SMWCX - Credits

[Arctangent]

Hell, SMB3 had shades of it, too. You didn't get infinite flight from racoon Mario

...but you do with a P-Wing.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to count that, since those're in far more limited availability. In that case, we might as well toss in Lakitu's Cloud and the Warp Whistle.

Which are fantastic for how Nintendo really let you play what you want to play in SMB3. It's just that they're not nearly as prevalent as the leaf.

[LunarRainbowShyGuy]

Nothing like a bad Mario level to make me start posting here again. Well, I wouldn't exactly say its bad but... well Mandew basically said everything I have to say about this point. Though while some people are saying they would split this level into two levels, personally, I would go even further than that. I think there's enough here to make an entire world (well, a SMB1 sized world at least). I feel like there's enough before the midpoint to make two levels, the part after the midpoint should definitely be its own level, and I'd say that the boss is probably hard enough to be in a level on its own.

Also, a random thought I had while watching raocow play this level: I wonder if level makers ever go back and play their old levels for fun. Especially people who make levels like these. I know I wouldn't want to play a level like this from start to finish more than once, even if I made it. Though I would never make a level this long without having multiple midpoints or shortcuts in it.

Also, I like the "Grinedrs" in the credits. I'm not sure how the credits were made but that seems like an odd typo to miss.

[Le Neveu de Rameau]

[level-skipping items in SMB3]

Remember, though, two, that the stage-skipping mechanisms in SMB3 all have their limits as well. Jugem's Cloud indeed lets you skip stages outright (though not Hammer Bros., airships, tanks etc.), albeit on the condition that you complete the next stage without dying once (unless there's a Toad House or mini-game for you to complete and make your new restarting point), lest you be hurled back to your starting point, having wasted your cloud on nothing. The P-wing is a proper level breaker, but more stages are P-wing-proof than you might think (including 7-7, the original Muncher run, and one of my greatest fears as a child); all it takes is a vertical pipe which extends beyond the upper screen boundary. On top of that, you can still get hit in the air; this makes you lose your tail and unlimited peas outright, rather than simply harmlessless knocking your out of the air as in SMW (honestly, that's why the cape is overpowered). So yes, the game did allow some stage skipping/breaking, but there were always points where it smacks you down and says "NOPE, you're going to play this stage properly whether you like it or not!"

Warping was most definitely a thing in all of the NES games, though, and my peer group and I made generous use of it (sometimes this was a practical matter; I loved playing SMB3 from beginning to end, but it literally took all day for me back then; I only had the SNES version, not All-Stars, so saving and continuing later just wasn't an option). Even that had its drawbacks, though, especially in SMB3: by skipping worlds, you no longer had the huge stock of lives and powerups (including Hammer suits, Tanooki suits, and of course P-wings) that you would otherwise accumulate by playing the game from start to finish. So even with the most powerful of skipping tools, trade-offs existed.

Warping exists to a certain extent in SMW, too, if on a smaller scale. Let's not forget that the game deliberately lets you skip to the final stage potentially as early as half-way through the second world (though in practice, I doubt many first timers found the Donut Plains Star Road before the Vanilla Dome one) if you're willing to go through the (generally short and easy) Star Road Stages. On the whole, though, the idea of warping doesn't work as well with a single, contiguous overworld with secret exits and the ability to replay stages, making the concept of worlds a bit more fluid to begin with. It also sort of goes against the idea of hacks and fangames, which are basically about having extra content for your favorite games, so people are less inclined to skip that content in general. Expectations, how they do change.

[ft029]

I don't think the problem about these levels is how finicky the plane is or any of that. Playing more carefully in the maze part and staying closer to the left side of the screen in the wall-death place would have made those sections way easier. Sadly, these messages weren't conveyed to raocow, and he made it hard for himself.

All of the obstacles are quite well-designed in my opinion.

The main issue is just length. It's unreasonable to expect a player to replay about 3 minutes' worth of material just to get to a new section. This type of level's goal is to show off how the authors could twist a gimmick, NOT to stress out the player. That was Depraved Stronghold's job.

[Mandew]

Name one non-Indie platformer that allows the player to break levels whenever they want. Name one 2D Platformer that doesn't limit the player.

