MAFAB 3 - Friendship Always Best

[deice]

the hothead boss was my personal favorite entry so i'm super glad it placed as high as it did. big props to davvic for making such a fun and cute little experience, you more than deserved this spot

the first place entry is the only one i didn't play in my initial run through the submissions so i'm looking forward to seeing that full thing tomorrow as well, great job to all the contestants honestly. i'm probably back to lurking until maglx4 or something

[Lord Ruby]

Don't Get Too Hotheaded - A Comedy in Two Acts

A comedy in the ancient sense, that is. Very charming.

I really like enhanced vanilla-style aesthetics like this, which mix vanilla graphics, vanilla-inspired graphics, and small enhancements like the lighting and fog.

The aimed bullet hell is perhaps a tad too intense, which I think is a driving factor for why it errs a bit on the foreknowledge side, were it less intense, or at least less intense at first, there might have been less of a need for misdirecting that attack from the start. Also, the first aimed shot during the "falling pollen" phase is the one that aligns most harshly, as it reaches Mario's height at approximately the same time as the non-pollen does, but I think that complication would be more appropriate toward the end of that phase. But these are just small things, this one's really giving Death Gaze a run for its money as my favorite.

[CleanBittyDrawn]

To do it in assembly, you'd have to give each attack a "bit" and check the bit if specific attacks are chosen. If so, you either re-call the random routine or just increase/decrease the selector value. If the byte is full (all bits set), you clear it before the attack is called again. The reason why I say "bit" and not value is because if you have 8 attacks, you have 64 ways the attacks can play out, so you need a way to make sure it can play out randomly.

You might be able to do it faster than recalling the RNG with division instead. Get a random value, divide by how many remaining moves there are in the bag, then use the remainder to select the right attack. (Namely, the first bit that's still open.) Of course, division is slow on the SNES, but conjoining two values can make, for example, every outcome where the first six attacks are "adjacent" to each other (say attacks 0 through 5) favor one value by a ratio of 7-to-1. But even division slightly favors lower numbers when not dividing by powers of 2.

Also, there's actually 8! = 40,320 ways the attacks could play out when using a bag. What you might have been thinking of would be 64 ways two attacks could appear adjacent to each other. Duplicates can appear when the bag makes the first value the same as the last value of the previous one.

Anyway, I'm enjoying this contest a lot. It's impossible to make a level that's optimal for everyone (and hence free from criticism), because everyone has different abilities, but this contest has had a lot of nice stuff in it.

[Emral]

And with that, all reviews have been revealed!

If you would like to play the episode yourself, here's the link once again:
DOWNLOAD THE EPISODE

And here is a link to the keyword generator, if you want to give it a go yourself.

For a list of all the reviews, go here. Individual judge spreadsheets are at the bottom.

So without further ado... congratulations to Team Scope Creep - Mushashi for getting 1st. I was very surprised to see no favourite medals here as well, but Most Fun, Most Awesome and 0.6 points lead speak for itself.
Thanks to everyone for participating! Playing and viewing all your creations has been a joy, as always. The next contest over on SMBX Forum Zone will be the Chocolate Contest, starting in roughly a month. If that's interesting to you, ready your level design bones.
If you have any feedback, we also have an Event Feedback Thread over there.

And here are ALL the medals!

But we're not quite done yet...

[Dragon Fogel]

Guess we weren't quite done with the dragons after all.

[LunarRainbowShyGuy]

- Boss Comments -

1st place - "Mushashi" by Team Scope Creep: I had a fun time with this boss, and combined with the presentation, I can see how this won the contest. My one issue here is that it seems like you can't use the slide while you're moving, which did result in me getting hit a few times, but considering that everything can be dodged without it, that's just a minor nitpick.

I appreciate the health regeneration system here, although I did find myself thinking that it maybe regenerates a bit too fast for things to feel particularly threatening. I would have liked to see an option to slow down or even stop the health regeneration. (Guy who implemented extensive difficulty options in his boss likes the idea of difficulty options; what a shocker.) Although it's not like the lack of such an option brings down the boss or anything, and I generally think it's better for something to be too easy than to be too hard, so I think it's fine as it is now.

- End of Boss Comments -

Well, although there is still one thing left here, that would seem to be the end of the contest. I had a good time playing all these bosses, so thank you to everyone who submitted a boss to this contest. Also, thank you to the judges, and everyone else who offered feedback. And thank you to Emral for putting this contest together (and for answering my questions for rule clarifications). And of course, thank you to raocow for playing through all these bosses.

[Catabo]

Kudos to a well-deserved win! Really enjoyable just to watch. The whole factor of "if you know the kanji, you can tell what the attack is going to be" would be great for a Japanese/language-learning game in general.

[Darkonius64]

Congratulations to team scope creep!

