Official blog for "PinesQuest: (A Romance of) 2Dimensions)", or "PinesQuest 2D", a Gravity Falls RPG fan game.
VERSION 0.8.2 AVAILABLE NOW! See pinned post or downloads page!
A little bit of behind-the-scenes artwork for you today, Fallers!
My original sketches of A. Tad Square from all the way back when I first started developing the game in early 2016. The first batch of expressions were actually drawn on paper in a sketchbook I carried around with me in college. The second set was sketched digitally, before both were digitally colored into the final artwork you see in game.
We also have my concept art for Nemm Lustre's battle images, for both the battle in level 10 and the final boss fight. I've always been really proud of Nemm's final boss form, especially with how the scarf transforms and symbolizes how Bill can't escape his past, the remnants of his homeworld still literally clawing after him.
After the events of the game, The Axolotl has sealed up The Snowglobe, making it so no one can get in or out. Can't have any more interdimensional kidnappings, or these two escaping to cause more trouble! So how do Nemm and Bill deal with being stuck inside a pocket dimension?
By playing some Dungeons, Dungeons & More Dungeons, of course!
Thank you so much to Mindscape for this adorable artwork! Please take a look at their ko-fi page and consider commissioning them for a super cute illustration like this one!
A gruesome event that would be the beginning of the end for the 2nd Dimension… Here’s a look at a chilling moment from Nemm and Bill’s past!
Due to how isolated from the multiverse it was prior to its destruction, many believe “The Euclydian Massacre” was a single event. In reality, it was the culmination of a Great War, a nightmarish period of boundless chaotic carnage…
The inciting incident was the betrayal of the ruling class by a noble scion. They allowed their co-conspirator, a peasant triangle mockingly dressed in gentlemanly accessories, to infiltrate an esteemed gathering of elites. Together, the two mercilessly slaughtered the hosts and every last guest, painting the walls of the estate in mercurial blood. They then declared to the restless masses that soon, the world would be their’s, and at last, all would see the truth and be liberated.
As a little gift for you all, and to show my gratitude... version 0.8.1 of PinesQuest 2D has been released.
Download it on:
itch.io / GameJolt
Version 0.8.1 Changelog:
The first half of level 6, the Crystal Woods, is now accessible.
Gideon is now playable and joins the party at the beginning of level 6.
Debug Room is now accessible, but you will need to find the password...
Once Bill has joined your party, new items will appear in A. Tad Square's shop.
If Bill is in your party, you can access a cutscene about the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel and Shermie Pines by examining the books in the hideout (hub area).
Certain items have been buffed.
Debug Room Features:
Talk to Bill to mark level 6 as completed. You can then go back to the Mystery Shack and talk to A. Tad Square to trigger a cutscene. At the end of cutscene, Bill will join your party.
Talk to Ford and he will join your party. Talk to him again to instantly raise your entire party to max level (99).
Talk to Dipper to watch some cutscenes from level 7.
Talk to Nemm to gain access to each character's ultimate weapons. Ford, Bill and Gideon's weapons are received automatically while everyone else's must be obtained from the secret areas in levels 1-5.
Talk to A. Tad Square to instantly get 999999 gold.
This will likely be the last version of the game I ever release. Through the full game document and videos I released recently, I now consider the game to be "finished," even if the remaining 5 and a half levels aren't playable. I truly wish I could make them playable but as I've discussed before, after years of trying, I just don't think I can make it happen. I did my best, but I hope you still enjoy what I was able to create.
Today we have some breathtaking artwork based on PinesQuest 2D by the fabulous @sunnihope!
First is perhaps the most climactic moment of the game, where after the final boss battle, Bill finally makes amends with Nemm by showing them that last precious speck of their bygone home world...
And then there's Bill and Nemm, best friends once more, hand in hand as they can at last move towards a bright and sparkling future together! At least that's probably what The Axolotl is hoping. He's gonna need to continue to keep an eye on them, either way...
Thank you once again to Case (sunnihope) for these gorgeous pieces! Please be sure to check them out, give them a follower and consider commissioning them!
The most loyal friend and (2nd?) worst war criminal in the multiverse, meet @pinesquest2d ‘s main antagonist, Nemm Lustre!
Nemm is, obviously, based on me and my mascot/persona/avatar, to the point where they were actually originally just named Nova. However I wanted to give them more of their own identity, especially since while they are a character based on me, it’s similar to say, how Dipper is based on Alex Hirsch.
