A 2nd X Thing Gaiden 2 - Now Even MORE Festive!

[KobaBeach]

I went for as light and short as possible tbh. since it's like the 2nd level I tried to make something that really lets you get a feel for how pily interacts with things, but theres always someone who doesn't feel for those kinda levels and uh well can't please them all

again, you did good.

I never played Endless Duel but the OST came to me randomly one day and I could not get it out of my head until I made a level around the music. anime games tend to have great music even if the games aren't the best sometimes.

endless duel is legit one of the better fighters on the snes, up there with super sf2, but not as well balanced. i'd suggest you give it a spin.

gundam heavyarms' theme is a classic

[wyldstrykr]

sorry for the very late reply.
first of all i would like to thank SAJewers for the edits and fiXes of my level, specially the writing. my writing is not as good.
also thanks for the others for the feedback i got during the submission phase and before that.
this is my first/second level
<VERY LONG TEXT BEWARE>

level spoiler/references/commentary/etc

i had troubles with googling things and adding things because i havent watch other raocow lps.
when the sprite changes to aXmt style i think of asking to aXmt discord for the names of the sprites but decided not to so that the original will tell you what custom sprite is behaving to. some of the teXt or sprite gets change in the final one.
i like the fact that you can walk, use fireball in some of the message boXes

0 intro: the level starts on a snow theme where a ninji from the ninji saga(2007) tell phily to collect 16 coins only to find out that you actually need 22 coins due to inflation. there is no ninji from the start and youll get a teXtbobX instead before. youll greeted afterwards with rickroll from 2008

in the first draft, i just take the cat sprite until theres a patch on the devkit that added the cages. i edit the cage and added it to the eXisting cat planet sprite. and no you cant proceed if you didnt free the cat.

1 goomba planet: there a tofuman that streches from marisa and alice 1 (2009)
2 koopa planet: change the planet to paranet because of the para koopas but some of the para koopa is changed to koopa. there are coins from spelunky (2010) for the player to collect.
3 crab planet: theres a giant crab hitboX joke once you touch the cat.
because of making the room two screens, i had despawning issues.

if you burn all the crabs eXcept the white crab from swim ikachan! (2011) imitating a mushroom, you can spawn a black cat. now you only need to burn the top left one and it sometimes despawn too.

theres also a trap cloud that slowly became transparent when youre near it just like in marisa and alice 2 trap tower (2012)
4 fuZZy planet: the right side is only present on the first draft and the diZZy guy gets spammed a lot. it gets nerf heavily and added clouds for some people that thinks pressing down and altJump is awkward.
theres a blue arrow showing wheres the gravity pointing to like in hinas fluffy dream (2013) and a heart from valdis story (2014)
4.1 crow planet:

collecting all the blue coin will spawn a black cat but its probably impossible for me to do, at least for me.

5 pipe/plant planet: changes to pipe plan't for the low end jokes. theres diamonds from shovel knight(2015)
6 jump planet: added blocks so that the player will be warned about the high jump. and replaces lava with hurt blocks if the player attemps to bypass the challenge (use fireball instead). theres coins from wario land 4 (2016) to collect
7 dino planet: killing the dino at the top will spawn another one that will defend the fishes from aquaria (2017) that being cooked for dinner.
8 puZZle planet: a recreation of this puZZle. touching a cat will make "gonna redo the puZZle: the level" teXt appear but gets removed due to feedback. theres apple/raspberry/strawberry from celeste (2018) acting as a mushroom.
9 mouse planet: theres 6 mousers but gets halved so that the player is safe from the bombs while figuring things out. SAJewers added a hint because the solution is very obscure.

killing all the mousers will spawn a black cat.

theres gems from henry hatswroth (2019) acting as a coins.

after entering the door, theres a GIF of "GO" from metal slug (2020) that you should go to skip:
10 trap planet: it forces the player to have 1 hit left and hoping for the player to like "i wonder what this does?? *dies* hahahaha" there are many ways to get trapped/trolled such as
10.1 getting the mushroom hoping to get one more hit gets only the head bigger and dies because of how stupid is it.
10.2 getting the key to get from the locked door and hoping to gets bounced by the koopa will alert the koopa and gets away very fast.
10.3 getting p-wing so that you could fly with made phily turn into a coins is a joke from mario 3 coinless run lp(?) where raocow keeps calling p-wing a p-switch.
10.4 getting a stopwatch that will stop time so that you can bounce on the koopa will spawn koopa and freeZes everyone. raocow breaks it and i didnt think that would happen. my bad. this is what should happen
10.5 riding a yoshi and hoping to yoshi jump on the very left will do the reverse due to how phily code, it breaks my code and as a small jump. this should happen instead.

