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Imaynotbehere4long

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A member registered Dec 07, 2019

Recent community posts

This has been bothering me for a while, but I think I finally know how to voice my concerns: the frame of the spinning spike log that hurts you doesn't look like it should hurt you. This is because it has the bottom of the spike outline bending downward (by a lot!), making it seem as if the spike is pointing towards the camera and the player would land behind it, but that's not the case. I think you were going for one of those slightly-downward-tilted-camera perspectives like what NES Ninja Gaiden does, but the problem is that the entire rest of the game is strictly straight-side-view like the Super Mario games, and this perspective conflict makes that hazard unintuitive. Please redraw the log's harmful frame so that the spike graphic isn't cutting into the log graphic, or at least so it only has the spike's outline overlapping the top pixels of the log. Maybe also make it so the harmful frame has a brighter spike for added clarity.

Stumbled across a few more regarding Chibie. First, her wings don't get shadowed/inked in the Unfinished Swan room. Second, her wing animation freezes if you cat-grab onto a wall while floating (so if they're in the middle of closing when you grab the wall, they'll stay in that partially-open state until you detach). Third, even when gore is disabled, the healing effect when she kills an enemy is still blood-red (though I'm not sure how much you'd count that one). I'd upload some more screen captures to show these, but itch is breaking my images again.

Oh! I just thought of another potential solution with the Nitro Bomb: even if you don't change anything about how it works (which I still think you really should), you could just have the boss rooms overwrite the powerup like you do with the Balloon Cake. That way, even if players switch back and run out of ammo, they still have the given powerup to fall back on.

Finally got this one on video! If you do a running jump into the bottom corner of a ground tile at just the right spot, you'll get stuck there until you move backwards out of it:

Keep in mind it happens with ALL solid ground tiles, not just bricks. Looking back at the footage, I think it might be related to the "get pushed back after landing" bug I mentioned earlier since the afterimages stick around until after I escape the wall.

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You're right; I double-checked, and the regular bomb's explosion also only deals a minuscule amount of damage to opposing players, though this is masked by the bomb itself dealing a reasonable amount of damage on contact, pre-explosion. Even if this oversight got fixed, though, I still think that having the Nitro Bomb deal recoil damage is going overboard. You didn't add any similarly-massive drawbacks for other objectively-improved versions of powerups like the long whip or the axe/boomerang sword; at most, you just gave them a cooldown period and made them rarer. You should do the same for the Nitro Bomb, maybe even limit it to being a pricey shop-exclusive item like you did with the gold leaf, but no recoil damage; that's going too far.


Anyway, I stumbled across another one: if you're one whip's length away from your opponent, you can still hit each other with a down-angled whip attack, even if you're directly in front of each other instead of below at an angle:

Weirdly, it doesn't happen if you're too close to each other; you have to be at the edge of the whip's range for the discrepancy to occur.


EDIT: I almost didn't realize your intent with the jumpthrough arrangements for Prison Maze because the Skybase tileset's jumpthroughs are just flat clouds at the top rather than being full squares that can fill out the intended wall/prison bar shapes. You did a good job at making sure all the other available themes had square jumpthroughs, though.

Also, it might be a good idea to raise the border walls of Canyon Bridge because with a Cat Sunflower, a Hikkori Skull, or even just a bit of teamwork, you can get on top of them.

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Hey, I'm not sure we're on the same page about how strong the Nitro Bomb's explosions are, because I double-checked and confirmed that they barely do any damage to your opponent, only really hurting yourself:

If you meant against the regular enemies, what makes those explosions so much stronger than the regular bomb powerup that they needed to be balanced with recoil damage? Seems more like you were trying to do a Decoy Effect rather than counterbalance an overpowered item. The only benefit I see is that the explosions are *larger,* but there aren't many levels where you can end up getting beset on all sides by enemies like this, so its potential uses over the other powerups are very small in practice. This honestly seems more like a "three-second cooldown" situation at most, but even if you still want to go down the route of permanently-limiting its uses, you should at least give them a separate ammo counter instead of taking away the player's HP.

