raocow's talkhaus

Now before we begin, I did ask for permission from raocow to post this contest idea on the forums, and I've also asked Judgespear and the other Super Mario Fusion Revival developers for permission to let entrants use their boss ideas + graphics for this contest. Now with that said, here's how the contest works.

Basically, it's a contest about who can make the best custom boss in Super Mario World's game engine. The catch? Well like the 'Make a Good Level Contest', there's an interesting 'box' idea of sorts in play here.

Namely that the boss concept has to be one of those featured in a fan game called Super Mario Fusion Revival.

Why is this?

Because otherwise, any custom boss contest would pretty much entirely be made of Koopalings and other traditional Mario enemies. However, Super Mario Fusion Revival's boss list consists of a whole TON of random creatures from different games, so in theory we'd see some more interesting Super Mario World boss battles by using the same concepts.

Secondly, Super Mario Fusion itself is kind of designed a bit like a hack or Super Mario Bros X fan game, in that most of the enemies are basically palette swaps of traditional Mario ones and the bosses are simple enough in pattern they could probably be made to work in a SNES game. So I thought I'd put it to the test and see if any of these could be pulled off under SMW's engine limitations.

The Rules

• Your entry must be submitted in the form of an IPS patch. Anything else is optional.
• You must base your entry off one of the boss battles in this video:
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-cR5hpCqKY
• The following bosses are not included in the contest:
  
  Koopalings (Roy, Iggy)
  Clawgrip
  
  This is because the latter is completely unedited from the original SMB 2 version and hence has already been done to death in SMW, and the former have likely been replicated by at least one person as well.
• The boss has to use the same graphics as the version in Super Mario Fusion itself. This shouldn't be an issue, I tested all boss sprites against the colour viewer tool and found that most 'normal' sized ones used far less than 15 colours. And even the most complex layer 2 one only used 30 colours...

However, there are no rules about anything else. You can choose whatever kind of boss arena you like with any kind of fitting graphics or music, you can add in minor attacks or gimmicks that keep the battle more interesting or substitute for things impossible in the engine, you can do pretty much anything really, as long as the basic 'pattern' of the boss matches one from Super Mario Fusion and the graphics of the boss itself are kept the same.

Judging

As far as judging criteria goes, here was what I was thinking:

• Technical Skill/Complexity: 20
• Atmosphere/Boss Arena: 10
• Similarity to original boss: 20
• Difficulty: 10 (not too easy or too kaizo)
• Creativity: 10 (yes, seriously)

Obviously, some things are different from other contests since it's not a level contest and hence you can't judge by the same criteria. I'm also going to be scouring my contacts list to find good judges for this, maybe including some people involved in the original fan game.

Deadline

Will be decided soon, since it's not your run of the mill contest and I'm still looking for more willing judges and participants.

Useful Tools

YY-CHR

Sprite Tool

Blocktook

Boss Graphics Sprite Sheets

Radonkel (bird from Super Mario Land 2)

Fryguy

Tryclyde

Fire Giant and Snowman Ghost

Both of the above are from Ghostbusters on the Sega Mega Drive.

Bagodad (Star Wars creature)

Machine Gun Unit (Metal Slug robot)

White Shark (Ecco the Dolphin enemy)

Stormrook (living palace/ActRaiser 2 level)

I'm still looking for the exact Dobkeratops and Witch sprites at this time.

Concluding thoughts

So, is anyone interested in this sort of contest? I know the people involved in the original game said they could see if people they knew were, and I might judge entries from two or three forums involved in game modding/hacking if necessary.

Are there any rule changes/judging changes I should consider?

And if you're either a decent programmer or Super Mario Fusion fan who wishes to be a judge, let me know!

Not to burst your bubble, but if the site's major collaboration hack (A2MT) can't even find boss coders after searching everywhere and asking a bunch of people, I don't know how you're expecting a boss-making contest to net any real entries. The very small number of people who are actually capable of this have mostly moved on from ROM hacking at this point, and those who would want to learn will need to spend months actually picking up ASM before they attempt this.

It seems like kind of a futile effort to me - at this point at least.

S.N.N. wrote:Not to burst your bubble, but if the site's major collaboration hack (A2MT) can't even find boss coders after searching everywhere and asking a bunch of people, I don't know how you're expecting a boss-making contest to net any real entries. The very small number of people who are actually capable of this have mostly moved on from ROM hacking at this point, and those who would want to learn will need to spend months actually picking up ASM before they attempt this.

It seems like kind of a futile effort to me - at this point at least.

Yeah, I know what you mean. But perhaps if I... get someone else post it on SMW Central and post it on the GCN I'll get a few entries across the different 'hacking' websites.

Still, I won't be too surprised if I get no entries. Nor too worried.