10.6 hitting the brick for something usefull will make pily dies like a brick
10.7 attempting to go over the door will get burned. and
10.8 going to the pipe leads to the saw room
i want to add more traps but i had no idea, inappropriate, lame or hard to implement.
eXperiencing all 8 will spawn the black cat.

and finally the door is not stop so you can go through without problems like the one level in the previous advent.
11 Zony (from Zwei -1) planet: i recreated the Zony stand that requires player to do:
11.2 ducking
11.3 waiting for the BGM to loop
11.4 grab something
11.5 pressing altRun
11.6 pausing the game
11.7 going above the camera
11.8 climb a vine
11.9 touch the (9) Zony and
11.1 overflow one of the Zony by increasing the counter above 9 killing you in the process. the last sign is hinting this.
making X/X removes the barrier otherwise, it will close immidiately.
i added a teXtfile of what Zony does in case i forgot it and enjl finds it.
originally you need to unlock 4 of them to proceed but due to very easy to screw up, it reduces to 1.

opening most of the Zonies will spawn a black cat.

12 ghost planet: added some unreachable ghost in pattern to make it spammy
13 cheap planet: theres only one of it indicated by the coins makes is very cheap.
14 and to end it up with a "cat planet" i opt to screenshot a video from cat planet instead referencing the 16 coins from intro.
the end is referencing the ending of cat planet cat planet

boss part

since im using cats, i should probably also use cats and there is one thing i see in the thread: photorealistic cat from bunny must die.
the cutscene referenced the bunny talking to the cat while the cat only respond with a "meow". i added the transition from the meow for the talking part as the reason for the fight.
watching the lp of bunny must die i only see 2 attacks. the one with paws and the paws using fire. i should use the podobos but it would made it hard so i decided against it, those 2 attack has a variation with isnt included because of the siZe of the sprite and how hard is it to jump over it. only 1 attack has a variation which increases the paws the lower the hp is up to 4
an alternate cutscene happens if you somehow die in the boss fight.
the ending is just making sure that the gift has a function.
the writing is almost entirely changed by SAJewers and im thankful for that as i have no talent for it.

i used a lot of cloud thus the name. theres probably still remains of the removed part in the level file and the folder.
apologies for the badly drawn Zony stand and a badly edited cage sprite.
despite the downs and ups, i still have fun making it. and if there an opportunity to make another one, ill do it.
PS: sorry for the typos, caps Z and X and grammar errors

boring history

somewhere in 2021 before the chocolate contest 2021, i just watch advent 2020 and its mostly levels and digital thingy and think to myself, "since giving real things is out of the question and its purely digital, why should i join and give raocow something??"
and i read the advent thread 2020 in talkhaus and decided to make a level because of how easy to make custom things in SMBX.

my first line of thought it make a "cat planet" level. and to make it somehow unique is to make it so that touching the cat will do something else like making some obstacles appear.
but i need to learn/read a lot of coding to do that, luckily theres already https://docs.codehaus.moe/#/ along with a SMBX discord that will answer most if not all question i have.

after doing about 10-15% of the level, chocolate contest 2021 appeared and i joined for experience and fun. so i stalled the level and make a second level for the submission. it got last place and its because of my design choices and very little on the level (or maybe they forgot the level due to my design choices) itself. i got sad but despite that, there is one if not two that have fun in few/some parts of my level despite the issues.

