cldc 2018 - layers
- LunarRainbowShyGuy
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Re: (cld—c18) - '—'
I feel like the gimmicks used in each of the levels (yes I'm calling each of the sections levels) had potential, but poor execution leaves it at just that - having potential. I really have issues with the gravity flipping level in particular, with all the things that don't work how it seems like they should (holding up to jump out of the bottom of the water, climb down vines, and throw a block downwards). It almost seems like the creator saw that all these things don't really work properly with the gimmick and decided to make a level out of them when you should really do the opposite; if two things don't work properly together don't put them together. Also, I don't really see the point of giving the player fireballs for Bowser if it's just going to be one of those 'wait until the game gives you a chance to attack' bosses.
- FrozenQuills
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Re: (cld—c18) - '—'
I actually had more issues relating to conveyance and difficult mechanics than the level's massive length, particularly in the gravity and snake sections. It's one of those weird situations where you really appreciate all the creativity and aesthetics but you don't feel as impressed as you should be, even if there are some clever and well executed parts here and there.
Nonetheless, this level did well enough in those categories to get third.
Nonetheless, this level did well enough in those categories to get third.
avatar by crayonchewer!
Re: (cld—c18) - '—'
The green section was definitely the hardest one for me. But you definitely made it harder on yourself by never attempting to get the powerup right at the beginning and having a hit to take through its first part. You sounded pretty annoyed throughout the level and I wonder if it's because of the bad first impressions with the green section since it's slowly, more methodical and feels more punishing if you die than anywhere else. It was definitely my least favorite of the areas, but everything else really grabbed me as fun and creative, especially the ending segment where all three get combined.
- BobisOnlyBob
- Mythical Quadruped
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Re: (cld—c18) - '—'
The final stretch - the combination of the three routes - is definitely the peak of the level, and I can see why the other three areas as necessary to teach the required mechanics to make the fourth area fun and playable. But the half-present, half-absent checkpoint/restart mechanic, semi-punishing deaths, and art and music that are both Fun and Original but still kinda feel awkwardly low quality next to the vanilla assets... it's easy to see that this level is great enough to be in the top three, but not great enough to take it home. It's swiss cheese - it's still delicious, but it's definitely full of holes.
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Ditocoaf
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Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
Gonna make a contest entry that's like "go through the garden, over the castle, across the bridge, then under the boiling sun to reach bowser!" and then halfway through the garden it's like "but wait, you need to collect the three bobs to escape the garden!, check these pocket dimensions!" and then at the end of the first pocket dimension it's like "oh no, the exit portal here is broken in half, go up to get the first half and down to get the second half!" and then either direction you go you run into bowser anyway and the level ends because I'm not actually going to hoodwink you into playing an entire hack.
edit: This has been my entry into the Describe a Good Level Idea contest 2018.
edit: This has been my entry into the Describe a Good Level Idea contest 2018.
Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
I have to agree with what people already said. The presentation of this level is incredibly good, and there are some really neat ideas in there, but the experience is kind of dampened by this funky sort of jank where the gameplay doesn't really feel fully cohesive.
I know this might be controversial, but I've come to realize that I'm not really a huge fan of levels that set up situations where you can get stuck and have to reset, at least in non-puzzle levels. It never feels good when this happens, at least not to me. And I feel like a lot of the time, this reliance on reset doors or reset buttons can become something of a crutch, where the designer doesn't think as much about how intuitive an obstacle is, which in turn can lead to some pretty janky-feeling level design. You could see that in raocow's playthrough of the first half of the level, where there were a lot of situations where he had no idea what he was supposed to do and ended up having to reset because of it.
All that being said, I did really like the Bowser fight at the end. Giving Mario his own health bar was a good way of facilitating a fight where Mario needs to have a fireflower in order to win.
