#j

I really like the destructible terrain myself, as the end product of a bunch of design thought. All of the Mario Maker Bowser fights are patterned off of SMB1’s single-strike duel, as a slip through walls to focus on movement rather than a “boss fight”, and the inelegantly restrained design in a lot of Mario Maker levels just outlines this harder. Meanwhile, SMB3 already had something much more satisfying for an out-and-out fight- where Bowser can move just as much as Mario, trying to leap on his head and spewing out fireballs, but with breaking bricks from above rather than below. SMBX has both of these in its ridiculous blob of Super Mario All-Stars + SMW contents, but incredibly enough I haven’t seen a single one of the SMB3 fights* that avoids tricking him into a pit while remembering the terrain he can specifically destroy. Like. Why is this so rare to handle any well. Mario moves around, a boss should move around to increase reasons to move around, Mario normallu destroys terrain, bosses can destroy terrain, 2D platforming doesn’t happen on flat expanses, bosses should have uneven terrain, natural level challenges are in combining multiple elements, bosses can more than just some single component.

The boos are part of ~randomized elements~ for the fight that themselves are part of the final level’s ~controlled randomized elements~ because what the fuck does SMBX have all this lua for if you can’t be any smartly creative with it. Two possible enemies on opposite ends each of a different stage, and the fixed (altered) boo circle serve as general area denial instead of spawns moving around the space. They’re… not in a great position in the webm, I’ll admit, as I was reminded by others watching the video, as the space is far too tight to manage them amongst the other moving parts. Thus, I expanded it enough that someone might actually weave in and out of obvious blindspots for another fire flower, alongside being just barely large enough to hit the middle and its own flowers. That webm only came after hours of testing practice, I feel obliged to note.

* I’m accessing memory values to hijack fixed health systems for healthier results because this engine is dead and closed-source and it’s weird anybody has managed to make more for it

Gods, I could ramble on about self-contained level design systems for forever. There’s over five hundred words in the lead-in for my next beta.

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Is it easier once Bowser has destroyed the blocks? It looks like it makes his timing more consistent and thus easier to dodge left/right/left after the level is opened up.

Why does the player go for the bombs instead of using the fireballs? Or, why does the fire flower keep spawning? Does the player need that infinite HP source to keep up with the high-HP boss?

It is easier after Bowser has cleared out most of the blocks because with flatter terrain it is easier for the player to stand at a fair and safe distance and anticipate (not actually that consistent) aimed fireballs and jumps (plus fire back). In exchange, the player has to have survived that long, any elements set to be infinite spawns will have most likely gotten a fair bit out, and two of the three power-ups don’t respawn. A fight dynamic shift with nothing changed in actual enemy behaviour! If players can get exhausted, so can the challenges themselves.

Bombs and fireballs coexist in the arena as choices- fireballs are easier to hit with at the start while bombs kill him faster once the terrain is cleared out. Fireballs can be fired regularly and can bounce but only deal 1/64, plucked-out bombs will crash against the blocks easily without practice or open space for 4/64, fireballs require not being hit and bombs require waiting on respawning grass in specific (if easily available) points. Fire flowers keep spawning because it loosens how well one has to play against a long-lived fight, but the 30 second spawning interval for another single hit is a long while in what can be a one-minute fight.

okay after I finish up and post said beta I am going to seek more distorted trans queer monster girls to post because sheeeesh

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thanks, I don’t exercise talking about level design often enough

https://my.mixtape.moe/kswzal.webm

Let’s trying indulging in a different excess…

SMBX is a haphazard mess of modular design. This doesn’t just apply to openly providing blocks and enemies from Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World without any given care for consistent aesthetics or looks, or even to the way nonsense like some Super Metroid and Zelda 2 assets are available by default. This nature seeps into its very bones, as the endeavors to make new versions apply lua scripts and memory address manipulation onto a closed-source engine like spindly towers built on-top of dead ruins.

Modular design is my forte, though. Crawl had over 500 enemies available, strong randomization controls readily based on chances and sets, and ceaseless settings and layouts as contexts.

