ASMBXT; Journey's end

[AUS]

I don't know, maybe we shouldn't start doing A2MBXT just yet; maybe it should have more direction; maybe more world themes rather than just easy world, slightly less easy world, etc.; maybe we could have a world map rather than a hub; maybe we should have a few more more story based levels; MAYBE I should stop thinking so much about a sequel to a game which almost no one has played all the way through.

...Isn't this the exact line of thinking that resulted in A2MT being stuck in development hell?

Then we would release a2mt as a precursor to that. It'll be perfect. Then the cycle will continue.

[darkychao]

I don't know, maybe we shouldn't start doing A2MBXT just yet; maybe it should have more direction; maybe more world themes rather than just easy world, slightly less easy world, etc.; maybe we could have a world map rather than a hub; maybe we should have a few more more story based levels; MAYBE I should stop thinking so much about a sequel to a game which almost no one has played all the way through.

...Isn't this the exact line of thinking that resulted in A2MT being stuck in development hell?

then... maybe we should start development now...

[Mata Hari]

I don't know, maybe we shouldn't start doing A2MBXT just yet; maybe it should have more direction; maybe more world themes rather than just easy world, slightly less easy world, etc.; maybe we could have a world map rather than a hub; maybe we should have a few more more story based levels; MAYBE I should stop thinking so much about a sequel to a game which almost no one has played all the way through.

Yeah, I know, I just wanted to extend an earnest hand, narmean?

I might actually totally lift all these assets to make my own miniproject. A Seriously Mata Hari Thing, anyone?

[TheVulpineHero1]

Just because commercial games fuck up too doesn't mean fangame designers get off the hook that easy. The criticism they get is just done differently ("You expect devs to do better than that." vs "Fangame designers have no legible deadlines to meet for a release.). I don't expect "perfection" or "top quality", but rather people look like they actually gave a fuck.

I would agree; however, I think it's a valid point that, whilst fangames have no hard deadlines for release, they certainly do have a time limit, particularly in collaborative projects like this one. Since the people making this game aren't paid (i.e., they actually have to go out and do something to pay the bills, get food, proceed to live) they don't have any obligation for this to be a top priority; this means that, inevitably, people will leave the project because their life conflicts with it. Eventually, enough people will leave or grow disinterested in the project that it becomes nearly impossible to continue, and anybody left working on it will fight an uphill battle for progress. In addition, unlike paid videogame developers, there's no hard structure to work in, which makes attempts at organisation more likely to cave in. The aim of most collaborative fangames, therefore, is to be finished before either of those things have chance to happen, since if given enough time, it's near inevitable that one of them will.

Again, the poster child for this effect would probably be A2MT. So, while there were no legible, 'put this game out now or EA is going to dissolve your company and you get to live on the streets' type deadlines, there certainly was a factor of time to be considered, and there will be in most fan endeavors; even in solo projects, enthusiasm comes and goes, and the longer a project is in the works, the more likely it is to be abandoned.

That said, I don't necessarily disagree with the points made. However, it might be wise to consider this the playable beta of the game, to be added to and built upon at a later date. I'm not overly sure on what the status is, but the continous bugfixes that are being put out would suggest that to be the case.

[Mata Hari]

One thing I found with ASMBXT is that it's real hard to try and hurry people along without feeling like a dick. But it is actually necessary to do!

[MrDeePay]

Everything goes as long as it was playable, finishable, worksafe and didn't set off the Youtube Content ID system.

So nothing was learned from ASMT. Alright.

The amount of mad in this thread is over the top. My level is fine as it is, and it went all according to my plan.

Mad? No.

You're contradicting yourself now. ("My level is fine as it is!" vs "First of all, sorry for making you go through this in world 1!" and "I didn't think it was THAT bad, so I apologize."

Which one is it, or are you one of those (many) people that ultimately look for raocow's approval over anything else?

To anyone who disagrees, I welcome you into submitting a level for A2MBXT,we'll probably need your exceptional level design skills. Jeez people...

I not even gonna touch this one.

We had about 4-5 testers covering half to all of the game each. There was significantly more testing of the earlier levels than the later ones because they're easier. Clearly not all of it was rigorous as bugs were often not pointed out until later than they should have. So no, testing wasn't perfect, but this level did more testing than most.

Then either:
A.) Get better players to test the harder levels.
B.) Tone down the difficulty of the later ones.

The entire game should get the same level of testing.

However, given the "anything goes" mission statement of the project, the testing was more "is this level broken?" than is "is it fair". So long as it passed the first requirement, which this level does do, it was accepted.