I know this might be controversial, but I've come to realize that I'm not really a huge fan of levels that set up situations where you can get stuck and have to reset, at least in non-puzzle levels. It never feels good when this happens, at least not to me. And I feel like a lot of the time, this reliance on reset doors or reset buttons can become something of a crutch, where the designer doesn't think as much about how intuitive an obstacle is, which in turn can lead to some pretty janky-feeling level design. You could see that in raocow's playthrough of the first half of the level, where there were a lot of situations where he had no idea what he was supposed to do and ended up having to reset because of it.
All that being said, I did really like the Bowser fight at the end. Giving Mario his own health bar was a good way of facilitating a fight where Mario needs to have a fireflower in order to win.
Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
Yeah what amazing presentation! A lot of effort was put into this entry, it's very impressive. Which is why the small quality of life decisions or lack thereof stand out. Instantly resetting the player to the reset position upon death would have alleviated a lot of the issues I think. Puzzle levels that essentially punish experimentation isn't a very good thing. Weird how the Bowser fight is unrelated to anything else in the level, yet I feel taking it out make it feel less complete? It's a nice way of using a boss fight to cap off the long trek into one complete package. I wonder if anyone else feels the same way? Though my feeling might have been different depending on where dying at the boss fight respawns you. Personally I'd make Mario invincible, retry immediately, or make it a scoring-like mechanic where you lose points from getting hit so that the high from completing the actual climax of the level--that section preceding the bossfight--isn't lost.
Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
raocow, don't tell me you've never heard of putting your pizza in a box and eating the leftovers the next day. :D
Same with this level. There's enough content here for 2 videos.
Same with this level. There's enough content here for 2 videos.
- Kilgamayan
- Happy Birthday, Schwer
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Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
Maybe I'm just an old fogey but I feel like death being a setback is the point of having a death mechanic in the first place? Like it'd be one thing if dying at any point sent you all the way back to the superdeeduper beginning of the level, but I thought the respawn points were fair given the level's length.
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Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
Galactic Adventure
Placement: 3
Codename: space
Author: Sariel & Wakana
some stuff:
how people feel about this level is usually how i feel about levels like miraclewater's entry - really interesting stuff, but just too much of it. it's interesting to see how this is where other people cross the line on that, i suppose i get burnt out on a level a lot quicker.
also, this level made me realize i have a weird history with wakana when it comes to cldc. i won cldc in 2016, with an entry that involved space, upside-down gravity, and snake blocks. also? wakana judged that contest
this year?
Placement: 3
Codename: space
Author: Sariel & Wakana
how people feel about this level is usually how i feel about levels like miraclewater's entry - really interesting stuff, but just too much of it. it's interesting to see how this is where other people cross the line on that, i suppose i get burnt out on a level a lot quicker.
also, this level made me realize i have a weird history with wakana when it comes to cldc. i won cldc in 2016, with an entry that involved space, upside-down gravity, and snake blocks. also? wakana judged that contest
this year?
wakana and i both did nes-styled levels! although we weren't able to get the 8bit sfx set up, and we had to use msu-1 for the music because neither me nor katrina were porters
(future video spoilers)- Arctangent
- squawky
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Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
Well then, why not just have the unwinnable states be full of spikes? Half-baking something often feels a lot worse than baking it all the way or just serving it raw, and having a generous checkpoint system in place clearly implemented and ready to use just feels like a slap in the face when it gets yanked away from you in the time you'd need it most.Kilgamayan wrote: ↑5 years ago Maybe I'm just an old fogey but I feel like death being a setback is the point of having a death mechanic in the first place? Like it'd be one thing if dying at any point sent you all the way back to the superdeeduper beginning of the level, but I thought the respawn points were fair given the level's length.
There's also something to be said about incentivizing your player to try and intentionally fail if failing unintentionally while trying to succeed ends up punishing you more.
- Kilgamayan
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Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
...I don't know if it's because of your hyperbole or my lack of Super Mario World expertise, but I genuinely have no idea what you're talking about.