Though as an aside, I thought I'd mention that the ammo limits were one of my least favorite parts of Gun Princess 2, and I was glad to see that DDG2 did away with them, so I still recommend the cooldown option of the two.


Oh, and I forgot to mention this one last time: dying to enemies in the Unfinished Swan room removes the player's shadow.

EDIT: Another glitch with the Hikkori Skull: phasing upward through a jump-through platform lets you phase again before you land, just like phasing into a wall does. EDIT AGAIN: Same goes for if you Hikkori-phase upward from a standstill; you get to do it twice before it gets disabled, even if you don't touch another platform in the meantime.

EDIT 2: Hey, was it intentional to let other players jump on you and hurt you while you're in the middle of Hikkori-phasing? Because when that happens, you're still invisible during the knock-back portion, and you don't become visible again until you regain control and your flashing i-frames start.

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Stumbled across another one: using the Hikkori Skull in the Unfinished Swan room doesn't cause the player to disappear while phasing like it's supposed to.


EDIT: Also, I'm not sure how intentional this is, but on the other end of the spectrum, bomb explosions can't be seen unless a shadow overlaps them (same for fireballs). Itch suddenly decided to break all my image upload attempts, though, so you'll have to take my word for it.

EDIT 2: Okay, I just found out that the Nitro Bomb is used! There's a chance it'll show up in PVP maps as an item drop, but using it will damage yourself. Was this an accidental holdover from getting Shattered Team to work, or did you mean for it to be an anti-powerup like the poison mushroom in Smash Bros.?

Either way, that's two more Sugar frames missing footwear if you haven't already corrected them with the rocket sprites.

EDIT 3: Why does the "Reaper's Castle" PVP theme have the lava background instead of, you know, the castle background? It has the castle tileset, though, which kinda doesn't fit with the lava background. Same goes for that world's Reinforcements, obviously.

EDIT 4: Oh, almost forgot: if you're in a PVP battle and you pause and go back to settings, the PVP settings menu won't have any music playing unless you back out further to the main menu.
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Sometimes, wall-jumping with the Cat Sunflower's power will do a regular-height jump instead of the tiny jump it's supposed to. My guess is that if you're lined up exactly right with a 16x16 wall tile, the game will do a regular "jump from ground" jump instead of the "detach from wall" bounce.

By the way, did you remember to put my "add visual indicator on solid tiles that Zombies come out of" comment to your to-do list? I'm not sure you actually did anything regarding making the Zombie-spawning easier to see in dark levels if the player is in front of them.


EDIT: If gore is off, enemies will sometimes play an extra death animation. It's easiest to reproduce by playing as Sugar and running at max speed while jumping on top of a jump-able enemy:


In the multiplayer VS mode, selecting the New Magma City theme has it play Nice Day for a Stroll despite the background being that same unfitting night sky that Waste Disposal Plant had. I'm guessing this is a holdover from DDG1 where the city had a day sky by default, so maybe you could swap it for the day sky, or swap the theme for Chemplant like you did before, or add an extra option so you can do both with New Magma City (day) and New Magma City (night).

Discovered a new one: dying in crystal form as Penguin Cop will cause the reinforcement to BE a pinkranite crystal until you take damage.


Anikel's cheery sprite used in the epilogue has the top row of pixels misaligned and has her hair-covered eye missing despite it being slightly visible in her other cutscene sprites.

By the way, I noticed that the data.win for v1.0.8 is around 4MB smaller than v1.0.7. May I ask what all got removed? I'm just curious.

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More feedback: I don't like how the ice buster and fire buster only shoot after you LET GO of the attack button. I know a bunch of other games do this as well, and I hate it there, too. It makes the controls feel unresponsive. The default green mega buster shoots when you push the button despite also having a stronger charge shot, and the much-more-common flower-equivalent ice/fire powers also shoot when you push the button, so I don't understand why you broke consistency for the ice/fire busters. I would greatly prefer if they instantly fired a regular weak shot when you push the button like the green one does.

