A2XT2 - M̴P̵3̶ ̷B̷e̵y̵o̸n̸d̵ ̵t̴h̸e̵ ̶D̶i̶m̷e̸n̶s̸i̶o̷n̷

[KobaBeach]

As for today's video: I could have sworn somebody did not want Pal to be present in this level, so I swapped the Pal sprites out.

sorry for bumping you off the front page of reddit but Why???????

[ztarwuff]

As for today's video: I could have sworn somebody did not want Pal to be present in this level, so I swapped the Pal sprites out.

sorry for bumping you off the front page of reddit but Why???????

Don't really remember. All I know is that I took a bit of time to create alternate sprites, but somehow the alternate sprites never made it into the final cut. Probably for the best.

[KobaBeach]

Don't really remember. All I know is that I took a bit of time to create alternate sprites, but somehow the alternate sprites never made it into the final cut. Probably for the best.

i showed my post to oddwrath bc the exchange sounded super silly context less and this is what she said (no raocows)

apparently it may involve spoiler reasons or behind the scenes reasons, and the fixed version of your stage was just lost during a malware infection or some sort, which. yeah that sounds like the pre-git repo era of mario collabs

let the dog go into the funny snot laser laboratory (not in vip1) Stop Having It Be Closed

[Oddwrath]

keep in mind, that's just my assumption. I don't know the actual reason, but I do know that

the a2xt2 level loadout had to be rebuilt from scratch once the post wiki level database suffered a malware attack and for that reason, some potentially older versions of the levels had to be used.

also entropy engine rules and is my second favourite level in w7

also also, ztarwulf, you're good at puzzle levels should probably make more of them if you're considering coming back into the community proper

[SAJewers]

I still have that copy of that version of the level

[sedron]

Wow, my level got played today! Kinda surreal to see a level I made ten years ago finally like, see the light of day? Haven't designed anything in SMBX in a hot minute. Glad that people seemed to like the level though!

I'm gonna put some level design stuff under spoilers for the like, five people who might be interested. Then I need to leave to get milk and I promise I'll be right back.

So this is like, one of the last actual SMBX things I designed for realsies. I made it pretty shortly after the project was announced and officially underway. I did a bunch of testing and even wrote a level design tips document that's still pinned in the subforum for this game (I have no idea how my advice holds up and have no desire to check, lol.) I wanted to do more for the game but the game development slowing way down around the same time that I was naturally moving onto other stuff just kinda meant I forgot about it entirely. Every once in a while I'd remember and ask some friends about it, but I didn't even know the project was actually nearing completion until right before release.

Anyway, I was really into autoscrollers at the time. I still think they get some undeserved flak and can lead to some really tight platforming when actually designed well. My ASMBXT1 level was also an autoscroller, and the song for this stage is from an autoscrolling level in Mega Man 8 that everybody loves and nobody ever gets frustrated with. I wanted to build around the level itself moving within a smaller space, using SMBX's physics to create some weird jumps and interactions with the enemy spawners.

When I put the level up for testing, I knew that the autoscrolling suddenly changing direction without clear visual indicators had the potential to cause unfair deaths (and that as the level creator I couldn't accurately gauge those issues since none of the changes in scroll direction were a surprise for me), so I specifically wanted feedback on whether or not it was too much. I got three responses while I was still paying attention. One person said it was too easy, one too hard, and one said not to change it at all. I didn't really know what to do with that info, so I did nothing! I know some number of people who tested it after disliked the way it played, and I do think it's fair to hold that opinion of this level. That said, I am overall happy with it. Part of me wishes it were a little longer and that the last segment were a bit more interesting but it is what it is.

After this level I made a few levels for a solo project that I never finished and stopped making levels. Except for MaglX3 but that one doesn't count because reasons.

[Noelle]

That felt like such a classic SMW hack level, perfect length for its difficulty too.

[King of GETs]

The game play style of Entropy Engine reminds me of segments from my levels Forest (MaGL X2) and The Power of Luna Lua (SMBX Community Contest XII). In those levels, I kept the movement slower because if you sped it up more than that, the way the character moved got kinda crazy. Entropy Engine didn't ask too much from the player, so the crazy movement wasn't that much of an issue. Also, keeping Entropy Engine a single medium-length segment was a good choice as some people can get worn out quickly from all that layer movement.

