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Let's wrangle them levels, yo

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raocow
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by raocow »

Alright, I'll hold off until we got a system going, and then give me some sort of assignement when the field is ready!
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Paralars
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by Paralars »

oh look, I managed to build it
success.PNG
I didn't get it functional, though because for some reason I can't move around the Demo location, but I guess that can be taken care of later.
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by raocow »

holy moly!!!
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by limepie20 »

raocow wrote:holy moly!!!
Yeah, good job, Paralars. It will be really great if we can do something like this for all the overworld submaps.
Also, I like how you made the dome look. Should we stay consistent with that 'background' throughout the maps?
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by S.N.N. »

The idea was that every submap was a dome, right? In that case, I really think that same style should be kept up.

Maybe you could actually vary up the walls depending on the atmosphere of the dome (eg. if it's an ice dome, make the walls "frozen" leading up to the hole in the roof. If it's fire, have parts of the dome wall burnt out, or have lavafalls coming down the sides). It might even be worth adding some overgrowth to that one you just inserted.
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by raocow »

I vote that 'crazy world's' dome is sideways.
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Paralars
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by Paralars »

I remember that a long time ago, we decided that the whole world basically consists of domes as an excuse why there are forests and mountains inside a huge spaceship.

Well, for the actual graphics I'd say tune down the "prominence" of the dome in the background a bit, because on that map, that consumed a LOT of graphic space.
(In this drawing I actually just included such a cave dome because I felt a bit starry sky could fit in).

I think we can probably have this dome background in some other submaps, but not all of them, because I had a lot of trouble with this one already, because the levels are all "on the ground" and therefore in the lower half of the image.
Of course this is only problematic on a flat landscape like this, in a mountain world or crazy-things-floating-through-space world you can just add the dome's wall in the background.
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by Camoslash »

Damn man, that is some impressive work!! Looks fantastic =D
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Paralars
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by Paralars »

Here's a plan

http://www.mediafire.com/?a8cywl51dt6ap7m

I included an idea of how to lay out the "hub-thing".
Basically they are 3 secret exit levels of rising difficulty that lead to one of the 4 OW paths each.
(first one leads to easiest path, last one to hardest path).

In the orange/ocre world are, I just listed all levels that weren't fit into any other world. They are similar in difficulty, I sorted them roughly by difficulty. There needs to be a world composed of some of them.
I wanted to leave an open space somewhere to have leeway, so that's that.
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by raocow »

Obviously, 'orange land' should be a microsoft excel page where you move around the squares.

(I honestly think that would be funny. If you're gonna have a 'misc world', might as well go all out. It fits thematicaly with the game because you see the big boss is 'the Artist' and artists also have to look after their finances)
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by Wyatt »

I may have already said this, but "A Beach" is a really tough level. Difficulty-wise it'd about on-par with the purple or grey worlds, so if we're gonna leave it in world 2 it should be off a secret exit branch and lead somewhere cool (i.e. a side entrance to one of the hard worlds).

As for the setup as a whole, I really like it! Really surprised at how well the world difficulties turned out, you'd think it'd be a lot more haphazard considering we just took the levels we had and slapped them together by theme.
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by Paralars »

well, that's what you might think. But I actually put a lot of complex thought into this and the main one being that these were the first ideas coming to my mind.
Anyway, I didn't know a beach was that difficult, I only played like half of it.
But since the beach world is pretty long like this, we could just cut it out of the main path and leave it somewhere there to be parrot-shop unlocked.

Speaking of parrot shop unlocked, will it be like
- you unlock post-game pseudo special world levels after beating the end boss
or
- you unlock alternate pathways with levels that lead to different worlds, before beating the end boss
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by raocow »

We never really got a consensus about that, but right now my actual concern is wondering if

1) it's possible to code something like this, and

2) someone is actually willing to do as such
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by AUS »

With the alternate pathway question, I have a starting question. How would the hub connect to the subhubs at the start of the game? Would it be multiple choice, or would there be just one or two choices?

I'm asking because if you can already start on whichever world you choose, having alternate paths that branch to the worlds is completely pointless, but if the only way to get to some other worlds is to
A: beat the worlds in order or
B: take an alternate path
Then that would be interesting.

