I notice with Sky Flower (normal) that if you do a short jump on the first flower on the screen with the 3 red flyers they tend to stay out of your way on the way to double jump

Edit: I mean on to the flower in the first place

So I didn't used to think this was really possible, but I'm feeling more and more recently that this is possible. I know it happens in Strange Dream (though this is more of a cycle thing, I don't know how universal timers work in this game) with the first red flyer just to the left of the start, where when you get there initially and cross the screen without losing too many frames the enemy will fire his projectile only when you get to the left side of the screen (again, this is timing based, not really manipulation, that enemy always fires with a steady rhythm; the manipulation part I refer to is entering the screen at a certain time or dying or whatever to get him in a different part of the cycle), thus saving you potentially dying. I haven't done too much testing about this specifically, or other cycles in Strange Dream or for that matter the game generally, I just know that there's something odd going on with cycles.

Nor have I really done any significant testing (except just noticing it casually, I play this game a lot and notice these things) about manipulation. There's a moment for example in a level I run called Frozen Mountain 2 where you have to get to a certain point on a certain screen, but there's these spikes around which seemingly makes it very random and so, difficult. When I wasn't trying to manipulate the spikes - they seem random and they go in a certain direction when they bounce off the walls so I always just assumed it was random - I'd lose runs because of just getting trapped forever in unfavorable patterns/cycles. (I say "cycle", I don't really think spike behavior is caused by said universal cycles) However recently I've done one thing specifically to a certain spike, and it seems to fairly consistently go the way I want it to. This allows me to get more runs past this point. (It involves turning Juni around in the opposite direction at a relatively small window of the screen, but as I said I haven't done widespread or intensive testing so this is all just theories) Incidentally, it's interesting that when I reach the screen sometimes, the spikes are in one configuration as their starting point, but sometimes they're in another configuration. It could just be that the level maker programmed the level this way.

These are just some examples; I have more. As said I don't have it down to a science, but a lot of enemies that previously seemed random seem now to be affected by position of Juni on screen. It sort of depends on the enemy. Some enemies are always fixed no matter what and others really do seem to be random (like the grey bouncer for example). I would be interested to find out if there's a connection here. On the subject of universal cycles, they're interesting in and of themselves, though it isn't really convenient to use that for enemy manipulation per se because it really depends on the level, I can't think of too many places where it would be useful. I do know though that when you enter a screen for the first time like I mentioned with Strange Dream the enemies that fire at a certain rate for example will always fire their first shot at a specific moment. After that I'm unclear exactly whether it's timing based (my own bias is that it very most likely is) across the entire level. But it's interesting because when you enter a screen for the first time, that's when it "activates". You can wait before that screen forever and then enter it and it will only then start counting down. ie it doesn't seem to activate when the game starts, as some games do when you turn on the console/start the game/whatever.

I just sort of feel like expansion pack levels are also "official levels", because they're official expansions. (And the levels that are in the expansions tend to be of a good quality iirc) Otherwise I mean yeah, I'm fine with all of the suggestions in the thread, it's not a huge deal at all. When I get runs that aren't garbage I'll certainly submit them and if anyone cares they can try to beat my time and make me a sad individual :^)

The only difficulty I see with this is if people end up submitting different versions of the levels... the way it is now it's a bit difficult with everything being dumped on knyttlevels.com instead of being arranged on the forums like they used to

I was wondering if we could add a seperate section - could just be called "other", no need to have a billion clickable seperate links - for runs that aren't nifflas levels or expansion pack levels. There are some I'm working on and competition is just as valuable for those as anything else