The ASMBXT/A2XT TCRFA (FT. MaGL:LL & SDS2) - I Have Hair In My Face. I Don't Know How That Happened.

[Zygl]

Just wanna say I assume it's just because the hub is enormous and not a deliberate decision but I honestly love how long the load times are going to the hub. Probably my biggest small complaint about A2XT2 was that there's all these nice little loading animations that only run for like two seconds on any reasonably modern PC with an SSD :( It's enough that if I ever actually play it myself I genuinely wanna put my SMBX on an HDD if I can just to force some more load time for them to run a bit.

I'd unironically respect and appreciate a setting for like a minimum load screen time tbh. idk how hard it'd be to implement and I'm not quite invested enough in the subject to debate the merits of it, but if it got implemented I'd be like "oh hey, cool"

[PSI Ninja]

All three levels today were good. But why the reduced screen space in Get Schooled? Was the purpose to make it more challenging to deal with the jumping fish, or was it just being experimental? Don't get me wrong, I thought the effect was cool, and I also liked the few MaGLX3 levels that used a similar "standard definition" viewport. I feel it makes things more focused, in contrast to how tiny the player is relative to the screen otherwise. Would love to see more SMBX levels do that.

[KobaBeach]

Just wanna say I assume it's just because the hub is enormous and not a deliberate decision but I honestly love how long the load times are going to the hub. Probably my biggest small complaint about A2XT2 was that there's all these nice little loading animations that only run for like two seconds on any reasonably modern PC with an SSD :( It's enough that if I ever actually play it myself I genuinely wanna put my SMBX on an HDD if I can just to force some more load time for them to run a bit.

I'd unironically respect and appreciate a setting for like a minimum load screen time tbh. idk how hard it'd be to implement and I'm not quite invested enough in the subject to debate the merits of it, but if it got implemented I'd be like "oh hey, cool"

you heard the man. sonic 06 length loading times Right Now

All three levels today were good. But why the reduced screen space in Get Schooled? Was the purpose to make it more challenging to deal with the jumping fish, or was it just being experimental? Don't get me wrong, I thought the effect was cool, and I also liked the few MaGLX3 levels that used a similar "standard definition" viewport. I feel it makes things more focused, in contrast to how tiny the player is relative to the screen otherwise. Would love to see more SMBX levels do that.

brutal mario for the jilted generation

[Rixithechao]

pretty sure you can actually set a minimum load time in smbx loadscreen code, don’t know if it’s documented though and I would not be able to tell you how to do it off the top of my head.

anyhow, gonna be honest, I’m probably going to fall behind on the LP for a couple days. was glad to see that things went well going by the video description, at least.

edit: oh, right, get schooled was today. yeah I’mma hold off on talking about it until I’ve gotten to watching the video, apologies

[KobaBeach]

preserving thread tittle

[Rixithechao]

Okay, having now watched the video: yeah, BIB is a really charming level and also another case where it looks like I didn't give it a proper graphics restoration/unification pass?? Whoops.

I forgot Firefly Fantastica was here and not in another world... yeah, we were never gonna get patch 4 out in time for this LP lol.

And

All three levels today were good. But why the reduced screen space in Get Schooled? Was the purpose to make it more challenging to deal with the jumping fish, or was it just being experimental? Don't get me wrong, I thought the effect was cool, and I also liked the few MaGLX3 levels that used a similar "standard definition" viewport. I feel it makes things more focused, in contrast to how tiny the player is relative to the screen otherwise. Would love to see more SMBX levels do that.

It was basically a tech demo that evolved into a level, so I guess technically more the latter but still some of column A.

Changing the screen size in SMBX episodes is a lot easier now than it was back when I first made GS, and I'd definitely like to see more SMBX2 collabs make use of different screen sizes in the future for how they'd impact level design; the most common approach in the SMBX community is chopping off the top to make it widescreen, but a 4:3 resolution somewhere between the default SMBX 800x600 and SMW's 512x448 (or, 400x300 and 256x224 respectively at 1px scale) could also be a sweet spot. Unfortunately you still have to manually resize the window to fit a changed resolution, but it does snap to integer multiples of the new size when you drag it.