Already covered.

I didn't test it for fairness but if I had been asked to, I would have deemed it fair. Here's my tests for fairness:
1) The margin for error is larger than human fallibility and reaction time, i.e. it's not frame-specific or close to it

Still looking for those "five errors" you made Shaman.

3) The rules of the level are clear at the beginning and don't change partway through without warning

Requires advance knowledge of the level in order to suceeed, but since it's for a secret exit and done in a time attack/race style, that issue is ignorable.

You're arguing your own individual mindset now, as am I, and so does everyone else.

Then you clearly don't know me.

I'm arguing more of a general mindset for the average player. The level of quality I expect for something from myself is (much) higher than what I doing here.

I never described this level as Kaizo. When I used Kaizo earlier I used it to refer to levels that are hard and unfair, as opposed to this one which is just hard.

No, but there are people that (will) read this topic and the discussion on "too hard" and try to use Kaizo as another term for that. That quip wasn't necessarily for you.

This brings me into a new point - it is okay that a level can be too hard for someone to play. Here's a "newsflash" for you: people have different abilities to each other. Not every game has to be beatable by everyone or even should be. You are not entitled to 100% every game or even get to the final boss of every game.

Just about everyone that spoke out about the secret exit found the amount of time they had to take to get it to be very high (40 minutes at least) and used "frustrating" as one of the words to describe their experiences. A skilled player can still find something frustrating to do in something in their field of expertise.

That should tip you people off that something may be amiss.

There's a difference between someone finding a game simply "not being for them" and someone trashing a game because the devs screwed up and someone who just sucks.

I think the simplest way I can put this is that something is better than nothing. For comparison:

ASMT & ASMBXT: Not the best QA, not every level is good, some are very good, some are quite bad, game actually was released and the public gets to play every level.
A2MT: Rigid QA, extremely heavy testing of everything, game has been in development for years and the forum for its development is lucky to get 1 post a day. Openly referred to as vaporware outside of this site. No levels, no matter how brilliant, can be played by the public at all.

"Hey, this level sucks, but at least it's something, right!?"
And A2MT's QA isn't as nearly as good as it could be as well, but that's for another day.

Again, something is better than nothing. We set deadlines and stuck to them. The game is far from being perfect but it actually exists.

"Hey, this level sucks, but at least it's something, right!?"
"Hey, this game is a lot worse than it should be and we have no actual deadlines to deal with when it comes to releases and whatnot, but at least there's something, right? Let's get this thing out there so (presumably) we can get reactions from raocow to our stuff as soon as possible, alright!?"

*post*

And in those cases, it's best for the departing person to pass their work onto someone else who they know will finish the job properly- or at least complete a lot of what's left to do before they pass it onto someone else.

[TheVulpineHero1]

*post*

And in those cases, it's best for the departing person to pass their work onto someone else who they know will finish the job properly- or at least complete a lot of what's left to do before they pass it onto someone else.

In a perfect world, I agree entirely; however, it's often the case that there is simply no person available within the community who has the requisite skills, reputation or inclination to handle the task, particularly if a project has been losing steam for a while. Of course, the higher the level of quality/complexity the project aims for, the more likely this is to be the case; that said, since a sizable number of the ASMBXT team were using the engine for the first time and the design philosophy was with an emphasis on anything goes, it's probably incorrect to assume that would have been the case (had ASMBXT stalled).

Personally, I think you raise a lot of valid points; to be sure, there's probably a lot that could have been done (or could still be done) in order to make ASMBXT a better game as a whole. (Not to denigrate the ASMBXT team, who all worked hard to make this happen in the first place; every game will have its bugs and its poor design decisions). I think in this case, however, the general feeling behind the project was not to create something which was of sterling quality in every facet, but rather to have a project that the community could enjoy making and then enjoy playing.

Whilst that's hardly likely to be the best philosophy in terms of quality and quality assurance, it is an understandable motive, and has brought a lot of activity to the forums; it may well be that it was the process of making the game, more than anything else, that was important in terms of project ambitions. For a lot of people, it was their first attempt at level design, or their first time using the engine, or the first time participating in a collab project, or all three; those people now have experience, and that's fine. If they want to take it further and become better at the whole thing, I would certainly urge them to listen to any and all criticism that goes deeper than 'ur level sux and ur ghey', even and perhaps particularly the criticism that's unpalatable (as Mr Deepay's has the tendency to be, for good or ill). For people content to leave it here, well, it's not wrong per se to simply bask in what you've achieved, even if more could have been done.

