Kero Blaster/Pink Heaven

This is a sub-page of Kero Blaster.

In order to promote the upcoming Zangyou update for Kero Blaster, Pink Heaven was released on September 11, 2015. The story follows Comomo, who is abruptly teleported to a cloudy place in peril. She must now choose to gain Strength or Gentleness to save her true love, Tsubasa (who, for whatever reason, is referred to as Blue Shopkeeper).

This demo is notable for reusing several unused assets from Kero Blaster, including the Roof Worm and Big Worm enemies, as well as the Umbrella item from pre-development reset.

Unused Comomo Colors

For some reason, in fuFixChar.png and several other spritesheets, Comomo has partial sprite sheets for beige and blue recolors, sloppily done with the fill/paint bucket tool. The beige color can be seen in-game by setting flag 14 and clearing flag 42. The blue color can only be seen as the damage blinking frames of the beige color.

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A little-known fact about Pink Heaven is that Comomo has slightly more saturated colors compared to Pink Hour and Kero Blaster. This is because Pink Heaven sets the Zangyou mode flag, and for whatever reason the developers saw it fit to differentiate the Zangyou sprites from the normal sprites. Interestingly, a few changes were made to the original sprites since Pink Hour, most notably the addition of the back-facing sprites and unused suffocation sprites. This updated spritesheet would later be used in version 1.4.3.0 of Pink Hour.

Pink Hour	Pink Heaven

The UFO's Name

In true Kero Blaster fashion, the UFO antagonist goes unnamed during gameplay. However, its spritesheet's file name and several event files refer to it as Adam. This is in contrast to most of Kero Blaster's bosses which use mainly descriptive internal names, such as Giant Mole and Pudding. From this, it can be inferred that this enemy is in fact named Adam.

Unused Graphics

Crushed Comomo

Found in fuFixChar.png, these unused sprites were intended to be used when Comomo is crushed by a falling block or spawns submerged in tiles. Both situations are impossible without save editing or modifying the stages in the final game. Note that these sprites were made specifically for Pink Heaven. In Pink Hour, Comomo just uses Hero's sprites when crushed.

Early Spin Design

In fu16kari and fuPiHsora2, this early design for the Spin enemy can be found. These sprites mapped perfectly to the enemy before version 1.4.0.0.

fuPiHsora2.png

An unused projectile. Given that it is present between the unused Bacteria enemy's sprites, it may have belonged to another scrapped enemy.

fuAdam.png

These sprites can be found that suggest an alternate, and arguably much friendlier ending. Here it is revealed that the pilot is a jellyfish, a detail that isn't revealed anywhere in-game, but is present in at least one of Kiyoko Kawanaka's concept art comics. In the final game's ending, he simply chases Comomo and Blue Shopkeeper until they fall out of the sky.

Also found in the same spritesheet is a single sprite of a differently-colored Comomo. It seems to imply that there was yet another alternate color considered, but it's more likely that this was a flashing frame. Probably for a teleporting animation, considering the spritesheet it was found in.

fuFixPtcle.png

Partially overwriting the unused Rocket graphics is a large, pink letter "P".

mptPIHheaven.png

Unused (mptPIHheaven)	Used (mptPHtrain)

For some reason, sprites for a Zanbito can be found in the main Pink Heaven foreground tileset. The different colors are probably just a result of the palette being changed.

Unused (mptPIHheaven)	Used (fuFixNPC)

A few sprites for Tsubasa can also be found in this tileset, suggesting that the Tsubasa NPC was going to read its graphics from here instead of the global NPC spritesheet. The sprite for lying down seems to be an earlier revision, as it is a little chubbier, has a smaller mouth, and is placed closer to the edge of the frame.

localize.png

jp.lproj	en.lproj

An item label that reads "Yellow Umbrella", suggesting that Gentleness was originally called the Yellow Umbrella. In the English file, the text is moved slightly and scribbled out.

logo.png

Found in the same location as the unused difficulty text sprites, but only in the Japanese language folder, are these two sprites for the Japanese names of Pink Hour and Pink Heaven. It seems that the idea of Pink Hour and Pink Heaven being part of the same package was tossed around, but eventually scrapped.

Unused Event

expKatsu1

For demonstration purposes, the event "exp2taku" has been modified so that "expKatsu1" runs when selecting "Gentleness".

//カーッ
*[expKatsu1]
<lkFU[1]<bllR<dl20<blln[mpc;0]<plAc[catch]でも、両方欲しいです。<nodB
<dl60<dl20
<souv[electric]<prm2[Kajiya;2]
<blln[Kajiya;0]カーッ！！<nodB<bllR<dl60<quie<fadO
<govr

Original	Translation
でも、両方欲しいです。 カーッ！！	But I want both. ARRRGH!!

Apparently, at one point the player would have been able to ask for both Strength and Gentleness, much to the ire of Mizutani. It seems that whoever was scripting the events in Pink Heaven forgot that choice boxes only have two options.

Another possible reason that it was scrapped is that it causes a major glitch! When the "Game Over" screen is entered, the game's audio engine will freak out, before the game eventually crashes. This is because in both Pink demoes, the "Game Over" screen plays a short theme, but doesn't actually check to see if there is a track currently playing. Most of the time, this isn't an issue, as the music is stopped when the player dies. But here, the music is still playing, causing the game to attempt to play two music files at the same time.

The culprit is the <quie command, which slowly fades the music out, but doesn't stop it. To fix this, replace <quie with <muSt.

Unused Maps

10test.pxpack

A room for testing the cloud platforms.

17port.pxpack

The only port room found in Pink Heaven. Stage "17" is stage 2 of Hard mode.

Changes from Pink Heaven 1.1.1.1 to Kero Blaster

Although Kero Blaster was already released at this point, there are a few early assets from the upcoming Zangyou update that can be found in Pink Heaven.

Graphics

Pink Heaven 1.1.1.1	Final (Kero Blaster)

• At one point in development, every Kurono-related enemy was going to have blue eyes, colored after the Kuro Blaster. Later down the line, the Level 3 Kuro Blaster was changed to teal, and with it these enemies. Although Pixel probably intended for every one of these enemies to be changed to this new color, he missed a few sprites in the final game:
  • Several Kuroinos.
    • The Kuroino piloting N577 (the truck boss) in Zangyou mode
    • The Kuroino peeking in the Zangyou "Game Over" screen.
  • The fireballs that the shelf enemy spits out
  • The will-of-the-wisp enemy that only appears in the White Laboratories glitch area
  • Every enemy in fu09marine.png, including the water dragon, the digging tank, and the eyeball mech
    • The eyeball mech enemy's "finished" graphics are present in the game at fu09machine.png, unused.

Hidden HeavyProc

The precise location of HeavyProc.

Just like in Pink Hour, in the top left corner of 14PiHfield1 is HeavyProc, an NPC meant for testing the game's performance when dealing with many NPCs. Here, it uses the graphics of the Hinterland Fort bouncing plant enemy's shots.

Version Differences

1.4.3.0

• In 1.1.1.1, if the player defeated the Big Worm boss, the shutter on the left did not open. This opened the door to a softlock: by immediately dying to the spikes after beating the boss, the player would be unable to progress. Following an official acknowledgment on Studio Pixel's Twitter, this issue was fixed in 1.4.3.0.