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Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
I agree with you here. This feels like the same problem a lot of VLDC levels have where they think longer=better and that by putting a ton into the level and... I guess trapping the judge there will leave a better impression? Or at least a stronger one.idol wrote: ↑5 years ago how people feel about this level is usually how i feel about levels like miraclewater's entry - really interesting stuff, but just too much of it. it's interesting to see how this is where other people cross the line on that, i suppose i get burnt out on a level a lot quicker.
This CLDC has made me honestly want to take my own crack at an "8-bit" style level. They seem super fun and it'd be an excuse to use rad Kirby and Gimmick! graphics.
Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
the issue of long levels in contests is probably because there is no guideline for difficulty/length as in the context of a hack. When making a level for a hack, you know when "enough is enough" because it just won't fit in the hack (unless the entire hack has mega long levels lol). The other "issue" is that, when you have a ton of ideas, you are more likely to pack them all into a contest entry than a random level in your own hack. You can always create the gimmick in a different level of your hack, but since the contest entry happens only once, you want to take the opportunity to include your ideas. It's also hard for you to voluntarily cut ideas from a level I think cause you'll 1. feel like the effort was put to waste, or 2. worried that the idea you cut may have spurred the judge's interest. Also, as the level creator, you are less likely to feel like your level is too long as a judge who has already played 10 long entries.
The idea that designers feel like they are "trapping" the judges to get more credit is just silly lol. You'll probably find that most designers of long levels don't actually think their levels are "too long". They most likely won't realize that people will react to the length (example: I had NO idea eminus and I's vldcx entry was very long until people said it was lol, it just simply did not occur to me)
The idea that designers feel like they are "trapping" the judges to get more credit is just silly lol. You'll probably find that most designers of long levels don't actually think their levels are "too long". They most likely won't realize that people will react to the length (example: I had NO idea eminus and I's vldcx entry was very long until people said it was lol, it just simply did not occur to me)
Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
Yeah, other than the general guideline of "Don't be Haimari", length seems like a real gray area. Especially since you don't know how much people are gonna be playing in one sitting when they get to your level. I might not even notice the length while playing simply because I might just end up playing half a level and taking a break. On the other hand, some might've already played about 8 or 9 levels before this and ended up getting fatigued. In the case of contests, I guess short levels are best since judges will be blowing through several in a row.
Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
The issue here is the inconsistency the level presents. You have two separate fail states. One of which sets you back a lot while usually being easier to trigger then the other sets you back only a little bit but only in certain rooms under certain circumstances and it's typically harder to fulfill those circumstances than the more severe fail state. It ends up feeling kinda cheap. They even could have kept that by changing how thins work. Having the easy to trigger fail state being the one that only sets you back a little while the harder to trigger one set you back a lot wouldn't feel so cheap and inconsistent. It'd be a penalty actually lining up with how badly you screwed up.Kilgamayan wrote: ↑5 years agoMaybe I'm just an old fogey but I feel like death being a setback is the point of having a death mechanic in the first place? Like it'd be one thing if dying at any point sent you all the way back to the superdeeduper beginning of the level, but I thought the respawn points were fair given the level's length.
Though in my opinion having deaths differ from the manual resets to begin with is a bad design choice. Especially since the manual resets aren't even usable in the last two rooms at all. Should've just gone with no manual resets or deaths count as manual resets.
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Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
I think at the very least the level could've benefitted from a fast retry system after death, where dying would also put you back to where retrying would. Then maybe make tbe second snake room a checkpoint for good measure. Level's still long, but you don't have to go through the death animation and run back to where you were every time.