Stumbled across yet another graphical inconsistency regarding a player-character's footwear: Yal's disappears while using the Cat Sunflower's climbing ability:

This one's extra surprising because I'd imagine most people would play as Yal since he's first. Maybe they assumed Yal needed to take off his sandals to climb, but seeing as how this doesn't happen for Matt, Anikel, or Paige, I think it's safe to say this one wasn't intentional, either.

By the way, remember how I said that using the Hikkori Skull lets you move around while talking to NPCs? Same happens if you use the Rocket Pack.

Noticed another one: landing after doing a running jump pushes me backward a bit instead of smoothly continuing forward movement. It happens every time I land, but is more noticeable after longer falls.



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Hey, the description for Shattered Team on the character select screen claims that they're immune to instant-death hazards, but when I jumped into a pool of lava, I still exploded. Sure, I respawned on the last platform as a reserve member, but Penguin Cop can do the same thing (if only once). And yes, the dead member slowly regenerated, but by that logic, they'd be "immune" to ALL damage with no need to specify instant-death ones, so I think that line should be reworded for clarity.


EDIT: Oh, and the Soaker Girl/Water Balloon Girl bestiary mix-up might've been on my end, too. EDIT 2: Or maybe it's only mixed up with specific Enemy Promotion settings? I'll have to double-check at some point. 


EDIT 3: Oh, and the unlock description for Holy Cow says she "can trample anything flat with her massive bulk," but again, this isn't special to her because it takes her the same number of bounces to crush enemies as everyone else, and she can't just run into enemies like Sugar, either. I recommend swapping out that phrase for one that mentions her vertical magic lasers or healing ability.

About that problem booting into fullscreen I mentioned before: it was on my end. My mouse has a double-click problem, and sometimes when I'd go to double-click the exe, the second click would register twice for a triple-click, which means File Explorer ended up being the active window when the game booted up. Somehow, that's what causes the game's fullscreen to get misaligned.

Hey, I just noticed that each of the three paintings gives a different amount of points on the mission results screen. Was this intentional? I feel like not all the levels ordered their paintings from easiest to hardest, let alone made the third one four times as hard to obtain.

Then again, I also recognize that this would be tough to undo since 14000 isn't evenly divisible by three, but changing the total points would throw off star balancing, so I'm not asking you to change it; I'm just curious what your intentions were.

Funny, I did notice its similarity to Cave Story's Balrog, but I never expected you to just come out and say it. :P 

Anyway, I stumbled across another mistake just now: if I set Enemy Promotion to "Harder enemies," the Sparky Po will move faster, but if I set it to "Much harder enemies," they go back to being regular speed with no differences, which you might notice is not harder. 

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I was a bit rushed with my last two posts, so I neglected to mention that the last part of Mr. 44's entry is rather awkwardly phrased and kinda hard to understand. I think a better way to say it would be "to study the BROX's cognition, such as its combat ability and how it handles human interaction in real-life scenarios." The Oxford comma gets removed since the restructuring means there are only two parts referring to the studying of its cognition rather than three parts referring to the studying of BROX in general. Also, the shorter, less-detailed phrase gets moved up front since it reads easier going into the longer phrase rather than the other way around. Lastly, I rephrased the bit before "human interaction" to avoid using the word "ability" again so soon after its previous use (it's not grammatically wrong; it's just a pet peeve of mine).

Oh, and depending on what BROX is, you might wanna swap out my it/its for he/his. I just made an educated guess that since BROX is something artificial with prototypes, it could become either a male form (like Mr. 44) or a female form (or non-binary, too, I guess), but this is your story, after all. Also, I was convinced that BROX/Mr. 44 was a robot or something, but rereading the description showed me that there's not really much evidence to support that, so I'm not sure which pronouns would be appropriate.


EDIT: Rereading Dan Maku's description, I'd like to correct my previous correction to be "When he's" instead of just "When"

Oh, one more thing: I know this is counterintuitive, and I myself have made this mistake a few times, but it really is spelled "bestiary," not beastiary.

