Colossus 2
Hey there, levelengine here, with the official work in progress thread for the next bombshell of an SMW hack I've been building on and off since 2020. As of 2021, I've confirmed there was going to be a sequel to the romhack Colossus (https://www.smwcentral.net/?a=details&i ... &p=section), released all the way back in 2015. Since then, there was motivation for me to try something of a scale about as large as the first Colossus again, because I grew dissatisfied with a few of the design choices made for the first one, mainly being the shortage of checkpoints for even the toughest levels, and even in some cases the overall difficulty being too high for the wrong reasons. Although Colossus 2 is much more likely to be my priority, a remaster of the first Colossus is also potentially on the table.
As for the general difficulty this time around, there will be multiple midpoints for the megalevels this time around and on the harder + longer levels, also worldpeace's retry patch (which conveniently also sorted out the multiple midpoints, which I already wanted anyways).
The next question that also came to mind when trying to balance the difficulty was how lives would be handled. I do plan to have the standard hack start with 5 lives and force you to redo an entire level (or multiple maybe?) if you run out, though in that case I'd add more opportunities to get 1-UPs, especially later on where dying a lot would be expected. One of the things I was thinking of having added was blue coins based off of the ones in Super Mario 64 that are each worth 5 coins, if not just extra hidden rooms scattered throughout the hack to both top up on lives and also reward exploration and curiosity. Even still, there will very likely be another patch of the game that will have infinite lives for those who want a slightly easier (and less frustrating if their opinion believes the loss of already earned progress is in fact frustrating) experience.
Since Colossus 2's inception, I've made tons of levels that will be in it, some of which are pictured below, though again, the contents of these screenshots can always change before the official final release.
I also made this teaser from various projects I worked on back in 2020, this being from before the reveal there would be a second Colossus (the Colossus 2 levels start showing up at 1:43).
Until just this week, I was mostly worrying about building levels/trying to flesh out ideas for gimmicks and therefore didn't have a solid plan for the overworld, or much progress to show on it. As I had basically no internet for 6 days, I didn't have much else to do besides work on the hack, and got to solidify some overworld maps making them basically ready once all the overworld events are also added in. The last one's actually my submap just to test all the levels, which is there to show the scale of the hack.
I was originally looking at a plan for the hack to be large enough that it was going to need a further expanded overworld or to have it be split into 2 ROM files (which would have been its own can of worms). It's still large enough that one of my ideas for a world was scrapped, bringing the total world count down to 12 so that after applying Medic's Submap Split patch (https://bin.smwcentral.net/u/2318/SubmapSplit.asm) to basically give us 12 submaps at the cost of the standard main overworld, 1 for each world. While most of those overworld maps already did exist beforehand, just this week I finally fleshed them out and made them presentable.
So as for gimmicks, there'll be lots of additions that weren't there in the original SMW such as blocks being solid depending on the direction currently being faced, screen wrapping in a few levels, flipping gravity, and switching between standard/water level, just to name a few.
Anything else worth sharing I'll just put in future posts, must have been here for well over 40 minutes writing this by now.