The difference for me between Super Mario World and, say, New Super Mario Bros. U, for me comes with how loose (but still consistant) the gameplay rules are in the former and how strict they are in the latter.

Guess why I love Super Mario World? Every time I replayed that game, I had something new to discover about it - whether they are intentional or not. And all of that came from exploring the limits of rules that were already in place - like how a stomp from Yoshi acted as a Spin Jump... That's how I found out you could spin jump off spiked enemies.

On the other hand, New Super Mario Bros. U has nothing exciting as such to explore. It's designed like a "one and done" experience and that means that there's very little to discover beyond what the game had already demonstrated by the end of it.

I'd like for when people would play a game I make, if they would all have differing experiences from the same sandbox. And then two people would, by some off-chance, talk about it and entertain themselves with what each others know and don't know.

[The Doctor]

I'd like for when people would play a game I make, if they would all have differing experiences from the same sandbox. And then two people would, by some off-chance, talk about it and entertain themselves with what each others know and don't know.

It's interesting to me that you use the word sandbox. That's where we're approaching this differently. I see a game as a challenge made by the author. The author of the game designed a set of mechanics and exquisitely designed his levels to work within the constraints of those mechanics. Castlevania's stiff movement leads to very different level design than Contra for example. Breaking those constraints holds no interest to me. I want to play the game the way it was intended to be played.

Now you can argue that giving the player the choice to break those constraints and the levels is okay, and I agree. The problem is that the player doesn't know what will break the level or what will not. Add in some optional cheats to bypass powerup filters if you want, but keep the powerup filters. I need to know if the level designer is okay with me bringing a Fire Flower from a previous level into her level or if the level will be a broken mess due to it.

[Mandew]

It's interesting to me that you use the word sandbox. That's where we're approaching this differently. I see a game as a challenge made by the author. The author of the game designed a set of mechanics and exquisitely designed his levels to work within the constraints of those mechanics. Castlevania's stiff movement leads to very different level design than Contra for example. Breaking those constraints holds no interest to me. I want to play the game the way it was intended to be played.

Ahh, now I see more where you are coming from with this argument. I see it quite differently from you, of course.
How I see a game...

Merely as one piece of the experience it offers, one "half" of it; the other half being the player him or herself.
The game feeds the player with images and sounds that inspire something in the player - feedback for what the player chose to do.
The game, taken by itself, is only an arbritrary amass of code and data. Until the player cares and is involved into the game, then the game by itself is meaningless. It's the player's interpretation and experience that really makes the game fun, entertaining, challenging, sad, tear-jerking, inspiring, charming, or any other feeling the player will resent towards the game.

I firmly believe that the act of designing a game works in function of feedback from the player. The player is who you're making the game for. After all, they're the ones who play it.

Challenge is only one of many things, one of many tools the game can use to entertain its player.

[Imaynotbehere4long]

Re: Filters.

Actually, when I add a filter to one of my levels, it's usually because playing as a certain character or with a certain power-up can make at least part of the level more difficult, or even impossible. For a quick example of what I mean, try playing Sky Fortress Assault as Peach instead of Mario, and let me know how well you perform on the parts where you have to spin-jump on the grinders.

For a longer, more descriptive example, remember the desert robot in Desert Temple? Whenever the player runs under it, the robot will drop and attempt to crush the player. However, the only way to get the robot to do this was to have a non-friendly Thwomp behind the robot kill a Toad resprite (if the Thwomp were friendly, it would have to be attached to the robot to make it move, but that would make the robot fall too fast). Did you notice how every time the robot falls, it's preceded by a thwack effect and a +100 increase in score? That's the Thwomp killing the Toad resprite. Now, the keen among you may have already figured out the issue here, but for those who haven't: there used to be a few levels in the collab that had hammer suits hidden in them. If the player brought a hammer suit into Desert Temple, managed to keep it until the boss, and accidentally killed the Thwomp with a stray hammer, then the level would become impossible because the robot would never fall, meaning the player could never reach the P-Switch generator needed to reveal Ludwig Von Koopa. If any level in SMWCX were built around using the hammer suit for anything, Desert Temple would have needed a power-up filter. Also, keep in mind that there's no way to make an NPC immune to hammers without Lua.

