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Holy cow. This was one hell of a blast from the past. Not to mention an interesting documentation of what's basically have been our "culture". Great video!

Chiming in -- I'd argue that while the limitation of old pixel art gives way to incite creativity, creators can simply copy the lessons of the old pixel art, and then take them beyond their old limitations to create something better.

The reality is that nowadays, modern pixel games are built ontop of what retro pixel games have managed to achieve thanks to their hardware limitation, and bring them beyond that. They didn't spend their creative energy to reinvent the wheel. In modern pixel games that creative energy is shifted onto other things beyond just making pixel arts pretty; such as adding lighting effects or implementing dynamic pixel arts to further enhance an already well made pixel art. That's primarily why nowadays modern pixel art games such as Celeste or Noita still looked beautiful, alive even, despite having potentially 16,777,216 different color pallete plus all special effects to choose from.

Celeste:

Noita:

Honestly, a simple if-else mechanic would go a long way in creating a really dynamic level. Ricochet Infinity does exactly this and you could practically design your own game... in a Brick-Breaker game.

Sweet level.

It's his trademark at this point.

As I actually extensively use these invisible gravities and portals, I would be pretty opposed to having them removed. Though they have less use case than coins, they are still a level designing tool as much as the former are, and how good they are depends on how you design the gameplay around it. If one comes across invisible gravities that makes no sense, or just adds to the frustration, that is not a good level design.

Invisible things in itself are not inherently bad, but they are certainly not a tool you want to abuse as much as visible gravity arrows. Running into invisible arrows takes control away from the players and may add to the frustration because by itself, there is no way to figure out where exactly they are until they stumble across it the first time and memorize it. Players hate losing control in any case and this also applies to the game, and this is probably why so many shunned upon any usage of invisible gravity.

Done right though, invisible gravity can also contribute to the experience. What the level creators could have done with the invisible gravity was to take advantage of what they are good at, and minimize possible frustration and/or loss of control as much as humanly possible. What are they good at? Being hidden and therefore not detracting from the background/in-game art. How do you minimize frustration? Make them predictable. How do you make them predictable? Make it a recurring pattern, over and over. How do you make sure they realize the recurring pattern? Make a controlled environment where it's required for them to take advantage of the recurring pattern.

This is essentially what I've implemented with the concept of ledge climb in my third Station (which utilizes invisible dot). I dedicated the entire six first mini games to have them familiarize themselves with how ledge climbing works, and commonly implemented dozens of these ledge climbs throughout the level consistently on every single corners. Ledge climbing ended up adding more to the players' repertoire of possible actions, which I believe ultimately added to the experience, not detract.

bit.ly only made the link suspicious tbh

I suggested this before, but now that the development team is now more active than before, I'd like to bring this topic back up. It would be cool to have this functionality in the game.

It's part of the level design? It's the little thing that's much more satisfying for players to discover themselves, rather than spoonfed. Plus, it helps to make the in-game art cleaner.

I'm so used to reading all these anti-mod posts that when I saw this one I immediately thought: It's probably nothing.

If you're gonna complain about mod abuse at least try not to be so hyperbolic. There's so many of those to the point that every single anti-mod titles had lost their legitimacy.