An SMWCentral Production: A game about some eggs

[limepie20]

Isn't any sort of live farming abusing the engine?

[AUS]

It's not abusing the system, it's the level creator's fault.

/denial

[Pink]

raocow has pointed out a better live-farming place in his videos.
The ghost house in World 2.

If you climb on something and a bullet bill shoots your feet, you can gain 99 lives pretty fast.
Basically it's sort of abusing the engine but hey...

Oh yeah! Completely forgot about that! Thanks for the reminder. =n.n=

Planning to play through all of world 4 between my morning and evening classes today (as well as getting the day's video up), so I shall make use of this!

Kind of reminds me of my Super Mario Galaxy 2 broadcasts where most started off with me getting 99 lives from hopping on the giant koopas in Supermassive Galaxy... XD

[kilon]

Why are midpoints (or the lack of them) always an issue in collab hacks?

[limepie20]

It's not abusing the system, it's the level creator's fault.

/denial

If a cop lets you break a law and you do its still breaking a law.

Edit - oh right the level.
I really liked the atmosphere and how it looks but the level design couldve been a lot better.

[morsel/morceau]

My impression is ASMT was just as bad (and not really that bad) as SMWCP with its pswitch/springboard fetching (that desert level with all the spingboards was helluva long, for example). Gameplay/level quality is fairly even, but I probably like this game better just because it's got Mario in it (and you can skip the stupid cutscenes).

Gotta say, raocow's reaction to the sudden end of cave of lost pride was priceless.

[Somepartsareme]

I gotta say, this hack looks really bad so far. Hiding enemies a la Super Challenge World, invisible holes, hour long levels, horrendously badly placed midpoints, etc. And this is world 3!

EDIT: yeah basically what pink said

[tatanga]

(that desert level with all the spingboards was helluva long, for example).

Ya mean, this bad boy!?

I didn't think it was that long and cumbersome!

[MrDeePay]

Both collabs got hammered for virtually the same reasons (level/boss difficulty, surprise difficulty, over-reliance on P-Switch/Springboard puzzles, pointless gimmicks, blah blah.), yet handled in different fashions.

Why are midpoints (or the lack of them) always an issue in collab hacks?

Some people just never get the memo on appropriately having them or have a "faulty" design philosophy in that not having a checkpoint will make your level harder (which is true, but at the same time a bad idea in many cases). To my recollection, Nimbus Ascent is the only level to have its checkpoint removed because it provides too easy of a shortcut to Sanctuary Fortress though it can still be beaten in roughly about two minutes since it's auto-scroll (and it's a hell of a lot more forgiving than Cave of Lost Pride)

[xjC0n]

About early life-farming:

Weeaboo Manor: There is some water at the blue P-switch in the second area, take a shell there and bounce on it underwater. This was in 1.3, don't know if it was removed or something in later versions. Anyways, even faster than waiting for that bullet bill-shooter if you feel bad about fast-forwarding.

This is actually the first hack ever I have abandoned because I simply couldn't stand playing it (not counting Kaizo-hacks)... I really think this hack is overrated. I think the problem is a lot of level-designers don't want players to rush through their level, and make them longer than they should be in some way. Of course length is sometimes good, but usually "fake-length" like no midpoints, no power-ups (more dying = more restarting), these item-juggling puzzles etc. is not very good..

I don't know about after world 3, but so far.. Well, basically what Pink said.

[AUS]

It's not abusing the system, it's the level creator's fault.

/denial

If a cop lets you break a law and you do its still breaking a law.

Nice analogy, but it's not the same thing.

/denial

[Pink]

...over-reliance on P-Switch/Springboard puzzles...

This is definitely the big one where the two differed. While I know I cannot give a FULL opinion (working on it! XD), this is how I feel thus far...

ASMT - P-Switch/Springboard moments were made very obvious. You always knew you would need the item, and the place to use it would more often than not be pretty close by, no going on "epic adventures" through murderously huge levels just to find one item. (Obvious exception to this statement being Super Puzzle Deluxe, I would include Dusty Desert, but it out-right tells you what you need, where you need it.)

SMWCP - No clear indication whatsoever on what you will need, and it can be very hit or miss whether you need to bring the item with you or not. Item baby-sitting sections tend to be VERY large, having to drag items across nearly entire levels, and this shows up OFTEN. Due to the item requirements not being immediately obvious, a lot of annoying back-tracking may be required unless the solution is known previously. (P-Switch Peak being a serious offender here. How in the world are you supposed to guess you need a silver P-switch HIDDEN BEHIND A BUSH much, much further into the level? Having to redo most of the level because of this is really dumb.)

...I really need to stop with the danged text walls. XD

[AUS]

That's not a text wall, it's more like a text...bar...counter.

[Epsilon Eridani]

While I have little to nothing to input on the matter, reading all of these critique-and-response posts is fairly interesting and somewhat educational to someone with platform game design aspirations.
Lurking lurker is... well, reading all the obviously thought-out posts in this thread.