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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by limepie20 »

You start at the hub with four branching paths, each containing two worlds.
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Paralars
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by Paralars »

so, my thoughts about starting the 'creation process'.

The big main map of the overworld will be created with the vanilla tileset to make things a bit easier. The tileset will then be redrawn to its own 'a2mt style' and to fit some components better (like turning ladders into vines, see below)
It will contain the beach world, the island/sky world, the hub world and the 'vanilla' world.
Anyone who wants to contribute to this can do so, I just set a starting point by creating the island in the very bottom right corner.
1.PNG
This image shows how you can use the vanilla tileset to create any object you want, like trees for clouds and ladders for vines. Then later we will turn the tree graphics into actual cloud graphics etc.

If anyone wants to work on this (e.g. Camoslash) , I'll upload the rom with this bit and it can be expanded, the rom can get passed around and the main map can be finished that way.


The fortress, cave, mountain, abstract, final and filler worlds will find place on their own submaps.
These are gonna be made as seperate drawings.
I already did the cave one.
Anyone who wants to draw a world can do so, they need to be:
- made up of 8x8 tiles. One submap is 32 8x8 tiles wide and 22 or 21 8x8 tiles high. (4 maps are 21, 2 are 22 high)
- able to be fit into 3 gfx files, therefore should re-use as many 8x8 tiles as possible, so keep it simple.
- you can create 8 different palettes with 15 colors each, every 8x8 tile can use any of the palettes.

The levels the world contain can be found in the excel sheet above, a suggestion of what it can look like to fit these levels together can be found on the previous pages.

The drawings can be sent to me and I can do all the hard yychr'ing and tile rebuilding work in LM.

Up to now, I did some stuff, raocow wanted to draw a submap and Camoslash wanted to build the main overworld.

So yeah, that's pretty much how I planned this out so far.
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raocow
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by raocow »

Hmm, I haven't drawn from tiles before, this could be interesting. Maybe I'll just draw something 'normaly' and see how I can tile from there with some advice, or something.

Though this will be delayed as I got paid projects to attend to first!
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by Paralars »

So, I think I have settled with the level order as far as I can judge the difficulties (I can't play through all the levels..)
And I think the big overworld could look like this:
mainov.png
Now, as soon as I find out how to channel the energy that I make these drawings with into something useful, this still needs to be done:
- Draw mountain submap, tile it, build it - same for castle, abstract and that other hard submap, which is gonna be icy/starry now.
- Finish building the big map
- Draw a tileset for the big map
- Draw a final world submap, which is just designated to the end level and the life farm just before that. (Someone else may draw this one, it could be basically anything that fits our Artist theme) then I'll have to do all the tile rebuilding stuff.
- Move ExGFX spaces 80-FF (This is the one thing I can't do)
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by limepie20 »

The big map looks fine as far as I can tell. For the exgfx, you need to ask systemkrash because he will be able to relocate the other exgfx for you.
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by Paralars »

Here is a usable mountain map background!
mountmap.png
mountmap.png (7.68 KiB) Viewed 7431 times
good news is, I'm getting the hang of making these

bad news is, I feel like I am delaying this whole thing with the GREAT idea of hand drawn submaps. Oh well, just gotta be faster..
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raocow
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by raocow »

Wait that would be a map?

Yeah, that's... that's amazing. It works wonderfully.

I myself hadn't really been 'working' on any of these because we don't have a 'full' set of levels, and things can crop up and stuff, you know? I do have an idea of something I'd want to do for the 'final world' submap, however I don't know when I'll have time to do it is the thing. Hmm.
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by Paralars »

Sure would work as a map, like this:
mountmap.png
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As for the levels, I think they're mostly set now, the only thing worrying me is wether or not there's gonna be dragon coin unlocked levels after all.

If you have an idea for the Bowser's castle submap, that's good, there is no rush for that one anyway, so you may or may not play around with that for as long as you want to.
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by limepie20 »

Where does that red level at the top of the mountain take you?
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Paralars
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by Paralars »

the idea was that it's "no secret exit here" where the normal exit is really easy to get and only returns back.
Getting the secret exit would unlock a path at the bottom.
I've tried it to see if that's a thing you can do and it is.
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Re: Let's wrangle them levels, yo

Post by raocow »

Could you refresh my memory, what are the total pixel dimensions for this? For a submap?
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