Yeah, it's really hard to judge what exactly is different. I can't quite tell, it just... feels different. Somebody who is better at HATPC physics and mechanics would probably be best able to know and explain though

So, I looked into the way the original game handles crate knockback, and the plot thickens. It turn's out what I've been thinking of as one thing (crate knockback) is actually two totally different things:

(1) When you are running horizontally through a crate, you don't get knocked back at all. Instead, you are motionless for the one tick where the crate is destroyed.
(2) When you run into a stack of two crates to destroy one, then let off the arrow key, you do get knocked back out of the stack of crates. But that's not knockback, it's just the ordinary collision physics taking over and ejecting you from colliding with the crate now that you're not moving. Basically, crates will eject you from themselves just like walls - but only when you aren't moving.

So yeah, there's no way a simple knockback could replicate the combination of those two completely different forces.

The behavior of the original is never going to be replicated exactly in my version due to different collision physics, but I can try to get a closer approximation of it.

I also looked into crate-jumping velocity and I think the way the game handles it is that your upward speed is equal to your previous downward speed capped at a maximum value. That's an easy fix.

"Not intentional. I didn't even notice the original game did that, actually. I think on user levels it doesn't? Anyways, fixed."
Perhaps you didn't notice due to a glitch present in both hatpc and hatic where the game doesn't allow you to restart on your 2nd-last life?

The reason duck-jumping into crawl-spaces like that is a problem is because that is this game's one-way gate. Having it still be possible if the crawl-space is next to a ceiling would be nice (and I think it's required to beat the last level of hatic).

We're clients from hell and you could probably mostly ignore us lol.

Maybe. In any case that glitch is fixed now. In fact, you can actually restart on your last life. By which I mean the restart button will act like the quit button if you're on your last life.


Does the campaign ever use that, or only user levels? Also, there are other ways to make one way gates, like a 4-block drop or a platform, but those may be less compact.

Well there's at least one crawlspace that you can't jump out of and then immediately get back into (the only one I found on a quick glance is in level 15). It's not really used significantly in the original game, but there's no moral argument against it and it's pretty handy.

Well, my argument for being able to duck-jump into crawlspaces like that is one of consistency, which I'm a big fan of. If the game establishes that you can, in fact, duck-jump into crawlspaces in some situations, it logically follows that you should be able to do it in all situations. That's consistency, and that's good game design in my book. Not to mention that in order to disable that ability, I'd have to code a fairly complex special case to stop you from doing it. The way it works now is just a consequence of duck-jumping + high tick speed - even at terminal velocity, you will always be able to get in the crawlspace during one tick because you will never completely fall past it in one tick.

On the topic of crates, the bounce from dropping onto a crate is also too low when falling at full speed. I wasn't able to land on a crate and then bounce up and land on top of a block that was one unit higher. (You can test this at the start of the tutorial level)

I've slightly increased the crate jumping speed since this alpha, hopefully that makes up for it. If not I can give it a bit more of a boost.