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General Planning Thread

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Dragon Fogel
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by Dragon Fogel »

So as I was going through the War Room level again, it struck me that it might be nice to set things up so that dragon coins are saved at a midpoint. Preferably in a way that it doesn't have to be done in every single level with them, but I've got no idea how feasible that is.

To people who added dragon coins to their levels: do you have any issues with this? If you want a reward for doing the level in one life, there are other ways to set that up.
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S1eth
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by S1eth »

That's fine.

My current dragon coin counter on the HUD works with "layer is empty" events for each coin, so it can display that you for example collected all the coins except the second one (OXOOO). So either the new code removes those coins and triggers the events, or I have to extend the HUD code to read from the Data class to check for already collected coins.
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by KayhemMaus »

I'm fine with Dragon Coins being saved at mids, if its not too much of a pain to code in :)
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by snoruntpyro »

I'm fine with that - I mainly have dragon coins in my levels to be put in a counter anyways.

On another note, I think with the amount of levels we have now it might be best to at least start trying to organize them into worlds. Probably based on difficulty.
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Dragon Fogel
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by Dragon Fogel »

I made this a while ago for precisely that purpose, when we had far fewer levels.

I think I set that so anyone can edit it? If I'm wrong, let me know.
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by snoruntpyro »

Yeah, you set it that way. I'll try to organize them once I get done with parts of one of my levels.
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Dragon Fogel
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by Dragon Fogel »

So I've been musing on bonus levels a bit.

I'm thinking of splitting them into three categories:
1) Reused names from MAGL X 1 and 2 produced by Horikawa's name generators.
These would be the most obvious of the bonus levels. Maybe they're made accessible through alternate exits, maybe they open up when you finish a world. Maybe they're all in one place (the "Recycling Center"?) and you unlock them when you get enough stars or something. Whatever the specifics, the basic idea is that they're designed to be easy to find and to be played over the course of the game, so there's a more varied difficulty range. Some of the earlier ones wouldn't be much harder than regular levels. Mostly I want to do it this way so there's no particular expectation on how hard these have to be. Plus, if a level gets made and turns out to match the name of a MAGL X2 level, it won't be too complicated to recategorize it.
2) Level names from MAGL 1 and 2.
These would be weirder levels, hidden in an equivalent to Zebraspace. In general they'd probably be harder than the first set.
3) Level names from MAGL X 1 and 2 that didn't use the name gimmick, either due to ignoring it or due to being postgame levels or something similar.
These would be postgame, so top-tier difficulty and probably also some of the weirdest levels in the game.

Of course, there's also the possibility that we'll get some extremely difficult levels with rejected names - A Deadly Dreamland Level is already very, very hard, for instance. We could accommodate that by having two "postgame" worlds - one is unlocked after beating the game (so the "ending sequence", however silly and inconsequential it ends up being, can be seen by most players) and the other, with the non-generated names from previous contests, would be for getting 100% on the rest of the game.

I'm not dictating any of this, of course; just tossing it out there to see what people think. One thing about this way of doing things is that it expects a minimum number of bonus levels in each category, but we can just worry about filling those out once we have the main game mostly done.
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by Zygl »

Dragon Fogel wrote:[words]
The main problem I see with that arrangement is that it requires the 'no name gimmick' levels to be a certain difficulty - namely, postgame difficulty. I'm not especially fond of the notion of forcing a certain difficulty onto a level name.

My proposal, personally, would be to not distinguish between the used names that do and do not come from the naming gimmick and just make the postgame 'a bonus world' outside of the difficulty curve of the game, with the MaGL 1 and 2 levels being in zebraspace-equivalent as you suggested. This would of course put some postgame-difficulty levels from rejected names into the endgame, but we can work around that by not requiring all the stars from every world, such that peeps can get through the endgame with a bare minimum of 'actually having to beat standard-talkhaus-postgame-difficulty levels'. As for the matter of how we'd balance a 'final level' of any sort in that setup, I dunno how practical an idea it is - and of course it'd depend on how much plot we want in the last level of the maingame - but I'm reminded of Pokémon Puzzle Challenge's puzzle mode having three final puzzles and only requiring you to do one of them. We could maybe do something similar in theory?
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by Dragon Fogel »

Zyglrox Odyssey wrote:The main problem I see with that arrangement is that it requires the 'no name gimmick' levels to be a certain difficulty - namely, postgame difficulty. I'm not especially fond of the notion of forcing a certain difficulty onto a level name.
I can definitely see that point. Certainly I don't want to force a difficulty level on the standard reused names, especially as we don't know all the MAGL X2 names yet.

But the pool of non-gimmick level names is pretty small - maybe 30 at most once MAGL X2's postgame is figured in - and nobody's requested one yet. So right now that feels like a relatively safe group to reserve for postgame.

Still, it is somewhat limiting in terms of what names get used, and that's definitely something I generally want to avoid. I guess I'll just leave it as something to consider if no one ends up picking any of the non-gimmick names for the "main" game, whenever we decide when that's done.

Also I just had an idea for the plot, I guess I'll put that in the plot discussion thread.
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Dragon Fogel
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by Dragon Fogel »

So today's video gave me the silly idea of having a two-part level in World 4 just as a joke. Probably with a fake angrycow warning, since it would be a bad idea to have a genuinely frustrating level at that point in the game.