after a month of doing something else/being sad ill continue making the cat planet level. it is only one screen rooms for about 20 rooms and its gets cut to about 13 rooms not including the intro and few rooms. that include a yump 38 room and a quiZ room. those two rooms gets critiZed a lot along with the spammy section and very claustrophobic nature of the rooms. it even have every element of a bad level design which few/some of them is present on the final level. i apologiZed for those.

some days passed and i look at the advent thread and look at the eXcel files and theres my level with "awaiting update" on my level so i touch my level again and try to fiXes the issues.
im my mind, it needs to be spammy for it to make the "planet" some sense. for the claustrophobic nature, i made it 2 screens per room eXcept for few. for it to make it spammy but not spammy is to place things and generator out of players reach or it will go offscreen in 1 second.since one of the feedback that my level can be improved but its probably in the last place, i tried to add something. since in the last advent theres an image of every raocow he played on 2020,i should do the same thing. my first attempt is make an npc on a game raocow lped one per year but its gets thrown out due to the claim thread. so i did make background/items instead. i submit it and i didnt get any replies at all.

afterwards i did attempt the gift eXchange cutscene my first draft is here and here

but i read in a thread that either do "rescue a npc from the goverment" or "defeat a government npc" so i did a boss level but enjl says those 2 must not have a boss fight and pily cannot die from those things so i did do a another cutscene instead. not sure why let it slide tho?

[EllenHouraisan]

Pilly's so dedicated, she even went to the afterlife to stop big government.

[Rixithechao]

i dont think broadsword can be fixed. he's like a curse

which saddens me because he is one of my favorite ASMT characters

but yeah. broadsword, or at least his playable form in SMBX2, is most likely literally cursed. Like, by a wizard or something.

[helucard]

I gotta be honest, I'm loving this, like, there's So Much going on in it that just blows my mind. Pily's abilities, the tech being introduced, the fact that powerups remain on being hit to prevent gimmick breaking, the entirety of yesterday's level being built around an instant restart to offset the difficulty, the absolutely STELLAR references to other LPs (my GOSH, that Iconoclasts segment was super well made, Mabel, what the heck, HOW???)... I love this so much.

I do gotta ask though, on the day select, is Pily wearing a sunglass, or an eyepatch?

Also, are the Government sign loading screens supposed to be

evoking the shape of Dr Wily's head, because I'm getting Vibes, and that would be very on-brand for our very unsubtle Gamma-thieving, Mr X impersonating, Roboenza programming scoundrel...

[raocow]

man, so many small references everywhere, there's a few that I missed

[Emral]

that Iconoclasts segment was super well made, Mabel, what the heck, HOW???

That cutscene was my doing
Like last year, for cutscenes made by the organizers we didn't go out of our way to drop our names on every other day just for those.
If there is a cutscene that happens in the same level file as the level it's attached to, chances are high it's made by the same person, and if it's in a different level file it's prooobably by the organizers, but I can think of at least one exception to each of these rules, so I'm happy to provide a more detailed breakdown at the end of the series.

[helucard]

that Iconoclasts segment was super well made, Mabel, what the heck, HOW???

That cutscene was my doing
Like last year, for cutscenes made by the organizers we didn't go out of our way to drop our names on every other day just for those.
If there is a cutscene that happens in the same level file as the level it's attached to, chances are high it's made by the same person, and if it's in a different level file it's prooobably by the organizers, but I can think of at least one exception to each of these rules, so I'm happy to provide a more detailed breakdown at the end of the series.

Given that I know the kinda SMBX magic that you're capable of (and entirely owe my learning of the engine to your tutorials and guidance), yeah, I can fully believe that if anyone would be capable of this, you'd be right up there. It doesn't make it any less impressive though, this is incredible.

Regarding things being in different level files though, I have zero idea whether something is in the same level file or not. Are loading screens the bridge between them?

[Emral]

Regarding things being in different level files though, I have zero idea whether something is in the same level file or not. Are loading screens the bridge between them?

Yep!

[Grounder]

[Nimono]

i did not expect to see the boss arena for soul of key from my MAFAB2 entry in today's level LOL

[WinterSweater]

I was worried there would not be enough people this year, but everything is turning out great

[camwoodstock]

it turns out the real key boss were the friends we made along the way. also was this literally just for an elaborate callback joke to the corn image in last year's gallery??? this is exceedingly silly and high-effort and i love it ngl.

