JUMP ½ - Half a jump is still a jump

[YelseyKing]

I kinda liked XXI. Like raocow, there were a few parts where I literally didn't know what I *could've* done (both spots involving cannons in tight passages), and I felt the Gilgamesh music was kind of out of place (not that I minded, because I love that song), but the gimmick was super neat.

Umbrella was just trippy. Pretty fun stage; not too tough, considering its position. What surprised me the most was learning that the background music came from a *Pokemon* game of all things. I'd have figured it was from a survival horror game or something.

[Awoo]

Man, this hack makes me want to play through Secret of Evermore again.

It's so weird seeing silly vanilla ropemachine climby things, whatever they're called, just happily going about their way in the weird, otherworldly place that was holding an umbrella. Did the SMW creators ever, in their wildest dreams, envision that their creation would be used to create such things when it was made, decades ago?

XXI is quite the Dangerous Disco!

[Kilgamayan]

Thank you post-post-game tower for wishing everyone a happy pride month

[KobaBeach]

i saw a dev video or a dev gif of umbrella once like years ago but completely forgot about it w

[freshtalk]

The up button is the ultimate enemy, here to take vegenace for all the times you didn't tilt Mario's head to look ahead.

This level is cool, though I question the purpose of the trap rooms instead of just making them plain reset doors?

[Validon98]

This level is basically "hey did you know you can hold down to climb vines?" in the second half, which apparently has thrown a LOT of people off, to the point I've heard some people were relying on doing key jumps and such to get past the first instance of it or something. Otherwise, I don't really know how to feel on this one. I was kind of just angry at the second half as a whole while playing and ended up save-state spamming through the part where you had to preserve the shell, since there is literally no indication you have to do so until it's too late and you have to repeat it.

Either way, I think either this or XXI is my least favorite of the four castles. Not sure. Tomorrow we enter Morsel land I guess.

[Sebby19]

Trap rooms make things more interesting.

This level looks like a Knightmare for anyone playing with a control stick, or a wonky D-pad

[Implo]

Today's level was very fun and tricky. I figured out that I can use UP arrow in the air or hold it to not open the door pretty quickly. I was sure that I'm outsmarting level creators. But message at the midpoint forced me to change my opinion. What a weird logic? But it worked. I got surprised.

I too had problem with figuring out door-vine gimmick. At first I used key jump, but it's super precise. Eventually on long door-vine I got forced to use the intended solution. What can I say? This is the first level that force me to grab vines with DOWN arrow. So it took me a lot of time to figure it out.

And, to be honest, this going down on vine is a very interesting gimmick. I would like to see level with DOWN arrow always pressed and using that to do jumps from vine to vine. Of course it would force to make UP arrow inferior or completely disable it. Also make it so you can only regrab vine 1 second after jumping out of it. Otherwise jumps from vine to vine will be impossible. But I don't know if it's even possible. Ah, nevermind.

Still, it was really fun level.

[Peliptia]

woahmegosh❢❢❢ thats so super duper neato⚊pushing down to jump onto a ladder is so secretly clever (^▽^)

[xfix]

A lot of streamers were confused by climbing vines by pressing Down, as in Super Mario Maker it's not possible to climb vines by pressing Down.

[maou shoujo]

Funny enough, our team had lots of trouble choosing a piece of music for umbrella. One proposed piece was an edit of Equinox - Tori, except lolyoshi did something with the instruments to make it sound legitimately unsettling. tori_louder.spc (you'll need a spc 700 player)

Holy shit this is terrifying. I love it, thank you so much for posting it

Please go- PleasegoPleasegoPleasego- Please go to- Trial Lab A

[Mata Hari]

'Potato of shit': a far less effective curse in English

[idol]

thanks for the love for umbrella, my boys.

it was my first planned contribution to jumphalf, but ended up being the last one submitted i think? sans the two levels i did that didn't make it in.

graphics and aesthetics were done by me - they're inspired by .flow. sixcorby jumped in to help build the level during a time where i hit a design block lol. funny how many people are jocking it as yukari shit - it's just Eyes, you know?

level name is from the japanese band boris. i considered changing it later to something unique, but jump team curbstomped that idea right outta shitsville

[Leet]

That's funny because I interpreted it as a followup line to "I saw you in the forest".

[LunarRainbowShyGuy]

I had a lot of fun in this level. I liked how you could hold up before going in front of the doors in the first half, only for the second half to explicitly rule that out. I figured out you can climb the vines with down fairly quickly, and while I wouldn't be surprised if some people took a while to figure it out, I am surprised that people were resorting to key jumps. I guess people just quickly dismissed them as useless or something?

My train of thought was that the vines are clearly there for a reason, and you can't climb them with up, so at that point trying down was really the only option left. Although despite any sort of wisdom I might have I did do something a bit stupid here myself; I ended up in a trap room with a door over a pit and quickly discovered that entering doors in midair only works when going into the trap rooms as I plummeted to my death. Speaking of the trap rooms, I appreciate that as long as you don't die they don't send you back very far.

[Blivsey]

Yeah I know the entire point of jumphalf is "romhack for romhack's sake", and I mostly love that, but this one level just looks... not fun in the least. Like a war against your own reflexes and instincts, and an exercise in frustration. And it has the hack-wide problem of "some of these failure states force you to restart the section, but others just kill you and send you back to the checkpoint" out in full force.

