First off, this was my first published level done in SMBX, though not my first ever made. It was inspired by the Talking Time Bros. Level "My Butt Hurts" and similar levels, since I found the idea of sliding levels to be pretty neat and wanted to take a shot at it. I pretty much spent several hours trying to get the timing right for each section of the slide, especially the part where you seemingly fall into lava only to teleport nearby. It was interesting trying to get everything to fit toghether into a coherent whole, though I did end up leaving some breaks in the sliding. Oh, and there's a section where killing a Goopa temporarily causes some platforms to shapeshift and let you through.
With the slide done, I then added the areas before and after. Since I didn't think much of themes at the time, they were rather random compared to the overarching theme of the Lava Cave World. Still, the main part of the level is in the cave, so it's not too bad.
During testing, I found out that Iris didn't really work out well in the slide despite being the only other character who knew how to slide, so I ended up filtering to Demo. To let the player know as such, I added that sign outside with the extensive list of puishments for violators (speaking of which, cookie to those who get all the references!). Originally, it was going to end "survivors will be prosecutedt to the full extent of the jam," with "prosecutedt" deliberately misspelled to call back to Lusco Fusco. However, during the testing for the Release Candidate the betatesters decided to undo the typo since it didn't really gel with them. It's not as bad as I feared, though it's still missing some of that referential charm.
As for the miniboss, I knew that there was Dr. Lakituvi(t)ch from Johnson McCain and the Communists. As I expected this level to take place before that one (rather than vice versa), I gave him a flunky named Lakitron who throws weird things out of his Einstein cloud to try and catch people off guard. In this case, he threw Big Boos with the faces of Andrew Hussie and the MSPaint Adventures logo--this was before I knew that a good number of people here can't stand Homestuck--and they all originally had three hits each. We ended up lowering the amount of hits to 1 with LunaDLL.
Finally, there was the secret exit. Originally, it was going to be worse in that after the leek disappeared there wouldn't be a door back to Lakitron. Also, I tried putting the leek inside an egg, but for some reason doing that makes it not register with the Leek Pillar Sanctuary. In the end, I just let it float while the P-Switch was active and have an amusing little scene with the scientist Toads. (Also, if you're quick you can talk to both Toads and hatch a baby Bullet-onyx before time runs out. It might not be much, but I just thought I'd like to share that.)
It's rather easy to tell that this was my first contribution to a collab project here, since it's rather rough around the edges. While it does have plenty of humor, the gameplay could still be refined so that it's less tedious. Nevertheless, the level still works, and it's not really much of a pain to get through, so there's a start. I'll still improve what I can in level design for future submissions to A2XT!
(Wow, my commentary is so long.)
<- Go team Yeah Doctor Shemp.!
<- That's everyone being nice to me. ^^
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