[MrDeePay]

...over-reliance on P-Switch/Springboard puzzles...

snip snip

yet handled in different fashions

Side effect of people who have faulty design philosophies or can't get creative with the use of them and the levels weren't strictly modded as much as they could*. Or simply just don't (regularly) look at existing levels in the base ROM to see if something they wanted to do wasn't done already or to death. Or a combination of them all and various people need to be slapped for this reason or that.


However, I still think the matter is exaggerated more than it should be.


Related:
http://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=43165 - SMWCP2 topic dedicated to the subject, though "over half" may, too, be an exaggeration (not even half IIRC).
*I'd prefer for collab and contest levels to be modded as if they're being submitted for hosting on SMWC.

[Chompie]

I forgot to say this when it was relevant, argh.

If you're going to hide monty moles' spawing hill thingies, you might as well make invisible underground bombs that go off X seconds from the time they enter the screen. It'd be more fair after all! Or possibly just more honest about what you're doing.

There, that should hold off the ol' snark gland for a few more days.

[McGack]

it is quite annoying not being able to identify if the non coloured dot levels have a secret exit or not

[Mineyl]

Coming out of the shadows just to make a few notes on the p-switch complaints:

I totally understand where everyone is coming from with this constant issue that has been repeated over and over, and I must say that as a level designer for this project, I'm appalled that my fellow contributors couldn't have snooped around other peoples' stages in the hack in order to figure out what there might have been "too much" of so that they wouldn't contribute to a possible problem.

My personal stance on p-switches is to use them only for secret exits, nifty bonuses, or for short timed segments to test the reflexes of the player (save the required puzzles for ghost houses). It's too bad that they're so mandatory throughout the hack, but I hope everyone here can at least understand that SMWCentral is a place that strives to reinvent the way we look at Super Mario World, so it was completely inevitable that people would inject something to make their levels less typical...though the problem is obviously that so many ended up using the same idea to try to do just that.

Basically, many people who designed levels for the hack only contributed one or two stages, so the majority decided to try to incorporate as many of their ideas as possible into a single stage (Cave of Lost Pride being the most prominent example of this in perhaps the entire game), and the hack just ended up being unnecessarily convoluted as a result because the majority of the levels are designed like they were made for a level design contest rather than being smaller, coherent pieces of a bigger, uniform picture.

Yeah, wall of text is a wall. I'm not trying to defend ASMWCP from the criticism here, I'm just trying to provide some insight as to what was going on. I hope all this rambling is coherent enough to understand. :)

[Ometeotl]

So, what was causing the smashed skeletons to change to the blue color in the ghost house-y segments of the level?

[MrDeePay]

Custom sprites set to Palette F.

[AUS]

it is quite annoying not being able to identify if the non coloured dot levels have a secret exit or not

I know, right? I'm going to file a complaint to Nintendo and ask them to fix their game.

[Epsilon Eridani]

it is quite annoying not being able to identify if the non coloured dot levels have a secret exit or not

I know, right? I'm going to file a complaint to Nintendo and ask them to fix their game.

There is at least some way of hacking in an indicator next to the level name... But then again, since the team ran up against memory limitations unexpectedly, it wouldn't be reasonable to expect them to rework it just for that I guess.

[MrDeePay]

All of the Fortress and Ghost Houses with secret exits have enough space in their OW names to allow for a symbol marking to indicate a secret exit. It's a design oversight. I posted all of the levels with one earlier in the topic, but it was behind a tag and, come to think of it, is pretty pointless to do so if the regular levels have clear indicators. Spoiler'd again out of habit, but Rao may want to look at it this time to save himself some trouble.

Weeaboo Manor
Unearthly Hollow
Mining Outpost
Zephyr Manor - Good luck with that one.
Chateau of Storms
The Counterfort
Confusion Chambers

[Rameau's Nephew]

Unearthly Hollow, starring Mario as Fido.

Even so, as much as I dislike this level, I did personally like the little explanatory message box at the beginning; it's sort of a nice touch when the designer tries to make a level seem like a distinct place with its own history rather than simply Mario's personal obstacle course. In this case, it also provides some sort of explanation for that nice-looking but weird "Pretty Rural Autumn with a Bunch of Skulls Incongruously Lying Around for Some Reason" tileset. That said, someone should probably inform the author that sunlight does not work that way. You need to accept that your petunias have left this world, friend.

[Oracle of Wuffing]

That level's music was like ten times better in chipmunk time.

I wish TLs4 would upload more MATH2 videos so I could hammer the point home what I mean when I say some levels just overstay their welcome. I mean, I think you could have the whole level there with a lot less complaints if the pumpkin patch was one level, and then the ghost house parts were another level. It's like, you know, picking an idea and sticking with it is going to turn out better than doing everything all at once.

Also I was doing pumpkins in SMW before it was cool.

On the bright side, at least we can tell that doing the shortcut level actually does save you time in comparison to not doing the shortcut level.