Thanks again for regularly responding to my comments. I do have one more question, though:
The sound test says that Frozen Hearts was the theme of a level in Final Columbus, but I recently beat that game and never heard it there. After I beat it, I edited my save file to put me back beside alternate paths I had skipped, eventually finding all nine gun upgrades, all five secret NPCs, and even stumbling across what I'm pretty sure are unused rooms (such as a speedbike tunnel, other final boss phases, and an alternate ending with Ninja), but I still never found any room that plays the track in question. I even cheated my way into That One Level (since it's inaccessible normally), which is what I was certain you were referring to, but no, that level plays a completely different track throughout. Is the reason only two people recognize Frozen Hearts because it was from a cancelled/unreleased build? Or if I just overlooked it, what's the room number that plays the song (and if relevant, how do I trigger the song to play)? I'm pretty sure I checked all 240 of the game's rooms (a room value of 241 crashes the game, saying that the room doesn't exist), so the only other thing I can think to do is ask you.
Because if that level really never saw the light of day...well, first, I'm curious how it managed to be worse than putting the factorial punishment after the escort maze, and second, I'd appreciate if its sound test entry was reworded to clarify that the level was unreleased since part of me was looking forward to seeing just how annoying that level was, and it would've been nice to know ahead of time that the level isn't actually there.
There's a hidden ice level which uses it, I don't remember how to access it but checking in the game's files its entrance is in room 251. (So there are more than 240 rooms, it's just that some were deleted leaving gaps in the structure)
(Room 254 is an unrelated, unfinished 8-bit level)
When I set my save's room value to 250 or higher, the game crashes with an "array index out of bounds" error before even reaching the file select screen. Any idea what the problem might be? Even the nonexistent rooms let me reach the file select and only crashed (with a different error) when I tried loading that specific file. As an experiment, I set my room number to 30000 and got the exact same error as with rooms 250+, even though I'm pretty sure there isn't a room 30000, so I doubt its something like the rooms not having properly defined in-game area names or something. All I can think of is that the GM8 compiler has a hard limit of 249 rooms and simply left out those higher-number rooms when making the exe, meaning the level was accidentally unreleased after all (or maybe the v1_2_15 build you uploaded to itch is outdated and isn't actually the final Final Columbus :P).
If the problem is somehow on my end, can you upload a save file that starts in that room without crashing?
(or maybe the v1_2_15 build you uploaded to itch is outdated and isn't actually the final Final Columbus :P).
...this might be the issue. That would also explain why you weren't able to find the entrance just exploring normally.
Oh my goodness, that was it. After finding out that you weren't kidding about how the game gets buried in searches (even with the "Heart of Ruin" added to it), I stumbled across the build you uploaded to Game Jolt, which is 1.2.19 and includes a bunch of other changes, like an existent room 241 and a combo mechanic that shows how many times in a row you hit enemies. Any chance you'll reupload that as an update to Final Columbus over here? EDIT: If you purposely chose to revert back to 1.2.15 for some reason, maybe you could give people the choice of which to download? EDIT 2: On second thought, maybe it'd be better to stick with version 1.2.15 since the upgrade for the Chain Core wasn't implemented (the sidequest seems to stall after giving the Master Floppy to the shopkeeper), meaning you don't get anything for fighting your way through that nonsense. EDIT 5: and the new boss fight against the electric-gun-wielder crashes the game when you try to speak to her afterward, so there's another reason to stick with 1.2.15. EDIT 6: and 1.2.19's credits are missing the comments/descriptions for the enemies/staff, but it does list all the enemies that were missing in 1.2.15's credits.
I guess I only have one more question: 1.2.15 has an unused music track called "sound87" that isn't present in 1.2.19 at all. What's the story behind that track? Was it a prototype of Frozen Hearts, a track for another one of your games that you considered reusing, or something that someone else composed and you included by accident?
I don't remember the exact details, but "massive stability issues and unfinished content" does sound like a pretty compelling reason to not go with that version. Presumably version 16 was what added the new stuff and 17, 18 and 19 were bugfixes (I have no surviving documentation from those days, it was before I even started using source control).
sound<NUMBER> is the default filename for a new sound asset before it gets properly named, so it was something I added and immediately forgot about. Back in those days I usually had songs on repeat in the GM editor instead of having a separate media player / youtube playlist for music so it might be an intentionally unnamed song I just replaced whenever I wanted to swap it out.
