Super Mario Doomsday - Turning Off The Matrix

[FusionWarrior]

When we first got the game running on the Virtual Machine, the error featured today would occur within 15-25 minutes of opening the game. I don't yet know how long this session was, but I was able to play the early game for upwards of 2 hours before it occurred again after all of Ben's work on his side, just to give a sense of how far we came.

I do suggest going into an easy level with a hard save and beating it every time you complete a level you wish to never play again, however.

[Sebby19]

So explain the invisible wall then.

I wonder what was in that alcove in the autoscroll section?

[Arctangent]

I do also feel bad for Ben for how this has gone so far, and particularly for how directly negative people have been.

I mean, there's been a whole lot to be directly negative about, especially recently.

[Voltgloss]

Can someone who has tested playing the build raocow is using please confirm that all levels are, in fact, completable?

[Grounder]

It might be best to leave this game with a bit of dignity and leave it there, as much as it might sting.

[Classtoise]

With how janky and broken these physics are... I apoligize for being mean here: Was it worth the effort to get this game running on Rao's computer?

Absolutely.

Was it really though? Or is this response solely because it is the pet project of you and a friend?

The more I see about this game and hear how much of a hassle it was for raocow to get it to work at times, and how the only way to prevent crashes is "don't play for a while", everything wrong with it on a mechanical and design level, I have to ask, seriously, was it play-tested? And I don't mean "someone used it as an excuse to play the game early". I mean, literally, did someone playtest it, bring up the crash or the controls being slippery, or the enemy physics being off, or puzzles being unclear, or the backtracking to literally the first dot in the game for a hint but having the cutscenes and joke-message blocks everywhere...It feels like whoever play-tested it didn't actually take note of what needed to be fixed or changed. Just "Yep looks like Mario".

Like all credit to Ben, this isn't UNPLAYABLE but honestly, at this point, it feels like it's not FINISHED yet and hasn't been properly tested. This is a very early Alpha game that is being portrayed as a finished project and that's just doing it a whole host of disservices.

[Leet]

Anything can happen in Weirdspace ... even a squid.

(Also I don't think any of the message boxes have ever conveyed anything. This is really oddly consistent, that anything important is on a sign while the message boxes have no unique information at all, not even on a flavor level.)

[Implo]

This was really enjoyable video to watch. Mostly because you had the same problems like me during my playthrough.

I suspect that the invisible wall is just funny way to inform player that: "if you want to continue, you need first to beat main game". Unless thare is some way to beat it.

Castle of Misconception

First of all, raocow, you missed a super useful secret exit. I really encourage you to get it before trying to beat Wart again.

Good job for finding a way to hurt Wart. I needed to look in the Youtube to understand how to do it. It's really misleading that after throwing shell at him he gives "bonk" sound like he was really hurt. Because of that I got time out once.

The best way to fight Wart is to wait for shell at the left size of arena with visible 2 platforms. Bubbles will not spawn but shell will spawn. Take a shell and just before him throwing bubbles: run and throw shell upward. If you time it correctly he will get hurt. Also be careful of backing out too quickly. It can dematerialize shell before hitting Wart and materialize it when you return to him. This is the mechanic in this game and it will screw you a lot in the future.

After hurting him wait under him because he has a tendency to throw leftovers (1-3 bubbles). After that go back to left side. Repeat that few times and you win... or time out.

Another annoying part of this fight is waiting for shells. Sometimes they appear very often. Another time you will need to wait 1 or 2 minutes for 1 shell.

The biggest sin of this level is lack of midpoint... in this version. Midpoint has been added in 2.0.

Also this level took me 2 hours to beat.

Good luck with this level, raocow.

[Veruchai]

(Also I don't think any of the message boxes have ever conveyed anything. This is really oddly consistent, that anything important is on a sign while the message boxes have no unique information at all, not even on a flavor level.)

I suspect two different design cycles.


It seems a common strategy is to just drop the glitchy unfair levels in the postgame where the difficulty is less offensive.
If I ever make a hack I'm thinking of just not having a postgame. Seems to attract more trouble than it's worth.

[The Doctor]

It might be best to leave this game with a bit of dignity and leave it there, as much as it might sting.

Yeah, I'm thinking the same. raocow clearly isn't having fun and the community has turned toxic towards the game. Unless the game dramatically improves after this video, it might be best to just end it here as a interesting, yet failed experiment.

[Leet]

By the way, since nobody is mentioning it even though it seems really obvious: the big flaw in this Wart fight is that Wart's mouth is open for literally only the frames that bubbles are coming out, meaning you have no real opportunity to hurt him. It instantly snaps shut the second that the last bubble has shot, and bubbles never delay in coming out in-between. Traditional Wart is not so rapid-fire, meaning you can find good opportunities to throw.

[The Doctor]

Yeah, Wart's mouth should hang open for a second or so after he finishes spewing bubbles. Or the bubbles need to be slower and follow a predictable pattern.

[Le Neveu de Rameau]

Oh, mamma mia.

[This Eye o' Mine]

With how janky and broken these physics are... I apoligize for being mean here: Was it worth the effort to get this game running on Rao's computer?