This hexagram is a fun-loving free spirit who loves to create, with a particular fondness for making riddles, puzzles and games. Having despised their rigid noble upbringing, it’s no wonder they found a kindred spirit in a commoner triangle who spoke of liberation through chaos…
Bill and Nemm have a lot in common, which contributed to them being such close companions, but Nemm balances Bill out in a way that he desperately needs by way of being the one to reassure him it’s alright to be flawed. While they both made mistakes and paid for them in the blood of their home world, Nemm understands the only way to move now is forward, as difficult and daunting as that can be. That’s why they don’t want to do it alone, and don’t want Bill to have to either.
Unfortunately for the Pines family and friends, none of this means they see “simpler lifeforms” like humans as anything but useful pawns at best or irritating pests at worst. Why not uproot them from their dimension and place them as pieces on what is, to Nemm, a far more important chessboard?
Neither of their parents were hexagrams! Instead, their father was a hexagon while their mother was a pentagon who married into the nobility. This was slightly uncommon, as it’s typically expected that one marries a shape with the same amount of points, but marriages between the high class and nobility or the high and middle classes did happen occasionally. However, marriages between shapes with a large gap in class, say for example a noble and a triangle, were forbidden outright.
They did NOT get along with either of their parents, to put it lightly, though they had a slightly better relationship with their father. Said father, meanwhile, also didn’t get along with his own parents due to the fact he married a pentagon, which Nemm’s paternal grandparents didn’t approve of.
Because it was frowned upon and sometimes even punishable by 2nd Dimension nobility to fraternize with peasants, Nemm would often sneak out to meet with Bill. They frequently communicated through letters written in secret codes they’d both created. Nemm would even sometimes hide the letters or other things they sent to Bill inside of puzzle boxes to keep them from being discovered by anyone else.
They personally witnessed the deaths of both their parents and Bill’s during the war. Their parents were captured and publicly executed by isosceles factory workers. However, if you ask them how Bill’s parents died, they’ll refuse to answer.
During the war, they only killed Circles and other nobles, though they were forced to kill a few squares and triangles in self defense. As for how they went about executing those Circles and nobles… You ever watch Saw? It was kind of like that.
There was one exception to the last fact… The only non-Circle/noble that Nemm ever willingly killed was a five-sided doctor who Bill’s family took him to in his youth. This doctor barely gave Bill and his family the time of day, since they could hardly afford him, however at the relentless insistence of Bill’s parents he prescribed their child a liquid “medicine”… which was actually poison to make his sight worse.
They were the last survivor to leave the 2nd Dimension after its destruction. They stayed until it was no longer possible to inhabit, in order to collect the celestial remnants they weaved into their scarf.
Part 2 of the video is here! Be sure to check it out after watching part 1!
This project has truly been a labor of love and after 8 years, I'm so happy to finally see it "completed." Even if it wasn't in the way I originally envisioned, I hope you all enjoy it nonetheless.
The first part of "PinesQuest 2D: The Gravity Falls Game That Almost Was," a massive video taking you through the whole game from start to finish, is now online! Part 2 will be coming tomorrow, Friday, August 9th! Thanks for watching and please look forward to it!
You can watch now watch a lyric video for PinesQuest 2D's final boss theme, "2Dimension Dream Fever"!
a HUGE two-part video about the game titled "PinesQuest 2D: The Gravity Falls Game That Almost Was" is coming soon! The first part is already complete, but I'm waiting until I finish the second part to upload it. Once part 1 is uploaded, part 2 will be released the next day.
First and foremost, I hope everyone reading this is doing well and keeping safe and healthy during these exceptionally unprecedented, difficult and stressful times. Take care of yourselves and remember that things will get better. We’re going to make it through this.
The current circumstances are one of, but far from the absolute only or even the primary reason(s) I need to make the following official:
PinesQuest 2D’s development is now on indefinite hiatus. The game is NOT cancelled, however it is being “shelved” for the time being. Should the situation allow, the earliest I could see development of the game resuming is late 2021 or early 2022, as (after returning to finish my education/degree) this is around the time I’m currently planned to graduate from college.
During the past four months, when I was able to find the time and means to do so, I did my best to look into resolving the main issues that were impeding progress on the game, and was unable to find any tangible solutions. Despite this, I don’t think these problems are unsolvable; I’m just not capable of solving them right now. Therefore I’m simply putting the project aside for the moment, with plans to return to it in the hopefully not too distant future.