Also, apologies for the awkwardness of the dev commentary outside of the level -- autoscrollers aren't a particularly novel thing, rubberbanding or not, but I still didn't want to spoil that aspect of the level. The original dialogue that would've been in the level itself didn't dance around that, of course.

Haven't watched today's video yet, but I should be able to within the hour.

[SAJewers]

Okay, having now watched the video: yeah, BIB is a really charming level and also another case where it looks like I didn't give it a proper graphics restoration/unification pass?? Whoops.

no that's literally how it was submitted, everything there was pretty much intentional by the author; i still remember how this level was

it actually used mario graphics when originally submitted but then they put in demo graphics later

[KobaBeach]

welcome back alphadia god bless the 1 billion rpgs of kemco and their like 12 developers

[Zygl]

It's actually really funny to me to see this level 'cause I definitely made a level with exactly this "pull up a snowball from the ground" "snowball fight :D" gimmick for one of the SMBX forum contests a few years ago

...Except in mine I tried to make the snowballs just knock enemies around instead of freezing them, which somehow caused a Lua error that I managed to completely avoid triggering until like two days before the deadline Wound up rushing out a totally different level over the following 36 hours.
(Kinda worked out imo, the replacement level was way funnier, but I digress)

[KobaBeach]

It's actually really funny to me to see this level 'cause I definitely made a level with exactly this "pull up a snowball from the ground" "snowball fight :D" gimmick for one of the SMBX forum contests a few years ago

...Except in mine I tried to make the snowballs just knock enemies around instead of freezing them, which somehow caused a Lua error that I managed to completely avoid triggering until like two days before the deadline Wound up rushing out a totally different level over the following 36 hours.
(Kinda worked out imo, the replacement level was way funnier, but I digress)

can i see, gentle gamer

[raocow]

today's thread title is an evergreen option

[PSI Ninja]

That wall in Cream Soda Floats also confused me when I played it. Looking in the editor, it's labelled as a trap, so I guess it locking you out was on purpose. You can swim underneath the level to bypass it, but I have no idea if that was the intended solution.

[BobisOnlyBob]

It really feels like it's meant to be a trap like a door that shuts behind you to lock you in the kill-room.

[KobaBeach]

completely bizarre level. bless it

[Joseph Staleknight]

Right, so. Cream Soda Floats. I...honestly, I had no idea what I was thinking when I made the refinery. What presumably went through my mind at the time I made the level was that, somehow, the normal exit path wasn't enough for me. So I went through the trouble of making a classic Mario 64-style "find 8 red coins" mission in a maze-like structure as an extra challenge. Looking back on it now, I wonder if I should've taken the advice of one of the level reviewers and instead made the refinery a small gag and then the key, no extra frills needed.

And yes, as BobisOnlyBob said, the trap wall was supposed to trap you inside the kill-room. I just didn't think to put the trigger a good distance away from the wall so that there wouldn't be any accidental lock-outs. (Or make the trigger happen when you crushed the can of Red Skull, for that matter.)

If there's anything I liked about what I did do, though, I felt the wall shaped like a surprised pointing person was a work of art. If I had the time and motivation to redo the level, I'd still include them in some fashion.

[Zygl]

Yeah no Surprised Wall is brilliant. Surprise Wall not so much, unfortunate oversight, that, but Surprised Wall? Top-notch

It's actually really funny to me to see this level 'cause I definitely made a level with exactly this "pull up a snowball from the ground" "snowball fight :D" gimmick for one of the SMBX forum contests a few years ago

...Except in mine I tried to make the snowballs just knock enemies around instead of freezing them, which somehow caused a Lua error that I managed to completely avoid triggering until like two days before the deadline Wound up rushing out a totally different level over the following 36 hours.
(Kinda worked out imo, the replacement level was way funnier, but I digress)

can i see, gentle gamer

I'm not sure I still have the files for either of them but apparently I did export the latter level as a .png and post it in Discord

because as a low-gravity vertical level built around projectile grass launching you when you pluck it it's hilariously tall

Herbal_Space_Program_Section_1.png (1.17 MiB) Viewed 330 times

I remember the intended solution for maybe half of these setups also, not helped by my having no idea what half these grasses have in them

[KobaBeach]

I'm not sure I still have the files for either of them but apparently I did export the latter level as a .png and post it in Discord

now THIS is what god planned. not a white ethnostate

[raekuul]

which somehow caused a Lua error that I managed to completely avoid triggering until like two days before the deadline

well that's better than what happened to me with Wiggly Weed Marsh, where I completely missed the crash that happens when grass doesn't have an associated sprite to pluck from it.

