar happened to Toby Fox when he was creating Undertale, which is why he ended up creating almost the whole game entirely by himself. Knowing this also makes me feel less bad about being in pretty much the same situation.)
At the time of this post, hereās whatās currently complete beyond the demo:
Dungeon 6 is playable, but only the first half is in a finished state. You can walk through the second half but thereās no enemies, items, cutscenes or boss yet.
Dungeons 7, 8, and 9 are in the same state as 6ā²s second half, so again you can walk through but thatās it.
Dungeons 10 and 11 arenāt programmed in at all yet as Iām working on finalizing their maps and overall structure.
Additional content (bonus bosses etc) has to come last so thatās not been started, though itās already all planned out.
Another way you could put it is if the first half of the game is currently in an open beta (which it sort of actually is, given the demo), the second half is in something of a closed alpha. The foundation is nearly all there, I just have to keep building on top of it, however long that takes.
Thank you so much for your patience, support, and following the development of PinesQuest 2D! As always, stay weird! ā¤ļø
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Development Streams Cancelled Indefinitely + Trying Out Something Else!
Unfortunately, there will not be a PQ2D development stream today or any more going forward, for the following reasons:
1) My scheduleās turned out to be way less consistent than I hoped, meaning I canāt actually guarantee my own availability every Saturday like I thought Iād be able to at the beginning of this year.
2) Despite streaming at the time most convenient for those interested (determined through a poll), the audience turnouts were extremely low.
3) Aside from map-making, a very boring process I donāt blame anyone for not wanting to watch, most of what I still need to work on for the game contains spoilers. And I really do want to keep the details of the gameās full story a mystery up until the release of the final version.
Instead, weāre going to try something different from now on. Whenever I work on the game, Iām also going to be on live voice chat on the official PinesQuest 2D Discord server! I encourage EVERYONE to join this server (even if they arenāt interested in voice chat), since Iām on it almost all the time and itās where I give the most frequent and direct updates in regards to the game and its development. Itās a really good and important place to be if you want to keep up with everything PQ2D!
And now you can ask questions or just talk to me whenever I happen to be working on the game, which also happens to be MUCH MORE OFTEN than once a week as well! Hopefully this will be a better way to engage with those following development, thanks to it being more frequent and not limited to working on only non-spoiler aspects of the game.
Thank you so much and I hope to see you on the PQ2D Discord server! As always, stay weird!Ā
January Development Streams Cancelled + February Development Stream Schedule
Sadly it looks like starting up the development streams again this month just wasnāt meant to be, since I had to cancel last Saturdayās due to being out of town, and now unfortunately I have to go in for surgery on Friday (tomorrow). Since it will take me at least 1 to 2 weeks to recover, this means Iāll have to wait until February to start doing PQ2D development streams once again.
So hereās the stream schedule for February!
FEBRUARY PINESQUEST 2D DEVELOPMENT STREAM SCHEDULE @ TWITCH.TV/NOVASTARLYGHT:
February 2nd - 7 PM EST
February 9th - 2 PM EST
February 16th - 7 PM EST
February 23rd - 2 PM EST
Again, these times may be subject to change, and also no end times yet because I need to do a couple of streams before I figure out how out how long they should be. Sorry the January streams didnāt work out and hopefully Iāll see you all in February instead! Thank you and as always, stay weird!
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