It’s been an unbelievable experience making this game since the Gravity Falls TV series wrapped up in 2016. I’ve gotten so many comments and emails of overwhelming support from fans who have played the demo and thoroughly enjoyed what I’ve created so far. It’s because of that I’m eagerly awaiting the opportunity to resume work on PQ2D, at a point where it becomes viable that I can finally see the game through to the end and give it the full release - the complete Gravity Falls follow-up story and retro RPG experience I envisioned.
I hope you all are looking forward to then as well. Thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart, for following the development of PinesQuest 2D. Please never stop staying weird, my fellow Fallers 💜
Happy Holidays, Fallers! Somehow it’s been seven months since the last PQ2D development update, and even more unfortunately I don’t really have a good reason for that which is able to be summed up as anything other than “Life happens.” Therefore I wanted to make sure I got one more update posted before the new year, and since it has been so long we’ve got a lot to discuss, so click the Read More to continue!
If you’ve been following this game for quite a while, you’ll notice its development has slowed down significantly during the past year and a half, going on two years now. I started what I now think of as the prototype for PinesQuest 2D in late 2015, however, I don’t feel I truly began developing the game as we know it now until spring 2016, when the Gravity Falls TV series concluded. When the official Journal #3 book released later that summer, the game’s story was heavily revised. That same summer I released the game’s first official demo, containing its first 3 levels, and proceeded to receive AMAZING feedback from players which helped to improve the game and my hilariously amateur skills as a game developer enormously.
A year later, I extended this demo to include the 4th and 5th levels, and estimated the full game would be finished sometime in 2017. This was INCREDIBLY stupid of me since how on Earth did I think I could finish the remaining roughly 60% of the game, when the previous ~40% had taken me more than a year, in less than 6 months? Because I thought as I went, the easier developing the game would be. The truth was it only got more difficult.
So I thought, “Okay, 2018 will be the year I finish it.” By the end of the year I only managed to give the demo its final update, addressing its various bugs, balance issues and making it better reflect my vision for the finished game. As you know by now, 2019 fared even worse, and I’m fully willing to admit this was the year I worked on the game the least since starting development.
Earlier this year I also shut down the PinesQuest 2D Discord server due to inactivity. Unlike a lot of other indie and/or fan games in development, there was no real “community” for PQ2D, meaning there wasn’t much of a reason to keep the server around. I decided I’d shut it down and simply make a new one once the full game was done, when there might be more of a use for it.
Now that you’re caught up with the game’s development history, you might be thinking “So now what?” because in all honesty that’s what I was asking myself too. I’d been rather unsure how to proceed because as I discovered, since around the start of 2018, I’ve been in an increasingly less of a good position to be developing a game on my own. I’ve found merely lending a hand as a member of a larger team, such how I’ve been assisting with programming on A Date in Time, far more viable.
As much as I hate to admit it, I’ve also been losing confidence in the game’s story and my own ability to write it in a way that measures up to the Gravity Falls standard of quality. Despite having a very clear idea of what happens in PQ2D for a long time now, actually writing it out in a way I feel properly conveys those concepts has proven to be unbelievably challenging when it comes to a few particular key scenes. Not to mention there’s programming issues which have arisen and are in need of solving, something that’d be simpler to do if the game’s engine wasn’t so limited without extensive knowledge of the otherwise rather useless Ruby scripting language.
After giving it a lot of thought, here’s my current plan for continuing development of the game in 2020: The next year is going to be a litmus test to see if completing the game is currently possible given the challenges facing it.
I’m looking into recruiting some additional help from members of the ADIT team, if they are willing and able to lend a hand with the things that can actually be helped with, which sadly isn’t everything. A lot of this stuff I still don’t have much choice but to tackle on my own. Regardless, we’re gonna do the best we can in the next 12 months and see what comes of it. The goal is going to be to try and make significant, steady progress to the point where we feel like we can see the finish line. If that can’t happen, well...
I wanna be optimistic. I’ve put a lot of work into this game over the course of nearly 4 years now. No matter what, it won’t go to waste as it’s been invaluable experience, but only time will tell if my full vision for PinesQuest 2D can come to fruition.