[Rixithechao]

factory factory factory factory factory factory

[Nimono]

factory! factory!! factory!!! factory!!!! factory!!!!! factory!!!!!

today's levels were really cool! i quite liked the first one, though I do wish it had gone on a bit longer, and played with the gimmick of turning the factory on and off a bit more!

[KobaBeach]

mummy cat bc daddy mulk. i need to play ninjawarriors (and denjin makai bc tulks/tarukusu is hot and kunio and double dragon, and finish golden axe and sor1, etc)

[Noelle]

We were robbed of a episode titled Mummy Milk.

[KobaBeach]

oh wait it was mummy milk wtf

how did i memory hole that

[Rixithechao]

[camwoodstock]

"(with audible fire crackling in background) i found out today what the printer does" is still the eternal mood for whenever we need to use the printer for literally anything, whatsoever, at all,

[KobaBeach]

(timestamp)

[General_Urist]

That was an intense level, suitable for what's at stake. But having Regulus's boss fight only take half his healthbar and then be just jumping on him in place... a choice alright. And man, he becomes a bigger jerk every time we see him!
At least Broadsword remains a barrel of laughs, the joke where the musical jingle and long pause after getting a super leek are actual in-universe things was nice.

[Grounder]

rewind, six billion coins isn't exactly cheap

[Oddwrath]

level fun facts:
- vs Rewind: hoo boy, this fight. there were plenty testers who would call it a really hard fight for the same reasons rao had issues with it. it got slight visual tweaks at the end, but the core version remained largely untouched, because as stated, at that point you may as well redesign the whole fight and we didn't have the time. after watching today's video, I'm not sure how much I agree with that (could have made the laser hitboxes less wide or made the laser instant flashes so that if you're in the air, you could at least somewhat escape), but regardless: boss hard. also the magnet pulses didn't help me at all, cause different eyesight I guess. I couldn't focus on them over the walls

as for world 7 as a whole? still my favourite world in the game. why? several reasons:
- it's the only world in my opinion that properly "feels" large. you genuinely feel like you're in a big city despite the level amount being mostly the same as previous worlds.
- at least half of the levels in the world are really amazing. back alley ballet and entropy engine are my top 2 of this world, but the others aren't pushovers either
- difficulty is the way I prefer it. not ridiculously hard, but not too easy either.
I know that most of these are vibe based and yeah, technically w6 is more inventive due to being a weird world, but still.

anyway as a farewell to w7, this is how w7 town1 map looks zoomed out:

big-building-hours.png (61.27 KiB) Viewed 672 times

[Rixithechao]

So, I've been equal parts excited for and dreading this video

as well as a certain part of tomorrow's PORT(S) visit

. I've watched the full thing now and I'm glad things weren't as rough as they could've been, but I'm gonna wait to give dev commentary for my share of the w7 finale for the time being.

[MonkeyShrapnel]

The last part of Rewind’s boss fight used to have one major difference; the platform in front of his computer did not rise up like it does now, which meant that every time you hopped on him, you had to maneuver around it rather than simply hopping on him a dozen times.

[Nimono]

man. rewind's a JERK, and that's the best thing i can say about him D:<

[Rixithechao]

Okay, so. Here's how the end of W7 breaks down:
- I made the basic tech for the level, designed most of it and wrote Rewind's intercom dialogue.
- Like with the world 3-1 castle, Hoeloe made the tech actually functional and pretty. She also reeled some of the design in and replaced a couple setups (mostly at the end of section 3).
- I wrote the cutscenes and went back later in development to adjust the dialogue once the changes to Industrial Pandemonium were finalized.
- Hoeloe made the boss fight, and then dialed it back based on everyone's feedback. Much later, I added the voice clips to it.

As someone mentioned in the comments, if you can't finish off Rewind before he finishes the countdown he restarts the fight, though there's a bit more to it. To quote my response:

Another thing worth noting: the amount of time you have to finish off Rewind depends on the amount of HP he has left. I believe it is actually possible to beat him during that countdown if he has full health, the timing is just much tighter.

And something most players are even less likely to discover is that every time he rewinds the same attempt, he has different dialogue -- he gets more and more bewildered and exasperated from being unable to kill the player. When I added the voice clips to the fight I set it up so that they reflect this as well, after multiple resets he uses more frustrated-sounding clips and then the following reset it changes again to an exhausted set.

