Lovely Planet was one of my favorite games of 2014. You fire slow-moving bullets—purple cubes, really—as you bolt through a level and must hit every enemy and trap along the way. It demands speed and precision, with small levels meant to be repeated to perfection. I probably played some of them 100 times before succeeding.
Good news for me, then, that creator Vidhvat Madan is working on a sequel—but it won't be exactly like Lovely Planet. In a blog post today, Madan says that he's getting rid of the Y-axis in the sequel, making it "much like Wolfenstein 3D but adorable."
Madan says that stripping a dimension will help him balance flexibility with "tight and snappy shooting," and give him new level and enemy design possibilities.
"This oversimplification of working in a two dimensional space makes room for more variety in other mechanics like the jump, which is more important now than it was in the original game," writes Madan. "This opens the door for enemy types and obstacles that understand the playing field better, I have a long list of enemies, traps and gizmos that populate the levels but I'll wait till later to share more about them."
The bit about jumps is ambiguous—I take it to mean there will be vertical space, but we won't be able to look up or down. (Update: Madan has a little more to say about it.) Madan also says that, though he can't guarantee that the sequel will come with a "production quality level editor" at release, he will be designing one for his own use, so it's a possibility.
Strangely, given the tone of Lovely Planet, its sequel will also replace the weird Sunshine Gun with "a dull grey nine millimeter handgun." That Madan admits the gun is dull suggests, at least, that there's more to the decision than we can see yet. The change is "for good reason," says Madan, adding that "the iconic rifle with the giant rotating star can't be matched."
There's no projected release date, but Madan notes that he still has time to "pack more fun into it" while his publisher remains focused on the original Lovely Planet.