Absolutely.

Was it really though? Or is this response solely because it is the pet project of you and a friend?

The more I see about this game and hear how much of a hassle it was for raocow to get it to work at times, and how the only way to prevent crashes is "don't play for a while", everything wrong with it on a mechanical and design level, I have to ask, seriously, was it play-tested? And I don't mean "someone used it as an excuse to play the game early". I mean, literally, did someone playtest it, bring up the crash or the controls being slippery, or the enemy physics being off, or puzzles being unclear, or the backtracking to literally the first dot in the game for a hint but having the cutscenes and joke-message blocks everywhere...It feels like whoever play-tested it didn't actually take note of what needed to be fixed or changed. Just "Yep looks like Mario".

Like all credit to Ben, this isn't UNPLAYABLE but honestly, at this point, it feels like it's not FINISHED yet and hasn't been properly tested. This is a very early Alpha game that is being portrayed as a finished project and that's just doing it a whole host of disservices.

The credits page on the game's website lists quite a few beta testers. That's no indication of how skilled they were at reporting bugs and odd design, or how good the author was at addressing them, but it means testing was indeed done to some degree.

I feel uncomfortable speaking about this for the author, and I might be completely wrong about it, but there's also just a point in a project where you've got all this work done over a long period of time, and you just have this big complex ball of code and design that you don't know what to do with anymore, or what way to address the issues that you know about. But you've worked hard on it, so what're you going to do? Just scrap it and say "well, that's six years wasted"?. It makes sense to me that you'd release it, and at least get some satisfaction that you've completed something, even if it's not the greatest piece of work out there. Maybe get some fresh outside views on what people consider the good and bad points of what you've made.

There's many ways a video game can end up falling flat, but I don't think lack of ambition or testing was the cause here. Maybe too much ambition, combined with not enough insight into what makes Mario fun to play. But hey, that's why it's helpful to get the game out there and get some criticism on it, even if a lot of it ends up being kind of mocking.

[ano0maly]

This is unfortunate.

The boss just wasn't good. The only way to really dodge the bubbles is to cheese it entirely by always hiding in the corner. Given that, it would have been more fun if you didn't have to hit him when he attacks; maybe you could throw it ahead of time and hit with a bouncing shell? And there should be a steady periodic supply of shells. Even if the shell is generated via RNG, there could have been an override that caps how many times Wart can attack without releasing a shell.

I've felt over the course of several videos that this game just doesn't do things different enough to justify not using SMW. Maybe the creator isn't familiar with SMW hacking but I think that if you're intentionally not using SMW, then you should take advantage of that and establish your own setup instead of mimicking SMW rules on things, like collecting five dragon coins. Other than janky physics and some minor differences like red coins, it feels too similar to SMW without actually using it.

I agree with Classtoise on playtesting, but for compatibility issues (with a GameMaker 8 game) I think the blame goes to YoYo Games, the company that made GameMaker.

• GameMaker Studio was released in 2012, and only a few years later GameMaker 8 was discontinued entirely and made unavailable from their site. It would have been better to keep it as legacy software, or if it's no longer supported, just make it free and possibly open source. Of course, that doesn't mean those that already have GM8 can't keep using it, but then there are these two key problems:
• Apparently games made in GameMaker 8 may not work well in Windows newer than 7. There's one GM8 game that may have lag problems in Windows 8, although Windows 10 might be a way to alleviate the issue. It can be said that it's also the fault of Microsoft for significantly changing Windows and introducing these issues, but still, YoYo Games should be responsible for addressing them and accommodating for newer Windows.
• And people that worked with GM8 (like BuzzNBen himself) said that porting a game from GM8 to Studio is quite difficult. It just seems to me that GameMaker is not friendly with transitioning from one version of the software to the next. It's fine to have frequent enough updates for a software, but why make it so hard to go from an old version to a newer one?

So it's hard to play the legacy GameMaker games, and it's hard to port to Studio. So what is the game developer supposed to do? I was told that these problems played a part in Mushroom Kingdom Fusion being canned, too.

[FusionWarrior]

With how janky and broken these physics are... I apoligize for being mean here: Was it worth the effort to get this game running on Rao's computer?

Absolutely.

Was it really though? Or is this response solely because it is the pet project of you and a friend?

The more I see about this game and hear how much of a hassle it was for raocow to get it to work at times, and how the only way to prevent crashes is "don't play for a while", everything wrong with it on a mechanical and design level, I have to ask, seriously, was it play-tested? And I don't mean "someone used it as an excuse to play the game early". I mean, literally, did someone playtest it, bring up the crash or the controls being slippery, or the enemy physics being off, or puzzles being unclear, or the backtracking to literally the first dot in the game for a hint but having the cutscenes and joke-message blocks everywhere...It feels like whoever play-tested it didn't actually take note of what needed to be fixed or changed. Just "Yep looks like Mario".

Like all credit to Ben, this isn't UNPLAYABLE but honestly, at this point, it feels like it's not FINISHED yet and hasn't been properly tested. This is a very early Alpha game that is being portrayed as a finished project and that's just doing it a whole host of disservices.