A lot of SMBX levels try to emulate specific games, or draw by hand their own consistent aesthetic. A lot of Mario fangame and rom hack levels in general try to emulate a lowkey tradition (following SMB1 - SMW) or embark on wild gimmickry trails (incidentally echoing NSMB+), both focused on seeing if a few notes can be iterated upon enough for a whole level. There’s also the natural compliment and opposite to such focus, which sprawls over many Mario Maker levels- roster dumps and complete overhauls creating their own melanges. Mario Maker itself is very curious in being one of the ostensibly smoothest arrangements regarding interface and sharing, yet its contents being so substantially lacking leads to a lot of curiously clunky collages and blatant (if creative) hacks.

As one can tell from the other level pictures in this thread, my levels try to transgress such normalized limits of expression. They’re cobbled together, plucking out and recontextualizing available assets into consonance as can be found. I’ve rarely seen uses of quite a few enemies here in the broad yet controlled rosters these stages use, much less put together, which gives them somewhat unique identities still grounded by grandiose and hostile structures.

Did I just analogize my particular identity forged from my many marginalized, volatile statuses into Mario level design? Whatever serves as an expression of one’s self works, as has been seen in endless other works of media.

Minisode v0.52a is [EDIT: HERE]. There’s one complete level in it, one mostly-done level in it, one level left a bit past half done, and a third of a level playable by stitching its first section directly into its last. The levels are kind of a little excessively (but not unduly) difficult and scattered- I don’t believe in filler, nor in instant deaths. There are also some scattered engine peculiarities (spin-jumps only fail on a very slim and inconsistent selection, you can shoot fireballs upwards, abuse these both), and that fifth-level finale is much more technical than it first seems.

As before, one can play it by downloading the latest SMBX 2.0 betas, leaving the episode folder in /data/worlds/, and then selecting from the launcher the “Practice Minisode” episode. I can start on finishing things up once the next 2.0 beta comes out, but I think I need a lot of time and distance to address other things in my life than this, what was supposed to just be another outlet to practice and demonstrate level design skills. Jumping up to the cleanliness of this 22% took nearly a month’s worth of creative efforts and focus, ugh.

In particular, this inelegant finale is a ridiculous bonus-zone level-mashup ornate death palace, a technical nightmare of randomization and detailwork. I wonder what song I’ll name it after…

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I’ll play this on Saturday and post a video of it here - if you don’t mind, of course. I’m not sure I have the super critical eye that could help you but it looks super cool.

I sort of expect a fair bit of death montage editing might be needed to slide a full eight star clear on that demo into one video. Even with my own thorough testing experience the last full-play test took an hour (and a friend who isn’t good at Mario just took three for the final level). It’s fine if you want to post such a video in this thread, anyway.

…also, I only just realized I never actually put the download link in that post up there until now. Argh.

I’ve heavily appreciated the feedback of some slim few (who all assert that I can making something of value, even if this is inevitably more of some non-existent game’s bonus world), and there are a lot of notes and assumptions I’ve made from watching them. still, the combo of this evidently being way too brutal for most people to see into to see plus watching others play it without days of practice made me want to try and record my own near-perfect playing of it.

…so of course, I leave a mouse cursor in the recording and find out that youtube removed annotations for no reasonable reason a few months ago. results that reflect both perpetual sleep deprivation and my severe negligence of preparation for a trip to another continent.

a few notes: I did the first three levels in backwards order, because I was getting impatient with failed runs (and because it takes forever for my connection to upload). the fourth and final level has a fair bit of very controlled randomization (circle around four parts from a given random two points, get any two of four arena elements) not very visible when you don’t die much in it. it also has a placeholder name and placeholder track (the latter planned for the first level), and I’ve been looking around for another track long enough to start at random given points that also can provide A Good Stage Name (songs in this include stravinsky’s rite of spring and kenji bunch’s boiling point alongside ella guro’s 37. 東–囟圖囟–東 - and castle logical’s mischievous boy). this is an aesthetic thread and I am nowhere near passable in terms of greater music awareness, so I’ll consider any suggestions I get.

(a few design notes: coral rings indicate cheep cheep and rupees indicate bullet bills, but even without that sort of perceptiveness the former is linked to player location rather than random generation and the latter is set up for the first half of the stage to fly well over the actual ground. the final level uses blocks and elements from all levels, and the first section crosses stages in each quadrant in the same clockwise fashion travel requires. wraparound in the hub and the final level may be rather confusing, but they’re always employed in linear terms.)

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all four of my months-long SB 2.0 avatars have been Toyosatomimi no Miko in some form of distortion or another, which is a nice trend I’ve been willing to keep up- subtle monster trans girls are ideal personal representation forms.