&: As a wise man once said: "Corn is good. I like corn"

[SAJewers]

sure can't wait to see this next year /s

also: https://www.mariowiki.com/Donkey_Kong_(slot_machine) https://www.mariowiki.com/Mario_Kart_64_(slot_machine)(the mario64 one doesn't have a mariowiki page for some reason)

So yeah, There was an official Sonic Fruit Machine that raocow missed for AtS, and I'd been trying to find a way to see if raocow could somehow play it that didn't involve buying a real machine and shipping it to his home. Doing some research in September lead me to find out there's an emulator for these things, and, not only was the sonic one playable, there are also ones for Donkey Kong, Mario Kart, and Mario 64. One for AtS, one for the next inevitable ape game, one for "soft all the mario", and one becaude i have no idea if that includes mario kart.

edit: here's someone who seems to know what they're doing playing the dk one, maybe this will help for now until someone who actually knows how to play these comments

[EllenHouraisan]

The Mario on that logo looks so threatening.

[camwoodstock]

the desert! it dares you! will you succeed??? this is REALLY silly despite how simple it is. i think what makes it is the "OH MAN I HOPE I BEAT THE VIDEOGAME!" and "I THINK I DID IT!" audio clips from pastcow there. also, like, HOLY ACTUAL COW THESE CUTSCENES??? HOW DO SOME OF THESE EFFECTS WORK???

mr. raocow clicking a .bat file like its Nothing Nothing At All. and like not only does mr. rao "bubsy 2" cow does this, but like... we admittedly didn't process this very well but like. are these??? emulated casino slot machines??? that super mario 64 one especially is Bizarre to me specifically, as to our knowledge, there is no information about it on the mario wiki??? they have the mk64 one. they have the donkey kong one. they do not have the SM64 one. mr. sa jewers has just given raocow what is, to the bestest of our understandings, one of the most obscure mario games... uh... period. this is already weird enough in emulation form, can you imagine how it'd be in real life? in the flesh? this machine blinking at you??? ...probably not with a floating super mario 64 logo in your peripheral vision. we'd be 100% down for a Slots 2: The Revisit at a later date--my vote goes to calling it a2xt gaiden 2 gaiden

&: I just had the thought of a "Dessert Dare". What would this Be? I will let you decide. Also uh, hey jan Misali? Does Super Mario 64 (slot machine) count as a part of the mainline Super Mario series?

[KobaBeach]

who the fuck is jon missile

the emulated slot machines gave me sinister liminal space "lost media" vibes and the noise was frightening. if i was raocow i'd just close the window in a panic my first time

FAKE EDIT:

what the fuck is this

and how is this person one year younger than me

So yeah, There was an official Sonic Fruit Machine that raocow missed for AtS, and I'd been trying to find a way to see if raocow could somehow play it that didn't involve buying a real machine and shipping it to his home. Doing some research in September lead me to find out there's an emulator for these things, and, not only was the sonic one playable, there are also ones for Donkey Kong, Mario Kart, and Mario 64. One for AtS, one for the next inevitable ape game, one for "soft all the mario", and one becaude i have no idea if that includes mario kart.

god you people really want raocow to play every fucking game. /positive

[Grounder]

maygay

[Catabo]

Speaking of binding alt-run to a shoulder button: is there a way to have simultaneous bindings in SMBX? My norm for SMW is to have spin jump bound to both A and R2 (GBA babby, but also so I don't have to worry about which run button I'm holding to be able to comfortably spin jump) and alt run to both X and L2.

[Grounder]

i like the idea of this level

[PSI Ninja]

Oh man, I felt sick to my stomach after watching the first few minutes of the video. When raocow somehow died at the very beginning, I thought it royally screwed things up, because of the trouble he had in getting Baton's first orb jump to work. Unfortunately, it kind of set the tone for the rest of the video and seemed to sour enjoyment of all the silly cutscenes I made.