[Lord Ruby]

I thought it was kind of ironic that one of the first things Rao mentioned after the fight was how little waiting there was, when I found the waiting times between boss attacks to be fairly long for this one (and that's why it can feel like health regenerates fast). But if you are going to have significant waiting times, you should fill them with spectacle, and this boss certainly does that - there is always something to look at or something that builds expectations. The attacks themselves are also clever interpretations of the prompts, and look fairly engaging despite the relatively light difficulty.

[Emral]

And... that's a wrap!

Dev commentary:

Previous MAFAB episodes capped off with a relay, with MAFAB2's relay still standing strong as being extremely climactic and fun. But when I proposed a relay for MAFAB3, it quickly became clear that with my schedule tightening around the start of summer and nobody offering to take up the role of host, it was unrealistic to organize a relay within the quick turnaround time I had aimed for with this contest.
Then came some delays in judging, coupled with ideas brewing in my mind: What if I, too, rolled two keyword sets? What if there was a healthbar in the hub so that the hub IS a sort of abstracted meta boss fight? What if there was an intro boss to set the scene? And with judges taking a bit longer than I anticipated, the tight schedule began to loosen in mid-July.

So I was going to just cap off the game with a little joke cutscene along the lines of Spimmy absorbing the power, but since the Arrows drained all the power you just kinda pick him up and throw him off the edge, roll credits. But SMBX people have also grown to have some nostalgia for contest episodes with story around them, and boss fights, and all that stuff, which hasn't really been done since the Tower of Biaseds. So I wanted to try and see how that goes, by making a boss that uses one attack relating to every submission.
I tried to pick particularly memorable attacks that also are easy to convey with minimal animation on the boss, which.. worked better for some dragon-type submissions than a barrage of Boom Booms, admittedly. But I like the implication that the powers Spimmy got a hold of aren't all useful for his world takeover plan. And in any case I think especially in the context of the LP, using a postgame to rekindle memories of the okamiden let's play as a whole was a cute idea, and I hope that came true here. It did end up taking only 2 afternoons to make all the attacks, thanks to all the help from the competitors in doing the hard work for me.
Why is your partner a Spamton-colored Gimmighoul in this? ̄ \_(ツ)_/ ̄ I had this sprite lying around and I needed some recurring unique character, and my sense of humour has recently been overwhelmed with Gimmighoul-related content. He's just a little guy.

If you pay close attention to the note next to "Replay Prelude to the End", the keywords I've used don't actually relate to the intro boss specifically, but the entire three-phase boss of intro, hub and finale.
* Play Nice - Spimmy, who I posed as a character who'd have accompanied you as an ally during the fictional prior "Immortal Blessings" chapters, conceals his dark motives for the longest time
* Thousand Arrows - The arrows that you unleash to damage the boss throughout the second phase, by beating other bosses
* Life Dew - A macguffin for me to try and set up the scenario
* Mimic - The final boss's ability to mimic the attacks of other bosses
* Supreme Overlord - Elgrim, and later Spimmy try to become a supreme overlord

Lastly, when I was looking for music, I couldn't settle on a soundtrack I particularly liked for the area, so I started to go into stranger and more unusual directions before ultimately browsing rixi's concept album for Minnie Marigold's Mystifying Manor, an album you should definitely check out if you haven't already. I asked them if it's fine if I use it for the hub, and lo and behold, bangers.

I'll make a patch fixing the Death Gaze and Sandcaster attacks.

Now that MAFAB and MAGLX are caught up to each other it's time to host 3 MAGWMX contests (make a good world map x).

[Dragon Fogel]

All I have to say is, I'm glad Mother Brain's exercises were so helpful to you in the end.

[LunarRainbowShyGuy]

I love the idea of this boss at the end using attacks from all the bosses in the contest. I do find myself wishing it was better; not that I think it's bad or anything - I had a good time here - but I like this idea so much that I would have liked to have seen more done with it, although looking at the dev commentary it seems like there wasn't a huge of time available to make this. With all the time I put into my boss, I'm just impressed that this was made in just 2 afternoons, although as stated, us competitors put in much of the hard work for the attacks. I'm just happy to have indirectly contributed to the making of this, and I loved seeing the purple orbs from my boss make an appearance.

While this boss is fun as it is, I feel like it could have been more fun if the attacks overlapped with each other more, so I think it would have been neat if there were difficulty options to reduce the delay between attacks, and maybe options to adjust the boss's health to compensate (guy who implemented extensive difficulty options... wait, I already made this joke yesterday). In any case, I definitely found this to be a great way to end the contest.

[Dragon Fogel]

One interesting alternate approach would be deliberately trying to make attacks from bosses that weren't actually hostile to you into helpful ones, as happened with Mother Brain's lobster rings. I guess I'm not sure how to classify Shadow in that regard, but under this idea the Hothead and Mushashi attacks would have been ones that helped you deal damage.

Not that I'm saying the current version was bad or anything, just noting this as a path not taken.

[Feathermind]

Now that MAFAB and MAGLX are caught up to each other it's time to host 3 MAGWMX contests (make a good world map x).

After seeing the winner of QLDC 2023 I am 110% for this idea.