2010 puzzle platformer VVVVVV just got its first update in seven years, except this hasn’t come from its original developer Terry Cavanagh.
VVVVVV is a unique platformer in that players cannot jump but rather invert or revert gravity in order to fall upwards or downwards, consisting of hundreds of levels, as well as many more user-created levels.
As reported in PC Gamer, when VVVVVV celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2020, Cavanagh made the game open-source, meaning that the source code was available on Github, where anyone could download and tinker with the game in any way they wanted.
As a result, “the first community-developed version of the game” has now gone live with the 2.3 update, which adds a huge amount of fixes and improvements to the original game (an abridged version of changes are listed here).
It's out at last! The community-driven 2.3 update for VVVVVV is now live. I wrote about it briefly here: https://t.co/Fj05oKVheM https://t.co/OnXY1kUHDy
— Ethan Lee (@flibitijibibo) August 31, 2021
The main highlights include: uncapped framerate, in-game timer support, big giant middleware update, including SDL 2.0.16 and updated Wayland support, a huge number of features for level creators, as well as “an obscene number of bugfixes, notably regarding undefined C/C++ behaviour”.
The fixes total nearly “2,000 commits” according to developer Ethan Lee (also known as flibitijibibo) who credits another contributor Misa as “a standout developer who will be an official maintainer for future releases”.
“This release was really important to me because I wanted to show that it was possible to do new releases of games with published source code rather than abandoning them like most other developers do, and I think players will immediately see that the results speak for themselves,” Lee wrote.
“Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release (especially Misa), and thanks to everyone who has done some really interesting stuff even outside of upstream. And of course, thanks to Terry for letting me try this absurd idea in the first place.”
Elsewhere, brutal cyberpunk first-person slash Ghostrunner has received a new update, which introduces a roguelike-inspired Wave Mode as well as an Assist Mode.
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