[Arctangent]

frankly i feel like levels like these are the culmination of jump's philosophy of exploiting any sort of mechanic, and that's just awesome

i will echo blisvey at how it also pretty strongly showcased how often soft checkpoints are used instead of just regular ones, though, making it all the more punishing to fail in certain ways. honestly it's a concept that feels extra silly in levels that are more about puzzling out a solution than just being raw platforming, which i suppose the first half was more of a mix but the latter really did feel more puzzle-y than anything else. i guess to some extent the trap room concept justifies it by making the soft checkpoints require a skill check to use, but they're also basically mini puzzle themselves so

also i feel like two things relating to vines were showcased too late, and that's the general thing that vines would've made a waaaay better way to introduce the layer 2 control gimmick by having a vine you have to climb with layer 2 in plain view ( the shell throw method just felt like it had waaaaay too many moving parts to be a good demo ), and the more specific thing that the downward pipe onto a vine layer would've made a waaaay better way to clue into the fact that that you can grab vines while moving down. honestly i don't think that mechanic's even in any other mario game ( i think nintendo might've included it in smw because of the nets? ) so it's just kind of a obscure smw fact check and that feels pretty out of place for this hack, what with how much of the obscure smw mechanic stuff is properly introduced in the levels that use it

tho granted i know that daizo said in the comments that the latter is something he was aware of, it's just that finishing the level was more of a concern for the team and rearranging the level for that would've obviously been a pretty significant undertaking

also something in the comments: one guy brought up that the castle intro showcased the "up moves layer 2 up" gimmick because of the door moving up after demo looks up ... but like, that's obviously not how the gimmick works, due to the delay and it not going down. still, it would've made a neat way to introduce the gimmick, too, although i dunno how much you can edit those intros and it's pretty vulnerable to the player just skipping it on impulse. the latter could be mitigated by just using it to reinforce the vine method, though

actually tho @ the shell demo, now i kinda want see a level where the layer 2's movement is somehow correlated to whether or not a shell is in motion

[Piesonscreations]

This is the first level i've seen where SMW plays you.

[Ashan]

I'm assuming those doors were made specifically for this level, and as a challenging thing. But I'm wondering if they would serve utility as actual doors. Cause SMW doors are really finicky and annoying to enter sometimes. Might not be the worst thing to have doors you can enter by holding up as you walk past?

[Shard1697]

XXI is a cool level but it could have done with ramping up the difficulty/'involvedness' of the gimmick more slowly, for a player who's not used to it yet(because it only applies in this level) there's a lot of parts that you're probably not gonna get until you've failed them once or twice.

[Awoo]

'Potato of shit': a far less effective curse in English

I've always wondered what that translated to.

raocow, consider your French pardoned

[Daizo]

Some fun facts about The Trap Doors:

>The name is a reference to the band "The Doors" and also the british claymation animated series "The Trap Door".
>The original name for the level was "Doors Are Indeed Zany, Obviously". I had it removed upon request since it's a pretty obvious anagram.
>The song was composed by me, tho it was to be removed at least twice. The first instance birthed the melody I wrote during a high school lunch hour while I was messing with the piano. The other was a little more harsh (Someone was going to remix it into a more "edgy" track to basically poke fun at me for being kind of an "edgelord"), which resulted in making this version composed by me and Mellonpizza before they ultimately decided to keep the original.
>The last bit of the revamped Trap Doors theme is a reference to "Riders of the Storm", also by The Doors.
>There was originally going to be a secret easter egg boss by Mellonpizza that we ultimately scrapped along with me giving up the whole level due to lack of motivation and time constraints. Considering JUMP Team did not want to be associated with this "boss" period, I will not reveal what it was. (the arguments to keep the boss around wasn't pretty)
>There used to be three sections rather than the final two in the finalized version, and I am very much betting ft got the idea of "sensitive doors" from the third part of my original version where if you touch "red doors" at all, you get teleported.
>This level was remade 3 times. One that was complete, the second version I dropped, and the third version ft created.
>The "Layer 2 up" gimmick was coded by Mellonpizza for the second version and was reused for the final part.
>The second version's second half was going to have a very different idea entirely. and this was when me and Mellonpizza fully collaborated. The idea was back when it was still called "Doors Are Indeed Zany, Obviously" we were going to have "Zany" doors; Rocket doors, lottery doors, screen scrolling doors, eating doors, and canon doors. Again, due to lack of motivation, this whole idea is scrapped.
>Only 5 of the original trap door rooms was reused in The Trap Doors. These are: Creating Block Crusher, "Thwomp blocking door with an eating block eating the floor", Spike Water Funnel, Spinjump Magikoopa Magic, and the Kaizo Mario World Trap (1 or 2 depending on if you hit the kaizo block above you).
>Version 2's First Half (White door was a skip to the boss arena if you found [and beat] the boss)

...Honestly I could go on and on about the whole level, but I'd rather keep a lot of the mystery. And that is the last level I was involved in... good luck on the final stages raocow!

[KobaBeach]

>There was originally going to be a secret easter egg boss by Mellonpizza that we ultimately scrapped along with me giving up the whole level due to lack of motivation and time constraints. Considering JUMP Team did not want to be associated with this "boss" period, I will not reveal what it was. (the arguments to keep the boss around wasn't pretty)

i know what it was but i dont know if i should say

[KobaBeach]

dagadingding NO

[Mata Hari]

Compton