So yeah, even if you're pro-"player choice," you have to admit that filters still have their benefits and that breaking a level doesn't always mean "making the level easier."

Super Mario World has a cape feather. It's overpowered. It lets you fly over entire levels. Nintendo knew this, and yet didn't take measures to impede this.

And the worst part? This is only at the very end, it wasn't a thing in most of the game.

Name one room in Bowser's Front Door that can be flown over (including the Back Door). "No measures to impede this" my foot.

And hey, what do you know, that's also at the very end!

e: Also FUN FACT: I once beat the boss and yet it didn't die and the battle didn't end. Hooray!

Wait, really? I thought I fixed that...

I wonder if level makers ever go back and play their old levels for fun.

This is the first time I've been involved in a level that long (not counting

Password: Proof of Concept

which works differently than Sky Fortress Assault), so I can't really say. With the exception of my crappy kaizo first episode, most of my old levels are about the length of one of SMWCX's world 2 levels (e.g., Little Ruins) and suffer from aimless design. I did have fun when I went back to play SMBX Teaches Typing to fix some minor graphical errors, though; does that count?

[Arctangent]

Name one room in Bowser's Front Door that can be flown over (including the Back Door).

1, 4, 7, 8?

I forget if any of those are auto-scroll or not, and given I'm just reading off of a picture of their map data 4 might not have enough room to get speed. But yeah, just from a quick look-over there seems to be multiple paths you can take to fly through the Front Door.

Amusingly, this'd make the Back Door a shorter route but one where you can't avoid the dangers, such as they are.

[Leet]

some of the conclusions being made in this thread are kind of ridiculous. "video games are supposed to be fun, so the player should have UNLIMITED FREEDOM AT ALL TIMES, and anything otherwise is an objective mistake"

like, that's called cheat codes

[Cirno]

The mainstream Mario games hit a good balance in my opinion re: filters vs freedom. SMW and SMB3 both had ridiculously broken powerups, and never filtered anything (with the exception of Yoshi in castles/ghost houses) but instead forced you to play certain levels more or less legit by use of clever level design. Ceilings are one of the biggest assets to this, and there are many other creative ways to force the player to be in sync with the level designer's wishes: meltable ice block obstacles for fire flower stages, plentiful small gaps in the ground so it's hard to build up flight speed, area-changing pipes, etc.

One could argue that it's a different design philosophy though. Nintendo gives you tools to cheese through a level if you find it too difficult to do legitimately, which is aided in part by that a level is just a part of a greater whole, so it's not like you're skipping the entire game. In collaborative works like this one, each individual level is special to the level designer, so it would make sense that you want the player to experience your level as it was created and tested, not allowing the player to make it easier on themselves with extra powerups. Which is fine in a vacuum, but I can't agree with it in the context of an actual game: filters for reasons like that make the game feel like a series of booths at a convention each selling their own wares, rather than one solid, coherent work. But considering this game itself is laid out as "here's a bunch of paintings", the booth analogy actually fits here, so I can't complain too much if that was the intended vibe one was supposed to get.

That said, I still agree with hard filters in cases where not filtering would make the level impossible or nonfunctional (such as the desert fortress boss with hammers, spinjumping challenges with Peach, what have you). But it ought to be a last resort. Players who absolutely want total freedom already have cheat codes in the engine that they can use to bypass the filters anyway at their own risk.

[ano0maly]

The takeaway I get from this discussion is that while it may be good to give player choice, it's also important to provide the player a lead. If the players just get a bunch of options dumped on them and the level provides no clues as to what are the intended or even workable options, it's hard for the player, who doesn't know the creator's intentions, to figure it out without a lot of trial and error. The game needs to either be flexible enough to allow various combinations of choices, or help the players narrow things down if in a more tightly constrained level design. Preferably both.

This observation may have more to do with the current conversation than today's video.

I enjoyed the classic SMW-style showcase of enemy characters. Note the subtle fact that the background doesn't actually move with the scrolling parade.

[Tyty]

Honestly when signups first started I wanted to apply and make a level using that sewer tileset for my failed MAGL2 level (I really liked that tileset and still want to use it) but I had to really wrestle with SMBX itself to do so, so I ended up basically not participating in the project because it wasn't worth the hassle to me to get the program working properly.