Here's the YT comment I posted earlier:

Oh, no! My heart stopped a few minutes in when you had trouble making my level's main gimmick work (pressing "alt run" when Baton is touching an orb makes her jump). I seriously thought that everything just... broke when you somehow died at the start of the level. I thought I had positioned Baton (who was invisible) in a way to avoid that. Apparently not.

Also, this happens to be the first thing of mine you've ever played! It's also the first full SMBX level I ever made. This is the first time I'm seeing this version of the level - Enjl fixed a potential softlock and added that cool glowing effect to the orbs.

Yes, all of the stage music are from the Mana games, because I've always loved their soundtracks. Since the level had a wintry theme, I knew a couple of snowy tracks that I could use. High Tension Wire isn't a wintry song, but it's just really cool in general and I thought it was suitable for the chase segment.

Speaking of, the chase was my attempt at doing something vaguely in the spirit of Tadpole Treble/rhythm-based games. My highest score is 15342. The whole thing seems hard to optimize, so I don't know what the theoretical maximum score is. But still, I'm pretty sure it's impossible to surpass even Sheath. The reason I had the organizers warn raocow about changing "alt run" from a face button to a shoulder button was to prevent awkwardness with controller grip during intense sections like this. I really do wonder how different things would've been if the changes to your controller scheme actually saved.

I make a bunch of references here, but there are two I wanted to point out. The first is the "Monsters" comment, which was meant to be a small dig at raocow. For those who don't know or remember, "Monsters" is what raocow calls people who don't use "Hasty" egg-throwing when playing Yoshi's Island hacks. As a "Patient" player myself, I've always wanted to get back at him for saying that, haha. Second, Pily's text "Everyone has suspiciously even numbers" is also a direct quote from raocow, which is what he said when seeing the high scores after playing Zool. That video came out at the time I was writing the dialogue for the final cutscene, and I thought it was too coincidental not to use.

Despite lots of back-and-forth between me and the organizers, I see that the level's still in pretty rough shape now that I've watched someone else struggle through it (sorry about that). But I think I stand by what I made, and I'm proud of it, especially having had very little level design and coding experience.

And here are some development notes (length warning):

I knew that I wanted to make something unconventional for Advent, and I was inspired by the Tadpole Treble LP to make a rhythm-based level. Fittingly, I decided to incorporate Tadpole Treble as the theme. Since this was a SMBX thing, I was confident that I could learn enough Lua to code any new gameplay mechanics that would be impossible or too difficult for me to make in SMW with ASM. My first idea was an autoscroller, with Pily swimming up and down a musical staff to avoid hazards just like in Tadpole Treble. The BGM would've been to the tune of Thunder Creek, with custom lyrics sung using UTAU or something similar. But I soon realized that I couldn't do a Thunder Creek homage justice, and that it wasn't worth it to learn voice synthesizer software for a one-off thing. Also, I thought that having the autoscroller by itself wasn't enough.

Then, I remembered LunarRainbowShyGuy's MaFAB2 entry, which used 2 Player Mode to control both Toad and Peach at the same time. However, it was only for a single screen. I thought it would be cool to do something similar, but for a full level. Tadpole Treble portrays Baton as being courageous, so I didn't want to make her a typical damsel in distress. So I came up with the idea that Pily and Baton can work together to overcome level obstacles, using their physics of interaction with each other. I had to make a lot of tough design decisions early on, such as: (1) should there be health, and if so, how much health should Pily and Baton have, (2) should it be shared or separate health, (3) can Baton jump whenever she wants, or only at certain points, (4) how to handle the case when Baton doesn't land in water, (5) when should the player get damaged, (6) does one character getting damaged affect the other, etc. I guess you could say that some of the decisions I made were arbitrary, which ended up giving raocow a bad experience.

The main mechanic of my level was Baton's jump. In order to code it, I had to learn three things: (1) how to use Lua in the first place, (2) the SMBX2 API, and (3) the A2XT2-specific libraries. From the beginning of November I worked probably 2-4 hours per day on my level. The vast majority of time was spent on coding, scripting the cutscenes, and incremental testing. The actual level designing portion took much, much less time. In my mind I already knew what kinds of setups I wanted, so it was just a matter of decorating around them and walling off parts to hopefully teach the player about the mechanics in a friendly way. Looks like I should've spent more time on that. Thanks to Enjl for helping me discover some softlocks which were then fixed, and helping to optimize my code in various ways. Also, thanks to Enjl and Rixi for testing my level (I don't know if anyone else gave it a try).

