Well I've got... something! Not sure if this is the kind of thing you were looking for, but I tried to break out of the 4 measure structure stuff as often as possible without making it sound COMPLETELY meandering and weird. Right now it's just piano with no velocity tweaking and with no real ending or loop point, but I'll prolly put some more work in on it at some point to make it a more complete piece. I've got a problem now, though, where I like one of the bits near the end much more than the rest of the piece... I'm vaguely tempted to try and start a new piece completely from that seed. Oh well.

Mobius Step

Period or semicolon would be better.

Isaac:
I think that a good place to be in the transition from AS3 to C++ is understanding to some extent what AS is doing with memory. Sure, a lot of it is behind the scenes, but AS already has implicitly a lot of the things that C++ makes explicit. What I'm thinking of is passing references vs passing values. In Actionscript, this is tied to variable type, so for example if you pass an int to a function

Code:

public function doAThing(parameter:int):void

Then the value is copied and passed to the function. Any changes you make to the value within the function has no effect on whatever you passed. Conversely, if you pass a something that derives from the "Object" class (which MOST variables in AS do)...

Code:

public function doADifferentThing(parameterArray:Array):void

Then you're really passing a REFERENCE to that array; any changes you make to it in that function will affect the array at wherever you called it as well. I'm sure you already know all this if AS is your job, but the fundamental difference between C++ and AS is that instead of this being all tied up in variable types this is UNDER YOUR CONTROL. You can pass ints by reference, and arrays(or vectors, which you should look up if you're used to AS arrays) by value.

So, uh, basically, to answer your question as best as I'm able, I'd say that the best path from AS3 to C++ is a deeper understanding of AS and the way it's already handling your memory. Once you understand what it's doing, you'll be better equipped to do the same thing manually when you get to C++.

I create because the thought of some things not existing is unacceptable.

Honestly even though it was my first I can't remember any QBasic at all. The only thing I remember was a lot of goto stuff. If someone dropped the QBasic IDE in front of me right now I'd have no idea what to do.
This is because I started learning C++ about 10 days later and liked it much more.

Quickbasic 

Oh dang deadline is Sunday? I'd better get to work

Yo.

So it's basically kiddie porn. With drawings.

Yes. And if you think any kind of drawing should be illegal you're an asshole.

(Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Try to be nice.)
I'm not gonna edit that out though. Fuck it.

You're proud that they punish people for making dirty DRAWINGS?
...
Whatever.

Well, yes, there are certainly cute elements to the game.

It's just that at some point in the game most of those cute elements die a horrible death...

If one thinks the story of cave story was cutesy I have to wonder how much attention is being paid. Art style != story.
Next you'll be talking about FFTactics' lame cutesy story  :D

Cave Story was a pretty amazing experience for me, and I played it fairly recently (maybe half a year ago now). At the time, I had all but stopped playing games, and I thought maybe I just wasn't much into playing games any more, only making them. Then I played Cave Story.
It turns out I DO still like playing games, it's just that no one's making the ones I want to play any more! It really cemented for me how much I feel that the industry has abandoned what interested me about games in the first place, and moved on to being products instead of games.
As to WHY it triggered such a strong positive response, I couldn't say. I think maybe it's the simple but sophisticated gameplay, the soundtrack, and the sweetly dark tone of the story that pulls me in. The presentation is like a cross between Kirby and Final Fantasy Tactics. I don't care if people are tired of the hype; I won't let that prevent me from stating just how fucking much I enjoyed this game.

How were you planning to maintain frame-to-frame coherence as the camera moves? 

It's definitely a huge problem, I agree. I'd originally planned to just redraw the entire screen with semirandom splots every frame. The flickering could get pretty painful. It adds a lot of life to the picture though. High contrast areas would be all flickery, whereas low contrast would seem relatively calm. Oh, and you'd totally use z-buffering to keep the front splots in front.

I love the idea of the impressionist painting style. I think that if instead of rapidly painting on top all the time you just changed the color of the splots when the new color is only slightly different, and drew a new one on top if that is not the case, it would not make it flicker too much.

Why not just splatter dots on each frame but never actually clear any of the old ones away? That way I think it would flow instead of flicker... especially if you, perhaps, added an effect where instead of each dot just dropping in it faded in and/or spread from a small point to a bigger one. Maybe it would be possible to do it like a series of raindrops where as each point is drawn it proceeds to spread out and fade out... I dunno, lots of interesting ways you could go with that idea.

The Arcane Sanctuary is specifically what I was thinking of. IIRC 3 of the 4 branches had different optical illusions in their paths. Unfortunately, I can't find a single decent fucking screenshot online, so I can't demonstrate it.
They didn't do it with slopes though, so that's another difference.

Visually, didn't they do something like that in Diablo 2? Having gravity matter will make all the difference though.

So would this be something like what my music teacher was talking about when he talked about Through-Composition?

On second thought, no wait, I actually have no idea how to do this  :D
Any ideas? I'm not sure I understand the assignment!

Oh dang this sounds fun, and I think it's not even too far off of my normal composing style... Well, sometimes.

Uh well I totally thought I was going to make something for this but I apparently haven't yet. If you wanna start another music challenge I say go for it.