And I don't even really see myself a member of SMWC's community, I just stop in for hacking advice ~every year or so, or to throw my name in a VLDC. Even if I stayed on the project and sorted out SMBX I'm not sure if my opinion would've counted for much. A handful of people also know I'm pretty adverse to the difficulty expected in a romhack endgame as it is and I kinda had to wrestle a little with that in my SMWCP2 level because it wasn't hard enough for world 3.

That said, while I think participation could've potentially been for the same reasons I had with SMBX being odd to work with, I don't think you can entirely blame lack of participants. Literally every large, long-running mario collab I have ever seen is like this. Any of the VIPs, SMWC, ASMT, all of them. The endgame is hard and the postgame is bonkers, and for people like me who prefer closer to standard Nintendo difficulty, they really aren't fun. At all. It's clearly not too many cooks ruining the pot in all cases, so I think there's this weird "We need to live up to VIP difficulty" or something causing it. Maybe someone should make a "fun rompy" collab or something I dunno.

Re: Filters, they do have their place. Games should be able to run a gamut from open sandbox to on-rail shooter and they fall along the middle usually. I can see wanting to block things to keep the experience of the level, or prevent a bug, or what not. That's why SMW filters yoshi out from castles and ghost houses.

With how absolutely weird the differences in some of the SMBX characters are though, character filters make sense to me in like, almost all cases. Link is the strongest argument for that on his own.

[Leet]

Literally every large, long-running mario collab I have ever seen is like this. Any of the VIPs, SMWC, ASMT, all of them. The endgame is hard and the postgame is bonkers, and for people like me who prefer closer to standard Nintendo difficulty, they really aren't fun. At all. It's clearly not too many cooks ruining the pot in all cases, so I think there's this weird "We need to live up to VIP difficulty" or something causing it. Maybe someone should make a "fun rompy" collab or something I dunno.

Super Talking Time Bros.

[Tyty]

Super Talking Time Bros.

... I forgot about those somehow actually.

More collabs like Super Talking Time Bros. then!

[Alice]

I don't think the problem about these levels is how finicky the plane is or any of that. Playing more carefully in the maze part and staying closer to the left side of the screen in the wall-death place would have made those sections way easier. Sadly, these messages weren't conveyed to raocow, and he made it hard for himself.

All of the obstacles are quite well-designed in my opinion.

The main issue is just length. It's unreasonable to expect a player to replay about 3 minutes' worth of material just to get to a new section. This type of level's goal is to show off how the authors could twist a gimmick, NOT to stress out the player. That was Depraved Stronghold's job.

"What are you talking about the glitchiest object in SMBX is a bad design decision for a marathon level? Just be cautious and there's no issue here!"

What a completely idiotic thing to say. The player shouldn't be the one responsible for making a level playable. I can't recall seeing raocow play any level in all his time with SMBX that used the airship piece and not seriously struggling with it. And the few times I've come across it myself it was such an enormous pain in the ass to make use of that I never even finished the levels it was used in. Using it seriously limits the developer in one of two ways. It either can be used creatively, in which case the player is likely to have serious issues not dying in stupid ways, or it can be used carefully, in which case the level design is likely to be pretty boring.

[Mata Hari]

Why does the Thwomp hold you morally culpable for death by rainbow shell/falling into the lava like an idiot#/

[raocow]

it's an idiot (but a powerful idiot)

[Willhart]

The design on that level was very clever. Lot of variety and nice flow. Also a good secret exit too, which tend to be rare.

[Voltgloss]

The design on that level was very clever. Lot of variety and nice flow. Also a good secret exit too, which tend to be rare.

Agreed 100%. The only aspect I don't understand is the level name. Is it a reference of some kind?

[Grounder]

hope you werent expecting undertale

[Ometeotl]

hope you werent expecting undertale

We were thankfully spared.

[TaviTurnip]

Night of Nights tho

[stormie]

Does anything special happen if you wait around in the ending room like the sign asks?

[Imaynotbehere4long]

Does anything special happen if you wait around in the ending room like the sign asks?

No; that sign is just there to let you know that the level author used a two-and-a-half minute song for a fifteen second section. It's a pretty good song, too.