Regarding the graphics, yes, I was aware that Baton and Melody were large relative to Pily. At first, I was thinking of writing into the plot that the Government poisoned the water and either made Pily shrink or the frogs grow larger. But it sounded too forced, so I just kept them big without question. Since I don't own Tadpole Treble, I had to rip the graphics directly from raocow's videos. For the Challenge Fly song, I had to pull it from another source, because raocow kept talking over it, haha.

Also, my original autoscroller idea became the chase segment at the end. At the suggestion of my testers, I added in the pink bubbles to help guide the player away from danger, and to incentivize collecting them for a higher score. But looking at the video, it just seems like a lot of visual noise and probably made things harder. To make it easier, I think I should've either made the autoscroller slower, or pulled both Pily and Baton further back to increase reaction time. This is personal bias, but I think that section feels really great when you get good at it, and it's fun to keep trying for a higher score.

If I had infinite time, I would've fixed the following things:

• Cleaned up the Tadpole Treble graphics a bit more
• Used Melody's "emoji" expressions in her message boxes
• Used Baton's other facial reactions from the original game
• Attached the free-floating orbs to plants, like in the original game
• Fixed Pily's running animation during the chase (it goes at like, double speed after you jump once)
• Fixed the glitch where powerups sometimes give the player 2 HP instead of 1 HP

I took a big risk by coding a strange, new gimmick despite the fact that Pily herself already has strange, new mechanics. But ultimately, I wanted to challenge myself. So I stand by my creation - I had fun making it, and I'm proud that I was able to figure all this out in about three weeks. Anyway, sorry if frustratedcow sapped your enjoyment of the video. To (hopefully) make up for that, here are some funny outtakes from when I was tweaking and perfecting the timing of the cutscenes:

Post mortem dialogue

Baton having fun

Bouncy camera

Pily's fail jump

[Dragon Fogel]

Okay, that last one is amazing and I'm glad we got to see it.

[KobaBeach]

this stage is alright and anyone who complains is a fucking cunt

my one suggestion would be to make baton less fragile in the platforming segments by removing her health and just make the boss chase segment kinder, but you ran out of time so whoop de fuckin do

lov mana

[wyldstrykr]

ill complain. its nearly impossible to score 20000 on that rocket run minigame at the end. if theres a multiplier if you dont get hit then probably??

[PSI Ninja]

^ That reminds me, I wanted to say something about the scoring system. The score goes up by 1 every frame, the player get 10 points for every pink bubble popped, and 100 points for every enemy that Pily kills, each orb that Baton successfully hits, and each powerup boost that the player collects. Getting damaged in any way is a 100 point loss. If you make contact with the missile, it explodes and it's an instant death. But I find that's difficult to make happen naturally. It's not a very sophisticated system, and if I had more time, then I would've considered multipliers and other fancy stuff. But of course, anything can be better if you had more time.

Even if you play perfectly, I think it's still impossible to beat Sheath's score of 20000. The positioning on the leaderboard is hard-coded anyway, so it was all meant to be a joke. My strat for getting a high score was to avoid as much damage as possible, collect as many bubbles as I could, and to not collect the powerups. Interestingly, there seems to be a net loss in points whenever you get a boost. I'm thinking it's because it makes you spend less time in the section, so fewer frames and thus not as many points. The extra health awarded by powerups, and the extra points you get when you avoid them turns out to be a really good tradeoff. I haven't been able to do a damageless run yet, but it's definitely possible. This minigame is hard to optimize, so I think it has some good replay value.

Maybe for the public release, we can further increase the hitboxes of the yellow orbs, at least for the chase section. Moving the players further back or slowing down the autoscroller will require too much redesigning, because it would mess up the enemy placements. And if we're doing achievements again, a score-based one for the chase seems to be a natural one.