Stumbled across more typos in the bestiary: 

  • Zombie's description says "they are brittle and easily falls apart" but since it's plural, it should just be "fall" without the s. 
  • Necromata's description says "The only who remain" instead of "The only ones who remain"
  • Goblin's description says "A type of imp that live underground and attack in great numbers" but type is singular, so it should be "lives" and "attacks." Also, if goblins have more than one weakness, you might wanna change that word to "weaknesses."
  • Tengu's description says "A bird daemon that love pranking" instead of "loves" but if you wanna change it up a bit, you could always make the noun plural and say "Bird daemons that love pranking" instead.
  • Giant Pirahna should have a comma between big and carnivorous. Also, I'm not sure "feel" is the right word to describe their blood-detection powers; maybe "sense" or "smell"? Oh, and apparently it's spelled "Piranha" with the h after the n, not before.
  • Bomb Girl's description says "the only foolproof way was having human-controlled detonation" which I guess technically works, but again, it would be more natural to say either "having human-controlled detonations" or "having a human-controlled detonation"
  • Human Rocket: "The rocket suits allows" should be "suit allows" or "suits allow"
  • Fireworks Girl: "fireworks brings" should be bring.
  • Sand Queen: it's spelled pharaoh, with an h at the end. Plus, I'm pretty sure it should be "regard for her subjects"
  • Dan Maku: I suspect that "While" should be a "When"
  • Mr.44: "the BROX cognition" could technically make sense depending on what BROX is, but the stray apostrophe in the current description makes me think you meant to say "the BROX's cognition"


Also, I think the kill count for Soaker Girls and Water Balloon Girls are accidentally swapped. I have a save file where, of those two, I only killed Soaker Girls, but it was Water Balloon Girls who became unlocked in the bestiary while Soaker Girls were nowhere to be seen.

Update on the dialogue font being different sizes sometimes: the cause is changing the "Screen size" setting, which drastically affects the text beyond intended scaling (even/especially if the game is in full-screen):




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I am 100% certain. I even tested it with all of the characters, and they all get their jump height reduced by ~18 pixels running vs standing (except Sugar, whose reduction is only 9 pixels). You can try it yourself with the third coin group in the first level; it's easiest to notice as Yal since he ends up being unable to reach the coins at all instead of barely reaching them like the others:

I can record a video, too, if you want, so you can see I'm not releasing the button early.

A similar case to the Balloon Cake: doing a running jump is lower-height than jumping straight up without horizontal movement--and by a full unit, too. I'm guessing this is a side-effect of that same "move the player down when walking" code?

A couple things I forgot to mention before:

- In the vertically-wrapping room near the end of the game, moving into a wall while falling past the wrap-point will kill your vertical momentum as you almost land on the ceiling block. Do you think extending the walls vertically out-of-bounds will result in a smoother fall?

- The change-log says that coins now refill your magic meter a bit, but this is true only for loose coins. Activating coin blocks doesn't change the magic meter at all. Was this intentional? 

More Sound Room typos: 

So, I looked it up, and the correct spelling in English is actually "Minuet," with an i. "Menuet" with another e is the French spelling. Also, Dr. and Reaper should have a space between them just like Mr. and Lloyd should in the intro.

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In the Sound Room, you mentioned being concerned about Rocket Rise being monotonous, and during my playthrough, I did start to feel that way about it. What do you think about using The Road Warrior for the cloud-tileset levels instead, leaving Rocket Rise for the skybase-tileset levels? I think it would work nicely for those levels as well as use a previously unused track. At the very least, I think it would fit Very Long Fall in particular. 

EDIT: Speaking of Very Long Fall, there's a hole in the bottom-right wall that's plugged by an invisible wall, but previous levels have taught players that they can jump into those gaps by holding down to duck. This means the fake gap implies a secret area but is actually a cheap hit. Please plug the gap with regular, visible solid tiles instead.

Hey, I just noticed an odd quirk with the Balloon Cake's power: if you're floating and you move forward, you fall a bit faster than if you float down without horizontal movement. What was your reasoning behind this decision? Not saying you should change it; I'm just curious.

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Just encountered a glitch where I hikkori-phased into the finish line and my character turned invisible until the game went back to the world map. I tried recreating it a couple times, but was unable to, so it might be one of those frame-perfect glitches where you have to beat the level right when or right before you transform back or something.