[Grounder]

No #SoRetro shenanigans? (assuming the lakitu was just an oversight)

I'm almost disappointed.

[KobaBeach]

shnabubula jumpscare

casual horse abuse felt like an a2mt level

EDIT: i am on team "lost levels and smb special did nothing wrong"

[SAJewers]

Mentioned this in the spotzone, but the swimming section originally had ratchet scrolling as well. Re-entering the section a 2nd time you cause you to instantly die off-screen.

[Rixithechao]

iirc the lakitu just didn't have custom graphics, and I figured the author went with smw lakitu because it looks close enough to an NES sprite, so I just restored the basegame sprites. (And yes, it was probably made at the time we had a devkit in which all lakitus had resprites, but this felt like another likely case of the level being made in basegame SMBX.)

to crosspost my own spotzone comments,

emospongebob1997 — Yesterday at 4:48 PM
another case of me being vague in the change note dialogue to avoid spoilers, but the hazard I adjusted was in fact the lava. imagine that leap across the lava lake at 5:50, but the colliders are level with the safe ground (and how that always works out in SMBX)
the solution I went with was just editing the graphic so the top of the lava was at the top edge and then adding a bit of code to shift all blocks of that ID down by that many pixels

it's not noticeably different when the player does fall into the lava because the collider goes up to the very tips of the waves, but that extra 10 pixels of elevation allowing the player to stand on the edges of platforms without instantly dying was the important part.

also, it looks like this in the editor lol:

[Rixithechao]

Welp, it looks like my change notes NPC in one of the upcoming levels was accidentally left unfriendly!

ping

We probably won't have the patch out before you get to it, so uh... when you get to a level with a very long name in which I'm solid and can be killed, here's what I say there:

SAJewers had to do some trickery to get some text events working right. Later, I went through and offloaded the characters' names from their dialogue, then adapted the final scene to Lua for consistency with the other dialogue in the level.

Hopefully this is the only case of that mistake in this world, or in the game at all... but I'm gonna go ahead and make the game force all instances of me and SAJewers to be friendly just to be safe.

[Dragon Fogel]

Expect the quality to be variable here, as different levels got different amounts of testing depending on how lively the project was. Levels near the beginning (like Mission: Proud Star) got plenty of testing, while later levels didn't see as much focus. I didn't even get around to testing three out of the four levels today myself, I had downloaded them but never actually looked at them. The only one I had actually seen was Mission: Proud Star.

I guess that means this is going to be an especially strange part of the LP to me, as I keep seeing levels that I provided for this project but have never actually laid eyes on.

This partly explains the weird situation you were in at the end of the last level, too, as with more testing that would have been noticed and somehow accounted for.

[KobaBeach]

Welp, it looks like my change notes NPC in one of the upcoming levels was accidentally left unfriendly!

please play clash at demonhead it's so unintentionally funny in how it really feels like a licensed game for an anime/manga that doesn't exist. it's legit designed like you need supplementary knowledge of its ip to make sense of the whole thing but. It Doesn't Have Any

also very early instance of the metroidvania genre and i mean an actual metroidvania like metroid, not the sort of pseudo one bionic commando or wing of madoola tried to do, though this one also had a map screen like mr. hitler's resurrection over there (bionic commando, im so glad one of the few instances of gore in an nes game is hitler's head asplode)

i guess think of it like maple story clones since they are also metroidvania-y, i forget if any wonder boy games or super adventure island 2 have any map screen whatsoever, i imagine not

terrific game, and i think rao should play it. if he wants