Title Screen... possibly a small excuse plot too?

[KobaBeach]

Okay so. I felt like a Title Screen should be designed so the baserom doesn't have... A mess in its title screen tricking people into thinking the game is broken.


So far it looks like this and, I will be honest, I'm not good at pixel art.

I mentioned it to Disk Poppy and how ugly it was and he was like. "yeah i hope it's a placeholder"

He also mentioned that he'd like to see it in Mario Bros' font, which I decided to photoshop, having experience manipulating fonts myself, managed to write Leomon But Gay for my old twitter header using Romancing SaGa 3 and I think SaGa Frontier's logo font so. I made what's below:


Feel free to discuss here what you'd like to see in the title screen and its accompanying level.

----------------------------------

If you would like a refresher, ASMT has a small level where Demo goes grocery shopping for vegan food, the game's title being Layer 3, while the game's subtitle, Demo's Journey is written on the wall at one point in Layer 1, with a red eyed Charlie's portrait (King Charles?) also being seen at one point. She later exits through the emergency exit door.

A2MT was to have a fancy title screen featuring all the bosses and cast, similar to VIP5. Its zombie release, at the very least, ASMagician Maks' C3 release, instead has the words A 2nd Mario Thing, written above a setting of a quaint little forest with tiles from Painting the Treehouse, as well as a treasure chest and a parrot, echoing the central themes of the game.

For AAT, I don't feel like we need to do anything super foreshadowy, there isn't much need to do an overt story, but the occasional humorous exchange and castle cutscene should be fine, to keep the tradition of ASMT in check, without reaching Devious Four levels of lore nonsense.

-----------------------------------

EllenHouraisan has suggested a story where Serac wakes Demo up from her fever dream, which represents A2MT, effectively making it Schrodinger's Canon, and they go off to the fish market to get some seafood. It's a good call back to Talkhaus memes and is a neat way to fit in the semi-unfinished A2MT, however I feel like Serac isn't 100% well utilized.

She also suggested an interstellar arena type Shonen anime arc that Demo and Iris has to climb up the ranks, but I worry it'd be wasted with a small amount of bosses, and I don't want to force people to make 90 bosses like this was Brutal Mario.

Of course, we can also just make it a generic level if we don't want it to reflect something about the game.

Feel free to discuss... now

[SAJewers]

Mentioned this in the discord, but I found out https://battleofthebits.org/browser/ has SNES music with .spc downloads that could probably be converted with spc2mml that we could use if we don't want to just grab something from smwc

ending up coming across this one, which works out well for title screen music


alternatively, could use this and have the title screen being demo walking around a night club randomly
https://battleofthebits.org/arena/Entry ... %29/14761/

[Lord Ruby]

I have an idea for a logo that I might try making when I have the time. No ideas on title screen level, though (yet, anyway).

I had a silly idea at one point which might add to Ellen's second idea (the "shonen" one), if people end up including a lot of OCs: The main villain has summoned/kidnapped/whatever a bunch of OCs to the place where AAT takes place to extract their 'all-powerful "donut steel"'. The twist being that

this plan fails because people don't put OCs they're super protective of (donut steel being a play on do not steel) in collaborations.

But then

it turns out the main villain is such an OC themselves or whatever, which at least lets them use their own protectiveness for the final battle (featuring tradesnark).

Meta and ridiculous, but could be fun for a light plot...?

[KobaBeach]

Mentioned this in the discord, but I found out https://battleofthebits.org/browser/ has SNES music with .spc downloads that could probably be converted with spc2mml that we could use if we don't want to just grab something from smwc

I like these songs but I wonder if it's okay to just take them? We'll credit the authors either way but... kfaraday had her music used in YUMP 2 though, and I think she didn't know, so it could be okay? Not sure.

I had a silly idea at one point which might add to Ellen's second idea (the "shonen" one), if people end up including a lot of OCs: The main villain has summoned/kidnapped/whatever a bunch of OCs to the place where AAT takes place to extract their 'all-powerful "donut steel"'. The twist being that

this plan fails because people don't put OCs they're super protective of (donut steel being a play on do not steel) in collaborations.

But then

it turns out the main villain is such an OC themselves or whatever, which at least lets them use their own protectiveness for the final battle (featuring tradesnark).

Meta and ridiculous, but could be fun for a light plot...?

Oh my god, the ultimate lore hack

[KobaBeach]

I've updated the title screen graphic to the Mario Bros. font, not a fan of my bad Mario World font style attempt

Sorry!