Also, I didn't mention this when I first posted about v1.0.8, but every now and then, the game won't boot into fullscreen properly, instead being misaligned down and right. Exiting and reentering fullscreen fixes the bug, so it's not a huge issue, and I also suspect it's on Game Maker's end because this never happened to me while playing v1.0.7.

EDIT: One more glitch: I entered a door right before I got hit by a projectile and died, but then the other room loaded and I was fine. I even had full health again, even though I was just one hit away from death beforehand.

One more thing: the Big Hikkori snakes in the final world seem to have a hitbox issue. Their faces are harmless (even as far down as their mouths), but their tails seem to hurt you before you actually make contact with them. Did the hitbox get misaligned at some point after testing them?

Good to hear. 

By the way, I forgot to mention another grammar mistake I noticed in the ending: Lloyd says "needs of the many is" even though the subject of the sentence is needs (plural), so that "is" should be are.

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I hope you're not feeling too down about all the problems I keep posting. As I said before, I think the game is good, and I really like it. I did find a couple more issues, though:


1) If I use the Hikkori Skull's phasing power and redirect my trajectory upward into a ceiling, I'll sometimes get stuck and stop moving until the phasing phase is over.

2) Another very minor graphical issue, but the purple smoke from the Hikkori Skull's phasing power is layered behind doors.

EDIT: Just noticed a typo in the ending: you wrote "rethorical" but the correct spelling is rhetorical.

Oh, and before I forget again: I really wasn't a fan of how the solid-white room near the end of the game had coins in unreachable locations. Even though I had gotten all the notes in that level, I thought maybe there was another key in that world or something that the coins were hinting towards, except no, I ended up falling to my death. Please remove all the coins that are below the platforms in that room, then lower the three coins in the top-right so they can be reached.

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Thanks. To clarify, I wasn't asking you to replace them with trivial challenges, but rather simply challenges that the player can see upfront. Like I said before, you have to be very careful when introducing and building upon invisible blocks, to the point where you basically have to design the whole game around them and use them frequently in order for them to be intuitive and fair, especially if you're gonna use them without hints. Not even Lost Levels could pull that off perfectly, so don't feel too down about it. 

One example of a potential replacement could be: for Load-Bearing Grid's first painting, below the bottom jump-through platform in that shaft, add one extra jump-through platform that can only be reached by jumping from the item block. Then, you could add a spike on the left side of the new jump-through block so that a simple running-jump wouldn't be enough, and the player would also have to slow down at the right time to land safely. That should be non-trivial enough for world 3, don't you think?


EDIT: Oh, and just in case this also needs to be specified, the shopkeeper sometimes calls the name of his store something like "Jason's powerups" or "Jason's quality powerups," which would require the p and q to be capitalized (watch your p's and q's! ;P). I guess it could be one of those slogans where the name of the store is just "Jason's" followed by listing one or two things the store sells, but then there'd at least need to be a comma after Jason's.

EDIT 2: Discovered another Hikkori Skull glitch: if you run into a wall while phasing, you can reliably phase again in another direction. I guess you won't fix this one since you said you're okay if something's unfair in the player's favor, so maybe keep this in mind for the sequel since it lets you expand on it by allowing for makeshift wall-jumping.

EDIT 3: Okay, okay, get this: I noticed a couple grammar mistakes while rereading the 1.0.8 launch post. In the first paragraph, you say "flaws that's been" instead of "flaws that've been," and in the second paragraph, you say "these changes trends towards" even though a plural noun (changes) means the verb (trend) should not have the added s at the end. ^__^ EDIT 4: ...and on that same topic, I just noticed that the store's description of the Blood Violet says "enemies that loves" instead of "enemies that love"

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Wow, I just barely missed you with my last comment, huh? Anyway, I discovered another glitch: if you speak to an NPC while using the Hikkori Skull's phasing power, you'll still be able to move around and jump while the dialogue box is on screen. Granted, the Hikkori Skull is rare enough that most players probably won't ever encounter this minor bug, but I thought I'd let you know anyway. EDIT: Also, doing the Hikkori Skull glitch while entering a door turns the player invisible until the next room loads (so only a fraction of a second). 

