General Planning Thread

[FFR]

I've still barely started mine. I've had such a busy couple of weeks with work that I haven't been able to do much, and when I do get some cooldown time, really don't feel like level designing... I'll hopefully get back to it this weekend or something...

I've been in the same situation this week, and I'd recommend trying to do some really silly level just to get some designing back into your mind

[romajiQuadhash]

uh...
Is this the lost levels thing?

[Rednaxela]

uh...
Is this the lost levels thing?

Yes, the "Magl X : the forumening" sub-forum is indeed for the lost levels thing.

[CapedLuigisYoshi]

Okay, actually sitting down to do my level. Procrastinated a bit too long on it, but you know what they say: better late than more late!

[Dragon Fogel]

So, since we've got some levels coming in, I thought it would be good to start thinking about which world they should go into and what order we should present them in within a world (whether we do that with a hub or a world map).

Admittedly it's pretty early and we don't have many levels to organize just yet, but I figured it doesn't actually hurt to set things up for later use. Plus it gives us something to discuss, and it might be good for helping people figure out the level of difficulty they're trying to aim for.

As it stands, I've put down my preliminary thoughts on where to place the five levels we have right now. Since we have too few to really order them within a world, I've also noted whether I think they should go more towards the beginning, middle, or end of a world. This obviously isn't set in stone; we might push things up or down a world depending on the quantity of levels we get and how difficult they are. Feel free to share your thoughts!

[Quman]

What do you guys think of having contributors hanging out in the hub? We don't really need friendly NPCs to dispense judge critiques, and it might get kind of old if we try to come up with funny Horikawa commentary for every single level, but it would be nice to have some NPCs to make the hub feel lively.

Of course, Horikawa will still be there when we can think of something funny for her to say (or if Horikawa has something she wants her sprite to say,) she just wouldn't be the every NPC the player sees in the hub.

[Pikabread]

I think having us duders hanging around would be cool.
Should we contribute our own dialogue?
Or hand out like a... bio? I guess?

[Quman]

I'd say we just open it up so anybody can contribute dialogue for themselves or one of the Mario/ASMT characters, but needs permission to put words in another contributor's mouth. But that's just my opinion.

[Dog In Da Grass]

What do you guys think of having contributors hanging out in the hub? We don't really need friendly NPCs to dispense judge critiques, and it might get kind of old if we try to come up with funny Horikawa commentary for every single level, but it would be nice to have some NPCs to make the hub feel lively.

Of course, Horikawa will still be there when we can think of something funny for her to say (or if Horikawa has something she wants her sprite to say,) she just wouldn't be the every NPC the player sees in the hub.

I'd be on board with that! More shameless promotion!

[FFR]

What do you guys think of having contributors hanging out in the hub? We don't really need friendly NPCs to dispense judge critiques, and it might get kind of old if we try to come up with funny Horikawa commentary for every single level, but it would be nice to have some NPCs to make the hub feel lively.

that's the classic way of doing things, a few games raocow LPd did that, and I like it very much big time, I'm on board with that idea

[Dragon Fogel]

I think we're off to a pretty good start with the four levels we've got already, but let's see if we can be a bit more ambitious. I think we should aim to get ten new levels done this month. That's collectively from everyone. Shouldn't be too unreasonable; hopefully we'll finish even more.

Okay, well. The month is almost up and we have four levels done, or at least done enough to submit for testing. Not quite up to my ambitious goal, but four levels is still pretty good.

Still, if we're going to manage it after all, I should be picking up the slack. My problem is that one of the names I've picked is, in retrospect, a level I'd like to use to reference other levels and so I don't have much for it right now; and I've tried working on the other level but I don't quite feel like I know what I want to do with it.

I may just pick out another name that I feel I can make a quick level out of, maybe it'll just be a boss fight or something.

How are other people's levels coming along?

[CapedLuigisYoshi]

How are other people's levels coming along?

Was going along well enough, but college stuff has been preventing me from working on it for a few days now.

[Pikabread]

To be honest my level should be going a lot faster than it is; I have everything I need (save for a graphic request that no one ever responded to :T), but for some reason I can't get my lazy butt to work on it. Probably either this night or tommorow night or whenever I have free time I'll just force myself to work on it. It's actually almost done so it'll probably be finished around that time.

The other couple levels I've picked will take a bit longer to get done, but the problem is me being lazy and not using the time I have to actually work on them. That said if I spend a weekend or two working consistently they should get to a position where they're at least ready for testing. Sadly I can't do that this weekend since I'm out on a trip for a couple days. I'll try to get myself to use as much evening time as possible, this really just is my fault, hehe...