The only thing is, I'd want there to be more to it than just "this level is split in two for no particular reason other than to make a joke". Does anyone have thoughts on interesting ways to use a split level? Otherwise, it doesn't seem worth bothering.
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by Solaris »

its how to handle two different people wanting to use the same level name :U
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by snoruntpyro »

I'll totally do that for the touhou name I claimed
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by romajiQuadhash »

Rednaxela wrote: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...
I'm trying to make a physics library for Lua to do just this sort of thing. PM me, and we can work it out
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by snoruntpyro »

So recently I've thought of an idea for a hub.

The hub would take place in the capital city of Talkhaus, very creatively named Talkhaus City. (I'm a master of naming things.) In this city, the citizens make levels for literally no reason, and these levels happen to end in stars. Horikawa would be the mayor, obviously. The city would be enormous, with one notable landmark being Hotel Otane, a massive hotel home to various levels plus all of the star rewards. We could include neat things like minigames, powerup stashes, a bestiary, and trivia about levels in these rooms (probably hotel rooms). The other worlds could take place in other landmarks, like a large central park, a museum, a mall, the legislative building, etc. Each of the areas would have flavor text like the MaGL Xs. For example, the museum would have interactive exhibits about the level and say "This exhibit displays (blah blah level name)". Having a central themed hub would help to create the feeling of a MaGL X without actually being one, in my opinion.

What do you guys think?
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by Shinoda »

Pyro wrote:For example, the museum would have interactive exhibits about the level and say "This exhibit displays (blah blah level name)".
What do you guys think?
My level would have to be in there (Hills of Canada). it's very.... museum exhibit-like... Once i'm done with it that is.

Good idea in my opinion.
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by Mata Hari »

Would it be possible to have Dragon Coins unlock stuff? I put Dagadons in my level but a 1-up isn't in itself a worthwhile reward for collecting all of them.
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by S1eth »

We could do that.

And I thought earlier, that if we add a global dragon coin counter, I'll remove the "item collection" star from my level. (Zebes Phantos)
The star just exists to give the player an incentive to collect the dragon coins. If we add incentives to the episode itself, I don't need it anymore.

And, I draw on the HUD to show which coins in the level you've already collected.
I think it'd be neat if every level with dragon coins had something like this (with better circle graphic)
What do you think?

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Dragon Fogel
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by Dragon Fogel »

That HUD looks pretty neat to me - the one issue is that it's above the item box, which looks a bit weird. Maybe move it below the life counter? Or keep it above but move the life counter down.

In general, I like the thought of making dragon coin collection more of a thing.

I'm personally not quite sold on Pyro's hub idea, but I'm not strongly against it either. I guess the main concern I have about it is that a city would overlap with MAGL X2 a fair amount; that said, there's certainly room to make it distinct from that in terms of design, even if there ends up being overlap with individual areas.
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by S1eth »

Dragon Fogel wrote:That HUD looks pretty neat to me - the one issue is that it's above the item box, which looks a bit weird. Maybe move it below the life counter?
Below the life counter is usually the star counter (not visible because I haven't collected any stars), so it'd have to be even further down.
Dragon Fogel wrote: Or keep it above but move the life counter down.
I didn't even know you could move the parts of the HUD itself. How?
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Dragon Fogel
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by Dragon Fogel »

Oh, sorry, I was under the impression the HUD could be varied more with Lua code. I haven't gone poking around in the details of Lua at all, though. (I feel like I should at some point, but I haven't gotten to there yet.) And I forgot about the star counter, whoops.
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Dragon Fogel
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by Dragon Fogel »

By my count, we've got 32 levels submitted now and I'm thinking it's at a point where we need a better way to keep track of them all. I remember something about A2XT using a wiki; is that a good idea here, or does somebody have another suggestion?
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by snoruntpyro »

Yeah, A2XT has its wiki for planning. A wiki would be helpful for this as well, especially with organizing levels into the worlds.

Also, you probably want to delete that outdated list in the name claiming thread. The spreadsheet serves the exact same purpose and more.
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by Zygl »

I was never a fan personally of having to go sign up at some other site or whatever to do a thing for A2XT... but I don't really have any better ideas at the moment other than another spreadsheet so idk
Pyro wrote:Also, you probably want to delete that outdated list in the name claiming thread. The spreadsheet serves the exact same purpose and more.
I specifically left that list in when I made the spreadsheet in case we had any instances of somebody not being able to access the spreadsheet because Google Sheets, but given that that hasn't happened yet we're probably alright to delete it at this point, yeah.
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by snoruntpyro »

On the subject of the hub, the capital city might end up not actually having much overlap with MaGL X2. So far it's been Verdant Avenue, the Train Station, Parking Garage, Shopping Mall (which was actually a melon farm), Church of MaGL and the Hospital. And from the looks of the map, it looks like Episode 2 might be in a huge tower (although I could be wrong). For worlds I was thinking along the lines of something you would only see in a capital city instead of just a city, like a massive library, a museum, the legislative building, the park (with a fountain and such), and the raocow Monument. tl;dr personally I think we can still have a city hub that has minimal overlap with MaGL X2.
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Re: General Planning Thread

Post by romajiQuadhash »

Pyro wrote:On the subject of the hub, the capital city might end up not actually having much overlap with MaGL X2. So far it's been Verdant Avenue, the Train Station, Parking Garage, Shopping Mall (which was actually a melon farm), Church of MaGL and the Hospital. And from the looks of the map, it looks like Episode 2 might be in a huge tower (although I could be wrong). For worlds I was thinking along the lines of something you would only see in a capital city instead of just a city, like a massive library, a museum, the legislative building, the park (with a fountain and such), and the raocow Monument. tl;dr personally I think we can still have a city hub that has minimal overlap with MaGL X2.
That sounds reasonale
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