This is no pet project of mine. I came in only to solve a problem, bringing with me another tech, and try to get it working in a modern environment. I believe heavily in game preservation. I was only concerned with fixing crash related errors. Everything else about this game I was hoping to preserve as is. I never even heard about the game until not long before raocow discovered it didn't work. I have loved raocow's commentary on gaming for many years now, if the game is good, bad, or otherwise. This isn't Cheetahmen level broken either, nor is it as bad as many other games raocow has played. Good or bad is irrelevant, what matters is that the entertainment of the LP exists. I don't want raocow to suffer, obviously, but he himself says he needs to once in a while. If the game can be played, it should be, in it's original form. A SMBX remaster can come later.

I just love technological puzzles, and helping people. Now I sit back and enjoy the carnage or celebration, whichever it may be.

[Voltgloss]

So I looked at another LP on Youtube, of what I assume is an earlier build of this game, to try to figure out what's up with the invisible wall in Weirdspace. The LPer I saw passed through the "invisible wall" without any fanfare or difficulty. One screen's length after that invisible wall, the level turns into an autoscroller. So the "invisible wall" coincides with the start of an autoscroll segment. I suspect revisions made between that LP and the version raocow now has somehow broke the regular-scroll-to-autoscroll transition point and made it an invisible wall.

I suggest this project be postponed until the creator or a tester can confirm the version raocow has is completable... or, alternatively, provide him with a version that HAS been tested to be completable.

I'd like to see where this game goes. I am intrigued enough to want to see this played to completion. But not in its current broken state.

EDIT: second sentence added for clarity

[Alice]

I suspect that the invisible wall is just funny way to inform player that: "if you want to continue, you need first to beat main game". Unless thare is some way to beat it.

I think you and I have a completely different idea of funny. It's a confusing and infuriating way to inform the player of that because it doesn't make it clear there's not some weird glitch going on since it doesn't actually inform you of anything. On top of that the player is basically guaranteed to die when running into it. If the player is on their last life they're going to game over which would frustrate anyone.

raocow's more patient with infuriating game design than I am but if I were playing a game that was that unclear on something and forced me to die several times trying to figure out if it was a bug or not then I'd simply stop playing the game altogether. Though in this one I don't think I'd have even made it this far to begin with. The glitchy hitboxes and generally annoying physics would've turned me off of it almost right away.

The glitchy hitboxes and the physics are something that should have been polished early on because they're one of the most important aspects of the game. It doesn't need to be identical to SMW physics or anything but it definitely needs to be similar enough that the game feels more like an actual Mario game. And for hitboxes, it definitely needs to not feel unfair. When you jump on an enemy and get hurt when you're clearly supposed to be hurting it then there's an issue.

Edit:

• And people that worked with GM8 (like BuzzNBen himself) said that porting a game from GM8 to Studio is quite difficult. It just seems to me that GameMaker is not friendly with transitioning from one version of the software to the next. It's fine to have frequent enough updates for a software, but why make it so hard to go from an old version to a newer one?

It's not necessarily difficult so much as time consuming. There's only a few places that it could be difficult since GMS/GMS2 don't support a handful of things GM8 did because GM8 did some weird things that they didn't want to replicate. As for making it hard to go from older to newer, it was because GMS was a complete overhaul of the GameMaker system. From what I recall it was a ground up recode from scratch and in an entirely different programming language at that.

[Ivy]

the only reason for raocow to keep playing this game is to stave off the last couple of weeks before the release of CLDC tbh

[BobisOnlyBob]

Regarding porting issues: Undertale was developed in GM8 and ported to GMS, and that's a bullet-dodging RPG hybrid. However, it meant one key feature was lost, which was the "live manual" (a local webpage whose images would be edited and updated by the game re-writing files). That feature is in the Undertale Demo, which was released in GM8. Unfortunately, Toby hasn't explained at length how difficulty the porting process was, but he certainly made it seem like quite some effort went into just getting it over to Studio, because the GMS version was more consistently stable across PCs.

Undertale Spoiler: Amusingly, one of the special features of the game is

crashing to desktop at a key plot point. However, that's on purpose...

[FusionWarrior]

In a few days (maybe earlier, likely no later than Thursday) I'm gonna need to be updating the first post late, or some days not at all.

Sorry, real life is gonna be kicking my buttzone something fierce real soon.

[raocow]

it's fine man, real life is more important

[Plutia]

With how janky and broken these physics are... I apoligize for being mean here: Was it worth the effort to get this game running on Rao's computer?

was it worth bothering raocow for ages to get him to play soldexus

[BobisOnlyBob]

With how janky and broken these physics are... I apoligize for being mean here: Was it worth the effort to get this game running on Rao's computer?

was it worth bothering raocow for ages to get him to play soldexus

sebby raises a not unreasonable point, but I cannot argue against this retort

[Sebby19]

I need to go through the request grab-bag and count how many times I suggested Soldexus. I feel people are exaggerating how often I did that. (Please don't count for me)

At least Soldexus worked, even if it was a very simple castlevania. Shame Rao didn't continue with Ava (the 2nd character), he would have liked her playstyle (fluid jumps, ledge grab, projectile, other abilities).