Tyty and I have known each other for nearly 10 years now so we kinda know how the other thinks. We decided that neither of us would have actually gotten anywhere with our levels separately so we figured why not work on an entry together? We'd made a level together in the past and it scored us 6th place in VLDC6 three years ago so we were confident we could put together something good.
Tyty had the idea that he wanted to build a level around a music track. That track was Etrian Odyssey 3's Harbor music. He ended up doing the music port himself and man did it sound good in the end. Starting from a music track is not an easy way to design a level but it was an interesting challenge. While he finished the port, I started thinking about ways to represent a harbor. He'd expressed interest in a cliffside beach and I figured harbor should mean ships or cranes not unlike Ricco Harbor in Sunshine. We decided to combine the two ideas. I grabbed my old Girder construction graphics from SMWCP2 (which I figured I had a right to use even though the hack isn't out yet since they were my graphics to begin with), and he grabbed a nice beach background. Eventually we found beach tiles and those blue cliffs by digging around both SMWC's exgfx section and I think MFGG and put everything together.
Fun fact, the rom we used as a base is actually the rom I used to submit my entry to MaGL 1 way back when! If you go digging through it, you'll find my MaGL 1 level, High Fly Athletic, sitting there on Level 003 fully intact. We used this rom because it was already pre-patched with a few things like the custom piranhas and had a bunch of my custom drawn graphics and a nice shared palette still inside it.
I designed the first half of the level and the downwards vertical section. Tyty designed the sky part and the goal room. My levels aren't usually anywhere near as aesthetically pleasing as this one turned out, but with some help from Tyty drawing some custom graphics for the level, like the chains, ropes, pipes and crates I felt like I had to take the time to really make the place look as good as I could while still having a fun design to it.
While it might not be immediately clear, the theme of the level solidified itself around an idea and not a mechanic. The idea was simply multiple paths to get from Point A to Point B. After the start of the level you can usually choose to go high or low up to a point where paths converge and then split off again. The sky portion shows this best, where you start at one pipe and almost immediately get the option to go high or low, then the paths converge briefly near the oil pool with fish, then split off again into high, middle and low paths until you get to the pipe at the end of the level. Is there a true purpose behind the multiple paths? Other than a self-doubting fear that I usually always made very linear, single-pathed levels in the past, not really. As I was building the cliff parts in the first half I just started throwing down tiles and discovered that the high and low path idea was a really interesting one to explore and we decided to run with it.
We had a little bit of trouble with Tyty's sky section. At first he wanted to include the oil in the pipes as an actual mechanic that you could swim through. This wasn't planned to be anything more than recolored water but we had difficulty figuring out how or why Mario would be in oil up there. We played around with oil waterfalls but ultimately we decided to make all the oil purely cosmetic. In the final level, all instances of the oil are inaccessible and purely decorative. And yes, those poor fish in the oil were added for decorative purposes too. With the oil idea out, we instead sought to expand on the high and low path structure the first half had touched upon. At this point we hadn't solidified this idea as our central mechanic and the big formation I'd made in the first half was just a one-off landmass. Once we started playing with the variable paths in the sky however, we knew we'd stumbled on our central idea. He designed most of the section and I went in to touch up the landmasses because we agreed that I had a better grasp on how to make them look really nice.
The downhill section was a late addition to the level. We'd decided that the level felt a little short just ending it during the sky section but weren't sure how to lengthen it. The midpoint was at a good location and we didn't want to make the level too lopsided. I tried making a vertical section going upwards from the midpoint to the sky section but immediately had trouble figuring out how I wanted to have Mario climb the level. Sprite platforms had a tendency to de-spawn and the math platforms only move in one direction. I quickly threw out the idea of a vertical climb and was about to give up on a vertical section entirely when I had the idea to have Mario come down from the top of the girder structures he'd been platforming across in the clouds. Suddenly I was struck with the idea of doing the sliding section as not only a way to lengthen the level a little bit, but also provide a simple enough sublevel that it didn't really matter that the level was a little bit lopsided. It was meant mostly as a cooldown from the platforming done previously.
It ended up being probably the most complicated sublevel I have ever built in SMW. I started out placing the slopes, note blocks and math platforms for the slide and testing it extensively. Once I had an actual slide I then went in and started adding all the aesthetic details like other ledges, crates, girders, etc. Enemies were the last thing added since they were mostly cosmetic, especially where the sliding was concerned. I also knew that I wanted to have one of the Dragon Coins (resprited to be Miku coins--thanks Tyty
) not only be on the slide but require the player to jump off the slide to get it. If you jump as soon as you see it and keep holding down, you'll get it and continue sliding right back onto the main slide path. This sublevel alone too hours to build because, honestly, I went overly crazy with attention to detail. If you want to see the sublevel and my insanity in its entirety, I have an image of it
right here.
Lastly, the goal area was done real quick by Tyty on the last or second-to-last day. Simple and sweet, complete with one Clapping Chuck applauding the player for a job well done. Or drowning and calling for help, either or.
A couple final points and I'll shut up.
-There's a secret area above the sky sublevel's exit to the vertical sublevel. raocow almost found it but he didn't jump over the ceiling at 13:18. There's a dumb injoke message box and a rainbow pipe in there, both references to the aforementioned VLDC6 level.
-I actually wish I hadn't put in the sign with the down arrow at the start of the slide section. I should have left it to the player to discover that it was a huge slide instead of outright telling them. That's the one thing I really would've changed if I were doing this level again.
-There are a ton of little details included in our graphics, probably way too many. I attempted to eliminate as much cutoff as I could, making custom tiles for basically everything that touched the water and left a shadow. There was a ton of ExAnimation done too to include the sparkling water surfaces SMB3's water uses across all the shadowed tiles.
-Neither of us had much experience using the math and carrot platforms so we decided to give them a try. You'll find a lot more of them in the level than most levels use so you could almost consider them a second theme. They didn't really have any big progression though so I think of them more as just stage elements.
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