Thank you so much for all of your phenomenal support and for following the development of PinesQuest 2D! Have a wonderful new year and see you in the next decade!!
I deeply apologize for not posting a proper PQ2D update to this blog or GameJolt for more than 2 months now. The game is as alive and well as ever, there unfortunately just hasn’t been much to discuss regarding it lately.
I’m basically still working on the same stuff I’ve been working on for roughly the past year or so: refining the maps, turning my outlines into fully written out cutscenes and programming the dungeons in the second half of the game, now that the assets are all finished. Back in early 2018 I thought this would only take a couple of months... and I might have been right about that if this game was my full time job. Sadly it’s not, as much as I wish it was!
You might be wondering then, “So why don’t you get more people to help you?” I actually did for a while but it wasn’t producing results I was happy with. That’s not to say the folks who were kind enough to lend me a hand were doing a bad job! I just realized it was too difficult to communicate a lot of specific details about what I needed, leading to a lack of consistency between the things each of us were doing. This meant I’d end up making adjustments to so much of what I got help with that I came to the conclusion I was probably better off handling it on my own, rather than wasting someone else’s time. (Fun Fact: Apparently something similar happened to Toby Fox when he was creating Undertale, which is why he ended up creating almost the whole game entirely by himself. Knowing this also makes me feel less bad about being in pretty much the same situation.)
At the time of this post, here’s what’s currently complete beyond the demo:
Dungeon 6 is playable, but only the first half is in a finished state. You can walk through the second half but there’s no enemies, items, cutscenes or boss yet.
Dungeons 7, 8, and 9 are in the same state as 6′s second half, so again you can walk through but that’s it.
Dungeons 10 and 11 aren’t programmed in at all yet as I’m working on finalizing their maps and overall structure.
Additional content (bonus bosses etc) has to come last so that’s not been started, though it’s already all planned out.
Another way you could put it is if the first half of the game is currently in an open beta (which it sort of actually is, given the demo), the second half is in something of a closed alpha. The foundation is nearly all there, I just have to keep building on top of it, however long that takes.
Thank you so much for your patience, support, and following the development of PinesQuest 2D! As always, stay weird! ❤︎
Development Streams Cancelled Indefinitely + Trying Out Something Else!
Unfortunately, there will not be a PQ2D development stream today or any more going forward, for the following reasons:
1) My schedule’s turned out to be way less consistent than I hoped, meaning I can’t actually guarantee my own availability every Saturday like I thought I’d be able to at the beginning of this year.
2) Despite streaming at the time most convenient for those interested (determined through a poll), the audience turnouts were extremely low.
3) Aside from map-making, a very boring process I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to watch, most of what I still need to work on for the game contains spoilers. And I really do want to keep the details of the game’s full story a mystery up until the release of the final version.
Instead, we’re going to try something different from now on. Whenever I work on the game, I’m also going to be on live voice chat on the official PinesQuest 2D Discord server! I encourage EVERYONE to join this server (even if they aren’t interested in voice chat), since I’m on it almost all the time and it’s where I give the most frequent and direct updates in regards to the game and its development. It’s a really good and important place to be if you want to keep up with everything PQ2D!
And now you can ask questions or just talk to me whenever I happen to be working on the game, which also happens to be MUCH MORE OFTEN than once a week as well! Hopefully this will be a better way to engage with those following development, thanks to it being more frequent and not limited to working on only non-spoiler aspects of the game.
Thank you so much and I hope to see you on the PQ2D Discord server! As always, stay weird!
January Development Streams Cancelled + February Development Stream Schedule
Sadly it looks like starting up the development streams again this month just wasn’t meant to be, since I had to cancel last Saturday’s due to being out of town, and now unfortunately I have to go in for surgery on Friday (tomorrow). Since it will take me at least 1 to 2 weeks to recover, this means I’ll have to wait until February to start doing PQ2D development streams once again.
So here’s the stream schedule for February!
FEBRUARY PINESQUEST 2D DEVELOPMENT STREAM SCHEDULE @ TWITCH.TV/NOVASTARLYGHT:
February 2nd - 7 PM EST
February 9th - 2 PM EST
February 16th - 7 PM EST
February 23rd - 2 PM EST
Again, these times may be subject to change, and also no end times yet because I need to do a couple of streams before I figure out how out how long they should be. Sorry the January streams didn’t work out and hopefully I’ll see you all in February instead! Thank you and as always, stay weird!
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