[PSI Ninja]

If we go with Ellen's first story idea, then maybe the title screen level could just be Demo walking through a literal fish market, throwing fish into her basket. Would be a nice callback to ASMT's title screen, but with fish instead of fruits and vegetables. However, it's not very original. I think someone may have already brought this up on the Discord a few months ago and I'm just repeating it?

alternatively, could use this and have the title screen being demo walking around a night club randomly

I jokingly suggested something similar on the forums, where we could make Demo dance to some EDM or something. It would be random and have nothing to do with the plot, but it's absolutely a Talkhausian thing to do.

Another thing that was mentioned on the Discord was to have each world be a different Canadian province. I don't know how serious that was, but I remember people saying that Quebec could be the postgame world. If we decide to go with this theming, then maybe the first world could be one of the Maritime provinces, like Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island. Just throwing that out there. No idea how important world map theming would be to the story.

As for the story, I have no strong feelings on it, and I would rather see what the storywriters come up with.

[KobaBeach]

Another thing that was mentioned on the Discord was to have each world be a different Canadian province. I don't know how serious that was, but I remember people saying that Quebec could be the postgame world. If we decide to go with this theming, then maybe the first world could be one of the Maritime provinces, like Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island. Just throwing that out there. No idea how important world map theming would be to the story.

That was me, I was watching the Super Mario Omega LP at the time, where raocow did the exact same thing, and I was also playtesting some stages and I separated the difficulties by provinces.

Sadly, my mother's blood pressure dropped in her sleep when I was playing Chrystal Caves (thinking about that when I was playing it just right now, at the Red Radish level) and we had to go to the health centre a few towns away for the rest of the night.

To be more specific, my brother had to drive her there, I chose to go with them on my own. She's my mom, I was worried! She's now on pills to tone down her cholesterol levels and blood pressure and trying to monitor the latter when possible, thankfully. /personal

------------------------------------------------

Anyway, Nao has stated that he wants to be a part of world map planning, while Valentine offered to make the world map as a funny goof, though I'm not gonna hold her to it, Nao is busy with university right now, for instance, so Val could also have something going on in her life later on that stops her from working on it.

I will state that, if we want to make an overworld, don't be scared of making Miscellanea-themed Worlds like a lot of VIP worlds.

[SAJewers]

How do we want to do worlds? Do we want to someone(s) to go through and try to organize levels neatly into worlds, or do we want to do the asmbxt thing of "there are x levels per world, claim spots for your levels as you wish"

[KobaBeach]

How do we want to do worlds? Do we want to someone(s) to go through and try to organize levels neatly into worlds, or do we want to do the asmbxt thing of "there are x levels per world, claim spots for your levels as you wish"

I'm not sure, personally I'd go with the former.

[PSI Ninja]

What I imagine should happen, is that anyone who's interested in world map planning would come up with a proposal for the level order, and post it in a designated thread. Then we compare the lists, debate the level placements, and fine-tune things to come up with the final list. Much less messy than having everyone choose their own spot on the overworld.

That being said, I would also like to be involved in world map planning (i.e., helping to come up with the level order, not the actual world map design).

[Catabo]

Since there's a title screen thread, i'll drop the doodling i did a while back when i wanted to make something inspired by ASMT's simplistic/minimalistic logo:

aat logo scratch.png (7.6 KiB) Viewed 129 times

In retrospect i think all of them (except the middle one that straightforwardly apes the original logo) are too tryhard, but hey, food for thought.
edit: hey, the "this post is yellow because i just posted it" post background colour is the same as the background colour of the ASMT title screen! You brilliant madpersons.

Re: story, Ellen's idea doesn't necessarily need a lot of bosses to work; you can just say that it turns out the generic monsters along the way you've been jumping on in the levels were the other champions who were summoned.

or you could have a penultimate level that's like a dozen straight Reznor fights

[KobaBeach]

In retrospect i think all of them (except the middle one that straightforwardly apes the original logo) are too tryhard, but hey, food for thought.

hush. they are Perfect

I really like the high effort blue one tbh, reminds me of Ruby's HP bar graphic

Re: story, Ellen's idea doesn't necessarily need a lot of bosses to work; you can just say that it turns out the generic monsters along the way you've been jumping on in the levels were the other champions who were summoned.

or you could have a penultimate level that's like a dozen straight Reznor fights

This reminds me of my AZCT level that at an early point

just had a Zelda 1 miniboss rush near the end because I was 15

.

What I imagine should happen, is that anyone who's interested in world map planning would come up with a proposal for the level order, and post it in a designated thread. Then we compare the lists, debate the level placements, and fine-tune things to come up with the final list. Much less messy than having everyone choose their own spot on the overworld.

This is gud