Once Summer rolls around these will probably get cranked out a lot faster, at least on my end. Too bad I still have 8 weeks of school left.

EDIT: Also I thought we had 8 done????

[Quman]

How are other people's levels coming along?

Was going along well enough, but college stuff has been preventing me from working on it for a few days now.

Same here. Spring quarter just started where I live, and I've been busy getting accustomed to the new work load and trying to get ahead in my homework so I don't have to worry about falling behind if I suddenly become busy later on.

[Dragon Fogel]

EDIT: Also I thought we had 8 done????

We had four done at the time I posted that and I was hoping to see ten in addition.

Seems it was a heavy school month for people, though. Plus the relays have been going on and that's probably had some impact, if only that people with not a lot of time are putting it towards those instead.

I don't really have much of an excuse, though; I've had plenty of time but I just haven't been focused on making a level. So I'm going to do that, at least.

[Zygl]

For my part, I've not shown progress lately because I have about a hundred ideas to choose from for the level name I still have reserved, I'll have to rip and/or have redrawn to not look bad in SMBX a tileset from the DKC trilogy depending on which idea I decide to go with, and also I've been busy with 'other things', to be brief.

[romajiQuadhash]

I think I'm dropping out.

[Zygl]

So hey guys I made a spreadsheet to serve as a level name list and keep track of who claimed what names and when, whether or not the level's complete, and when last we've heard from you about it if it's not.
I kinda bungled things ridiculously several times in the process of putting this together, so if you could check it out and verify that I have your claims correctly noted it would be much appreciated.

*ping*

I can give you edit permissions on it if you PM me your email address, apparently.

[Rednaxela]

So I was recently thinking about some level ideas I might want to use in either Magl X: the Lost Levels or mayybe A2XT Ep 2... and it led me to thinking I should see what other people think of the following:

How do people feel about levels that modify the game physics to a large degree? By "large degree", I mean say... still being a platformer (unlike some bullet-hell things), but a very different platformer (i.e. as one example, if there were a stage which accurately replicated Meat Boy physics). In general, assuming well-implemented, is it cool or uncool?

Part of me feels tempted to lean towards saying "uncool, too much of a gimmick", but on the other hand I feel tempted to try making such a thing anyway.

I suppose one could compare the notion to ice physics in a way, as that is rarely used and much of the point of that is that it changes up the physics a bit on the player... though ice physics often seems like a complained about thing so...

[Dragon Fogel]

I think in general I like it when things are changed up and it's done well; the main risk is not designing things around the change, which leads to it just getting in the way. Going back to your example, people complain about ice physics because it very rarely does anything other than make a stage harder. If you somehow made a stage where ice physics were beneficial in noticeable ways, even if they were still hindering you regularly, that probably wouldn't get as many complaints.

(I have no idea how you'd do that, at least if the ice physics only affect the player as they usually do.)

[Rednaxela]

I suppose ice physics is a poor example, as the sorts of physics-mods I'd be tempted to do in a level are more of a "different movement characteristics that expand the possibilities" thing, whereas ice physics are usually/often done as a purely limiting thing. By that I mean, ice physics often being done such that the player's range of motion is strictly a subset of the default range of motion, given a particular situation and time interval.

Y'know... the games where I feel like ice physics are done best, are ones where ice physics gives some sort of positive tradeoff instead of being purely detrimental to the player. I've sometimes seen it allow for an increased maximum speed to make up for the reduced ease of control.

In any case though, my main uncertainty is whether a one-off completely-different-physics in a level is generally too gimmicky, heh. I suppose how much is "too gimmicky" probably depends in part on how off-the-wall the project it's used in is... and well... Talkhaus projects...

[FFR]

not a satisfying answer, but I'd say "it depends"... rednax, you should totally go ahead and do it, the worst that could happen is we all get mad at you and TP your house

[Mabel]

instant respawns would be great on some levels.

if nothing else, id like that

[S1eth]

If you made a "mod" that allows people to create super meat boy levels in SMBX, I think that'd be pretty cool.

I really don't how much you can mess around with Mario's physics in lua. Wallsliding and wall jumping would be pretty neat.

[Zygl]

Spreadsheet update: We kinda didn't update the spreadsheet for like two weeks there apparently, sorry about that. I believe it's caught up now. Also I noticed I was way too lazy to keep track of that "last status update" field so until I figure out a better thing to put in that column I just put a link to the most recent version of the level in there.

Also for the record in general I'm all for changing up the physics to a silly degree.