You may have asked yourself (or asked me) “Why is it A Koopa’s Revenge 2 version 2.9 and not version 3.0?” Well, there’s a long and a short answer to that question.
Short Answer:
Put simply, the game’s not finished. So then why did I release it before it’s done? Ruffle, the Flash emulator. I was on my way to releasing 3.0 some time in the next year or two, when I realised I could have AKR2 running in browsers just like the good ol’ days. And giving people access to the game again was more important to me than delaying it until it’s 100% finished. Perfectionism be damned.
Long Answer:
The details are a bit of a long story, but here goes. When I first heard about Ruffle, I got excited and tried to run AKR2 in it, and at first everything seemed adequate but… no dice
At this point I figured maybe a future update to Ruffle would run AKR2 and not to lose sleep over it. We’d always have the Newgrounds player to keep Flash games alive. But then 2021 rolled around and the NG Player stopped seeming so permanent. Windows updates kept breaking it, and many people have never been able to get it working at all. Every day someone would tell me they want to play AKR2 but can’t because the NG Player won’t work for them.
Things seemed pretty hopeless, but then one day I had an epiphany. I realised precisely what Ruffle wasn’t doing that Flashplayer was. Then it was a simple matter of modifying a few lines of code to change how levels are loaded and unloaded, and voila.
You may notice that although the game is running fine, it doesn’t look quite right. In addition to not supporting some of the features I was using to run AKR2, Ruffle also doesn’t yet support Flash’s real-time visual filters.
So although I had a technically functional version of AKR2 running in Ruffle, I did not yet have something presentable. I needed to go in and replace all the filters with similar looking graphics, which was a surprisingly big job I’m still not technically done with. Aside from replacing the filters, I needed to finish up the features and graphics I was in the middle of implementing when I had my epiphany. And that’s why although I got the game working properly in Ruffle on March 20th, I didn’t release a Ruffle compatible version of the game until June 29th.
And that’s the story.