I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Nintendo game with level design like a DOS platformer
I still don’t feel like I really understand that stark symmetry
You know, I guess Treasure also likes to make levels without any art or elegance, just nakedly working out a situation
For the Frog the Bell Tolls (I thought this had been posted, huh… must have been in the old SB):
Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu. Stage 4 has a secret branch cartwheeling through the sky before syncing back up with the normal route:
The Wario Land 4 maps sort of remind me of Gimmick’s:
Kirby’s Adventure?
that’s a pretty good answer! I suppose Kirby ratchets between straightforward grassy and cave levels and the strange PC-logic teleport castles; I guess it wasn’t obviously similar because it’s coated in bespoke art rather than the American/Wario 4 style of art pieces being used straight from the grid, without making them look like a thing.
L riffing off one of his SMB1 romhacks from much earlier selectbutton days for another forum’s first collab project of three. Super Talking Time Bros 1 - “Sunset Silhouettes”.
it felt like sheer luck that vanilla components could work towards this, and it feels kind of annoying I’ve been working on so much framework of much less elegance. almost miss raw manipulable abstraction, really.
That’s closer, with agglomerations of strictly-speaking-unecessary cannons and other level elements but I feel like Mario’s formal restrictions (no more than 3x vertical frame height, steady movement in one direction) are clear distinctions from Western PC level design. I think those are good restriction! as Mario never feels as confusing or maze-like.
Super Mario World’s Boo Houses get close but they’re eager to expose their superstructure and gimmick. They don’t want you to navigate it as though it were a spatial problem you can only ever catch a glimpse of.
Here’s another thing:
Watching Tom Hall’s Mario Maker level
Oh, I was just wondering if those SMBX stage slices could even count for the thread title, seperate of said conversation. As always and especially around now I don’t have much in me to really process thoughts like… hrm. Coiled spaces is fundamental for abstraction and top-down designs but platformers ought to enjoy rather than constrict their movement? Discrete spaces are dull because novelty in many modular formats relies on interplay and should overlap? Something suiting in contrast between muscling through splattered obstacles versus acrobatics courses, too, of course.
I’m not sure if I’ve shared this before, but years ago I tried to replace all the tiles on the Zelda 1 overworld map. Never quite finished. working on it gave me an appreciation of how they combined tiles to make the different dungeon entrances and such. Like, look at the entrances to levels 3 and 5 next to the obelisks in the top right screen.
You’ll probably have to zoom in on this to see what I’m talking about though.
I spent the past few days making a 1:8 scale map of the Metroid 1 total conversion Junkoid:
Level editors make 1:1 screenshot maps trivial to make (especially Metroid 1), so this style of handmade, detailed-yet-miniature map is highly regarded in our hacking community instead. Authors such as danidub and Ambureon have made maps like this for a wide variety of Super Metroid hacks, and their efforts were a huge influence on the style I chose to work with. (Part of the impetus behind this project was because neither of them had any plans for doing this with M1 hacks.)
I always found these mesmerizing
https://www.deviantart.com/vgcartography/gallery/79358385/metal-gear-solid-1998
hugely worth perusing this person’s deviantart account… damn tomb raider iii looks sick actually lol
oh another place for me to steal take inspiration from for D&D
Tomb Raider 3 is sick! This app lets you cruise through the maps in the main Core games if you’re a sick Tomb Raider perv like me.
Legacy of the Wizard, top tier.
Kokotini Wilf
Son of Blagger
I took some other ZX Spectrum maps and used them as backgrounds for my Speccy zine. I believe these are Jack the Nipper 2 - In Coconut Capers and Mr. Wino
https://maps.speccy.cz/ the place to go if you want ZX Spectrum maps, they’re all pretty sick looking!!
been making more maps of metroid 1 hacks, and I’ve managed to come up with a semi-automated process for generating a clean starter map:
This relies on the fact that collision in M1 depends on the 8x8 tile numbers, every area uses the same collision definitions, and nearly every hack uses standard collision as well. In other words, it’s free real estate.
Here’s what Metroid X looks like without doing any clean-up with this process:
This process is much less labor intensive than what I did with Junkoid, so I’ve been able to crank out a few of these in the past couple weeks, gradually refining my technique along the way:
This is a bad hack that boots you back to the title screen if you die with no continues or password.
(Guess how many metroids appear in this hack.)
The final area of Over the Moon is some Grade A nonsense where you have to navigate god’s worst morph ball maze several times while being pelted by an unending stream of cheerios so you can destroy a bunch of zebetites blocking the way to the final boss (all while being assaulted with an absurd amount of visual noise). For any people who decide that they’re sicko-enough to play the hack but not sicko-enough to properly solve the maze, here’s a helpful map:
EDIT: cleaned up and elaborated on the part of this post explaining The Process here:
EDIT 2: added a very accurate illustration of the process in action
2 weeks late, but what does the game itself look like once you’ve replaced the graphics with your version? i feel like you’d get a result somewhat like this SMB Hack
but in metroid instead