There's a lot to talk about wrt Rewind's characterization, and really how we handled the ABCDs and Space Masters and everything in this game's story overall, but I'm hesitant to get into much of that just yet given the responses to today's video have mostly been about the the gameplay of the fight and

I'm anticipating a lot more story comments in response to the previously-mentioned thing tomorrow anyway.

For now I'll just say that having Rewind be the racist uncle was a team decision back in the Skype days -- like, mid 2010s -- and I'd like to share this video youtube randomly recommended me back when raocow was in world 4 or 5:

[KobaBeach]

For now I'll just say that having Rewind be the racist uncle was a team decision

emptyquote

[Rixithechao]

emptyquote

?



...Ah, okay. Fair. Kinda surprised you didn't include the building video, in that case.

I guess I'll get into it now after all.

What I meant by the team decision thing is that it was a consensus among the 10+ active members of the original team for at least several years. We didn't just all gather together one day and go "okay one of these characters needs to be a bigot all in favor of it being Rewind say aye", it just came about as we were hashing out other aspects of the story and there wasn't a point in any of that when someone flat-out objected to it.

I've been searching around in the skypelogs, discord scrollback and threads to try and figure out who first proposed it, and while I haven't found that I did see that in December 2015 we had already arrived at the general understanding that he was going to be a cyclops supremacist, just hating all non-cyclops species. Counted 8 people active in the chat at that time. In May 2016 I crossposted the first draft of the pre-fight scenes to the forums, which was when we added him hating the twins and siblings specifically. Zero responses in that thread until I posted there again half a year later.

April 2017 in the old archived codehaus a2xt channel, we were discussing the boss titlecards and Rewind's subtitle was outright planned as "Racist Toaster Guy"; 5 people involved in that discussion, one of whom found it hilarious. I suggested maybe going with something less on the nose because I was worried that "oh, we didn't mean for this to be some grand statement but this will anger people on both sides and raocow will get caught in the crossfire!!!" Which, past me, rao's an adult, and if any part of this happened to upset any reactionaries that weren't already scared off by the LGBTQ+ rep in the game then good.

But that was back in 2017; needless to say, a lot happened in the following years. I gradually shifted from being an insufferable centrist/useful idiot into just an insufferable idiot myself. When it was mostly down to Hoeloe and me we discussed revisiting Rewind's characterization, and we decided we wanted to seriously try and make it rather than rewrite several scenes, potentially his dialogue earlier in the game too depending on the new shtick we'd be giving him. But we wanted to be careful not to trivialize racism and not leave any ambiguity about our own stances, because it is very, very easy to put out something incredibly stupid and tone-deaf (as I demonstrated with my last post).

All in all I'm absolutely not the person to determine how well we did in those regards. I did ask for input on how we handled Rewind's character during the final testing period, and overall it seemed like it came across clearly without any particular issues pointed out? Folks mostly just went like "oh wow he is racist" and proceeded to comment on the difficulty of the fight. But considering there's one comment that includes "Regulus FTW" and a couple others I don't know how to interpret...

And setting aside the matters of how we handled this incredibly sensitive subject juxtaposed with other parts of the game's story, including the thing I keep spoilertagging, there's also this: I'm sure there's members of the community who feel like this is a waste of Rewind's design, like they saw the character had more potential and were excited to use him in their own fanworks. For instance, he has clear parallels to Science in his mechanical nature and time-based powers so there's potential for a mentor-esque relationship there! But here we are going "no, this man is an unrepentantly awful person who represents a great evil of humanity".

Retcons and alternate universes may give creators a lot more options for getting out of a given interpretation of a character, but when the character's first major appearance portrays them as this much of an "intolerant jerk" that's probably still going to cast a shadow over other takes on them if left unaddressed, and that's something I do feel we -- or at least I -- didn't give adequate consideration to throughout the game's development. Will any future works featuring Rewind feel the need to either lean into his racism or go out of their way to establish that he's not the same guy? Does he need some sort of redemption arc where he learns to be an ally or something? But whether Rewind as we wrote him deserves something like that is a whole debate in itself...

So yeah. In short, I don't believe the dialogue I wrote "solved racism" or anything like that, I hope my previous comment and/or this one is a bigger fuck-up than this part of Episode 2's story overall, and whether or not it was a good idea at all to attempt said subplot in the first place I do regret the potential fallout from us using this particular existing character for it.