I guess you could always just put this in your "Known Issues" thread if it's too much work to fix for too little gain.

EDIT: Also, is it just me, or is there no tutorial for panning the camera up/down? I only figured that out after I kept running into surprise death-falls in levels like Monument Valley and Massively Makeshift Bridge, but I had just assumed I forgot about that mechanic at the time. However, looking back, I don't think the game ever explicitly mentions its existence, so it'd be nice if you added some text explaining it somewhere in-game.

EDIT 2: You said you didn't change Yal's world 5 convo because you forgot to add it to your list. Did the same thing happen with removing and replacing the invisible blocks in those two levels that still use them, or did you simply disagree with my criticism?

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Oh, and one more if you'll hear me out: one of the things the shopkeeper can say is "Jason's discounts is coming to town." This would make sense if "Jason's Discounts" is the name of the store (singular), in which case the d in discounts should be capitalized. However, if it's referring to the general discounts (plural) provided by Jason, "is" should be replaced with are.

...except the phrase is preceded by "When fighting crime has worn you down," which isn't referring to something currently happening right now, but rather to something that will happen in the future. Therefore, it'd be more natural to say that Jason's [D/d]iscounts "will come to town," which also coincidentally avoids the is/are kerfuffle entirely.

Wait, but then why does her description say "range and power" if it was always meant to be just range? Ah, I guess it's moot if you're gonna make it more powerful regardless.


Anyway, I noticed a couple more things and can hopefully get them in before the next update this time:

 - Yal's World 1 convo says "threadmill" (again, no h in treadmill). Also, the word "gym" is a noun, not a verb; it'd be more natural to say "work out" instead. (by the way, it looks like you didn't change "moment of surprise"; may I ask why?)

 - Seems like players can get stuck by Marble Tower's first painting if double-easy blocks are active and they fall from above without a sword or whip item (which is entirely possible if they end up with a fireball/float combo). Maybe save introducing the Balloon Cake until the next power-up block and put a whip or sword in that first one instead?


By the way, I remember you said you had an idea to make a collection/compilation of all current and future Daemon Detective Gaiden games, but I found an archive of the first game from 2014, and most of the levels in it got repurposed for this sequel. The main differences are 1) less HP, and 2) powers are locked to different characters, which is how I discovered that Marble Tower was originally designed so that the (first two) paintings could be collected with either the whip or the cat claw power, which I thought was a neat detail that got lost in the sequel (though besides that and the zoomed out camera, everything else about the sequel is a huge improvement).

What I'm trying to say is: in this hypothetical collection, would you make new levels to replace the near-duplicates, or would you expect players to effectively go through the same levels twice? 

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Hey, I'm not sure if you're still working on another small update to address the things I mentioned after v1.08 launched (such as the boomerang sword being weaker than the bomb, even if you're Paige who allegedly has stronger sword strength but still seems to deal the same damage to the final boss as everyone else), but I recently discovered one other small thing that should be tweaked: in Maha's difficulty options, the description for toggling additional platforms doesn't mention that you can add obstacles instead! You'd only know that's an option if you actually cycle through said options. I myself didn't realize that until right now, and the only thing that finally clued me in to its existence was seeing the red spikes in the level editor (I would have never known otherwise; even the "or dial them up" on the store page could just be referring to the stronger enemies toggle).

Also, when I asked for descriptions for the rocket and crystal powers, I meant in their Reinforcements level instead of the shop. I didn't realize the penguins' dialogue in those places was randomized until later, but I still think it would be beneficial to swap out one of the random-dialogue penguins in those two Reinforcements for one that tells you how their respective powers work.

...and speaking of the rocket power, you forgot to fix Sugar's missing shoes in those recolors as well:


P.S. Small typo on the store page: you wrote "an unique" twice instead of "a unique" ("an" is used when the word starts with a vowel sound, whereas unique is pronounced "you-nique" with a y-consonant sound, so you should use the word "a" instead).

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