I’ve had the occasional idea for other avatar trends of equal consistency and purpose…

but it’s only recently that I’ve been tempted with a breadth of good shots from some other monster girl. Sluri’s decently trans anyway- an insecure slime enrolling as a mage to defy her expected role and purpose, disparaged by her peers for her innate form despite her skill and her sacrifice, in a relationship with a robot who defied his own expected service role with warranty-voiding body changes. (Also, she burns out after any prolonged effort-)

Badnix eventually finds a decently satisfying grounding anyway, in the silly “consistently snes-as-fuck game world” and all its ramifications. That Number arc in particular…

maybe if SB 2.0 had rotating avatars again I’d have weeks of “guest” avatar sets inbetween each next Touhou use. I don’t buy the identification argument against rotating avatars anyway, select posters flit around constantly regarding their avatar choice and throw out the capability to consistently identify through that anyway.

rather transparently trying to push away omnipresent dysphoria by reading obscured trans natures from random idiosyncratically-preferred media, with a rather directly aggravating trip and lacking in energy to read my actual severely-heavy trans resources

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reading obscured trans natures . . . lacking in energy to read my actual severely-heavy trans resources

if this ain’t fuckin me

one of the coping methods I’m trying to employ in this heatspiral is amateur photography, even though before this I’ve literally never photographed anything besides myself

I’ve never thought much of architecture as tableaux and scene in my abstracted and limited level design practices. that area has solidified into a process of slamming together spare ideas of content and shape and aesthetic, feeling out shapes while forming extremely precise tiny rules of decoration and variation, then dancing through introduction / iteration / establishment / subversion. a conceptual and functional sculpting rather than any deliberate evocation of captured scenery.

so as the rest of my body and mind sloughs away I’ve been trying to grow new eyes.


naked


this is just the immediate and obvious photo dump, of course, and I’ll comb through for further shots plus straggler shots after the trip is done.

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almost

free

all reserves empty

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as time goes on attempts to actually theme and focus any frequent posts starts to wither away

though I guess [distorted] [girls] is a constant

haven’t involved nearly enough non-Mario landscaping in this thread, really

also should try to find consistent aesthetic content beyond two hues

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i love all the art you post including this jtm

MINIMUM OF MONTHLY AESTHETIC CONTENT: almost nothing

this jiangshi is busy dissssssssolving into a hyperdense void devoid of purpose or self-esteem or functionality

all the worse for being the presumable norm

the only detectable conversational element left is a minimally-critical everlasting depth of gay

tumblr_ouao3aZUiB1w8oppyo1_1280

DAbCJFVXsAAPEtP


…including Actual Gay, of course. like the extremely-tumblr asian-american lesbian* teens VN about found families and baseball, Butterfly Soup.

iya

regarding said work… I kind of especially appreciate how abuse is depicted not from tumultous relationship or powermongers or wastrels, paired with the notion of the found family and minimal shitty internalizations over the queer nature of the protagonists. It’s a very lived-in work regarding how dumb millenial teens are, but it also avoids much of teens actively being shitty to one another in discriminatory ways- life is filled with enough garbage without having protagonists uncritically exercise malevolence, cough cough P5 cough cough.

okay okay she also has Actual (Anime) Aesthetic content she’ll dump out when she isn’t ideating

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further sb dialogues quotage collection in this thread

since I’m busy undergoing hyperdeath and all I’ve returned to chipping away at that SMBX project. with Weird Mario being embraced and weaponized by nintendo as of today’s release of Odyssey, it feels appropriate (and bitter) to finish up my old practice work of my own lesser free Weird Mario.

https://my.mixtape.moe/yjloxy.webm

v.60a exists mostly for the above level being completed (if still in need of more tweaks) and a few system changes to ease playing through the nonsense I’ve arranged. might take a month or two more of my academic exile (also spent on exorcising my demons and coming back to death and all) to finish it all off. not that I expect anyone beyond a handful of chat/room people who expressed direct interest to bother touching this work of mine.

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is smbx needed to play tihs?

I guess I should always leave a little note of how to play this on any release post, which is simply

anyway. through the power of closed-source memory address manipulation I can enable and disable abilities to thus replace Mario with Peach without redesigning any levels.

https://my.mixtape.moe/rkpgue.webm

this, of course, improves the quality of the level pack twicefold.

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