- Kilgamayan
- Happy Birthday, Schwer
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Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
See, from a gameplay perspective, I didn't see it as an inconsistency so much as a bonus that makes the level less unforgiving. The level would have been perfectly possible without it, but it would have been much more annoying to get yourself stuck with the only recourse being to kill yourself (such as any puzzle with a finite number of grabbable blocks). We also don't necessarily know how the reset system worked from a coding perspective*. Since the reset system required Mario to be alive to activate it, it's entirely possible that it would have been functionally impossible to make death trigger respawns and reset system respawns work exactly the same way. Perhaps someone with more Super Mario World programming knowledge could address this.
*The reset system probably did not exist in any of the snake platform rooms due to programming limitations; Based on how Mario respawns using the reset system, I'm guessing it functions akin to a reset door/pipe, which means the snake would have been reset to the very beginning of the room, making it suddenly 100% impossible to complete the room (with, again, the only recourse being to kill yourself). This would also support my theory that it was not possible to make death trigger respawns and reset system respawns work exactly the same way, since enemy damage and bottomless pits are not reset doors/pipes. But, again, I'm not an SMW expert, so I may be completely off-base here.
The long and short of it is that I imagine the level creators looked at the options of (a) having no reset system and making all failures, no matter how minute, overly punishing, (b) having nothing but the reset system, which amounts to a situation where the game is basically forcing save states on the player, thereby trivializing most of the difficulty, or (c) something between the two, which makes for a tough but fair level on the whole. I don't blame the level creators at all for choosing the third option.
*The reset system probably did not exist in any of the snake platform rooms due to programming limitations; Based on how Mario respawns using the reset system, I'm guessing it functions akin to a reset door/pipe, which means the snake would have been reset to the very beginning of the room, making it suddenly 100% impossible to complete the room (with, again, the only recourse being to kill yourself). This would also support my theory that it was not possible to make death trigger respawns and reset system respawns work exactly the same way, since enemy damage and bottomless pits are not reset doors/pipes. But, again, I'm not an SMW expert, so I may be completely off-base here.
The long and short of it is that I imagine the level creators looked at the options of (a) having no reset system and making all failures, no matter how minute, overly punishing, (b) having nothing but the reset system, which amounts to a situation where the game is basically forcing save states on the player, thereby trivializing most of the difficulty, or (c) something between the two, which makes for a tough but fair level on the whole. I don't blame the level creators at all for choosing the third option.
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Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
I feel like arguments like "I just never noticed the length" break down when it's 4 entirely separate, distinct, and unrelated gimmicks.
Yeah a giant puzzle level you get lost in the puzzle and don't realize how long it takes. Not, like, this. This was clearly designed as multiple levels.
Yeah a giant puzzle level you get lost in the puzzle and don't realize how long it takes. Not, like, this. This was clearly designed as multiple levels.
- FrozenQuills
- hehe haha 2024
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Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
fun fact: the first draft of today's level was extremely janky, complicated, and involved cannons following you spitting out saws.
Yeah I think the cat shell streams worked out better.
Yeah I think the cat shell streams worked out better.
avatar by crayonchewer!
Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
VERY VANILLA CALAMITOUS CAT CANNON CANYON CAKEWALK
Placement: 2
Codename: harvey
Author: FrozenQuills
this was fqs first level concept:
Placement: 2
Codename: harvey
Author: FrozenQuills
- raocow
- the death of the incredible huge
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Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
that's a lot less cute
the chillaxest of dragons
Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
Just put a cat face in the middle of the saw. Problem solved.
- LunarRainbowShyGuy
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Re: chocolate hack design contest - ten shots per screen
I wonder about that... well, there's only one way to know for sure. *spends 5 minutes drawing a cat face on a saw*
Anyway, this level looked pretty fun. In fact, I almost want to play it for myself, which is pretty rare for SMW hacks. Also, it's always nice seeing raocow react to cute cats.
I guess it does look kind of cute, though some one who's actually experienced with sprite art could probably do better.Anyway, this level looked pretty fun. In fact, I almost want to play it for myself, which is pretty rare for SMW hacks. Also, it's always nice seeing raocow react to cute cats.