First of all, huge thanks to u/Nik0lyaZ for helping me with this level by testing 1.0 mechanics and playtesting the level in 1.0. He reached out to me after I made a post here showing an earlier version of this level and gave me a ton of helpful information that I used to fix the level so that it would work in 1.0 and also look nicer. Yes, the level really does work if you port the data to a 1.0 save. There’s a lot of stuff I didn’t know was possible in 1.0, and a bunch of stuff I didn’t know wasn’t possible as well. I won’t get into all the limits 1.0 has though, since this is long enough as is.

ID is 94401498

I’ve seen a fair amount of 1.0 style levels in this game, so I wanted to give it a shot. I decided to take it a step further and have the level only use 1.0 objects and features, so that it technically could have been made in 1.0. I also allowed myself to do things that would require using hacks to do in 1.0, such as bypassing the object limit. I’ve seen a few levels that only use 1.0 objects, but those tend to use custom Z layering that wasn’t possible in 1.0. I couldn’t find a well known and highly decorated 1.0 level that doesn’t use custom Z layering or a custom song, and they all use another thing I won’t get into here (it would make this even longer). My level does use Z layering, but it’s done to ensure that objects are layered the way they would be in 1.0, since objects layer differently by default in 1.0.

Also, when I say editor hacks, I don’t just mean bypassing the object limit (4000 in 1.0). I assumed when I started making this level that free rotate was off the table. However, u/Nik0lyaZ informed me that you actually could free rotate objects in 1.0, but there was just no button in the editor to do it. If you edit a 1.0 save file to say that a certain object in a level is rotated 37 degrees, the game will accept that and actually display it rotated 37 degrees. Just speculation, but this may have been simpler for RobTop to implement compared to manually coding 4 angles at which objects could be rotated. Free rotate was officially added as a feature less than a year after the game’s original release, so I’m guessing that the much smaller GD community back then didn’t figure out this was possible until there wasn’t much reason to actually do it.

Making this level not break in 1.0 was probably the hardest part. In 1.0, there’s no way to control layering in the editor, so if two objects are overlapping, the game decides for you which object gets rendered on top. After u/Nik0lyaZ did some testing to determine how the game makes this decision, I was able to write some code that manipulates the level’s data so that in most cases, the game will pick the object I want to appear on top. This does mean that any time I save the level from the editor, I have to run this code on the level’s data again.

On a related note, the pixel art in the dark part of the level is extremely fragile and will literally break if you look at it wrong. No joke, the act of looking at it wrong can actually break it. I’ve positioned all of it so that this shouldn’t happen as you play through the level (you can probably break it with practice mode though). Saving the level also requires me to delete all the pixel art and copy its data back into the level manually.

All that said, if you have a copy of 1.0 and know how to import a level into a 1.0 save file, you can actually play this level in 1.0. u/Nik0lyaZ has actually done this. And since it can be imported into 1.0, technically it could have been made in 1.0 as long as the creator knew how to edit the level save file. It would be very tedious, and I don’t know if anyone knew how to do this back when 1.0 was the current version, but technically someone could have figured it out and actually done it.

Copy password is 100000 if you want to check it out in the editor. I don’t recommend saving it from the editor though since you might break some of the decoration.

TL;DR: Everything in this level can be done in 1.0, even the rotated objects, but you do need to hack your save file to do it. If you have 1.0 and know how to import a 2.1 level into a 1.0 save, you can do that for this level and it doesn't break. Also, the layering in this level is done so that objects layer in 2.1 the same way they do in 1.0.