I think I'll bow out of the debate at this point, however; as someone who wasn't involved with the project or game design in general, I'm rather out of my depth, and it wouldn't be out of line to criticise me for weighing in on a subject I share no expertise in. Feel perfectly free to disregard my argument in light of that.

[Doctor Shemp]

As one of the co-creators of Fricken Meta, I'm going to talk about a few of the points some of you have brought up and were brought up by raocow's video.

1) I can't see the boss or interact with it. Why?
We have no idea. Several people reported this bug but we could find no common factor between them or way of fixing it as the boss graphics were pathed and flagged correctly. As we had no idea what was causing it and why it was only happening for some people, we couldn't fix it.

2) Why is there a detonator under the boss and why doesn't it do anything?
It does do something: stepping on it before you've killed the boss removes the wall to the Demo & Iris blocks as if you had killed the boss. It's there so that if you can't see the boss the level is still beatable for you (although a heck of a lot easier).

3) Why is the boss harder than the rest of the level?
The boss room was mainly Darkychao but I'd assume it's because Mother Brain is the easiest boss to resprite. As for the design of the level itself, riding a bullet over a pit is perhaps too hard for World 1, so I apologise for that, however in my defence I'd like to say that without the pit it's really easy and boring. It is also possible to cheese the boss in about 5 seconds if you know how. raocow accidentally did it a little bit but didn't seem to realise, so if you go back and rewatch him closely you'll see how.

4) What's up with the P near the level door?
The P stands for a word that starts with P that has some relevance to the level.

5) What's up with that vine? Is there a secret to it?
Yes and it has to do with Question 4. The secret is that

bullet bills can push vines if they hit the vine head. If you push this vine and climb all the way up you'll get a reward.

[Sebby19]

It's too bad raocow slide over a specific block at the end of that Pacifist level. Some some reason, and I have no idea how they did it, the block underneath the leet makes you kneel, essentially having your character kneel before the gaint Blood Drop for the cutscene.

[darkychao]

It's too bad raocow slide over a specific block at the end of that Pacifist level. Some some reason, and I have no idea how they did it, the block underneath the leet makes you kneel, essentially having your character kneel before the gaint Blood Drop for the cutscene.

It has a resprited SMB1 axe set to, upon death/activation to run an event to cause the player to press down, then a couple ticks later cause a neutral event.

[Sebby19]

It's just too bad it's really easy to slide over, even while walking. Especially with Iris.

[shaman]

I still have the issue with the boss on Fricken Meta, I have no idea why. Can't see him
Also I loved the gimmick on the Land of the Pacifists, I laughed much more than I should have on the "Have a vegetable"

[Sturg]

I like the Blood God realm, it was neat.

Also, people seem to have trouble with custom npcs that replace Mother Brain...

[AUS]

Dunno, that boss didn't seem challenging in the slightest..but what do I know?

[SAJewers]

It'll be curious to see how raocow does tomorrow. IIRC hip hopping about has a really hidden secret exit, and Castle of Reflection can be difficult.

[MrDeePay]

Dunno, that boss didn't seem challenging in the slightest..but what do I know?

It's just pointless grinding, really.

[Vergalon]

Dunno, that boss didn't seem challenging in the slightest..but what do I know?

It's just pointless grinding, really.

MB, the bas for the virus boss, is one of two enemies in the SMBX engine(the other being MB's jar) that is stationary and has more than one HP. They each have a set amount of HP when created, and as far as I can tell, it is very difficult to change the value to lower it.

Is it perfect? Of course not. The SMBX engine is not flexible when it comes to creating new content, rather than replacing existing content.

[cheez8]

It's too bad raocow slide over a specific block at the end of that Pacifist level. Some some reason, and I have no idea how they did it, the block underneath the leet makes you kneel, essentially having your character kneel before the gaint Blood Drop for the cutscene.

It has a resprited SMB1 axe set to, upon death/activation to run an event to cause the player to press down, then a couple ticks later cause a neutral event.

Yeah, except I could swear in an earlier version I actually was stuck kneeling until the textbox went away, which was wonderful, instead of this where Demo and Iris just kind of trip and stumble as they skid past.

Dunno, that boss didn't seem challenging in the slightest..but what do I know?

You don't know the magical, irresistible allure of bottomless pits, that's for certain! And it's probably a good thing.

[SAJewers]

They each have a set amount of HP when created, and as far as I can tell, it is very difficult to change the value to lower it.

AFAIK It's impossible.

[AUS]

Is it perfect? Of course not.

Everyone is making the game seem terrible when everyone keeps answering any amount of criticism with well, it's not perfect. I'd rather hear "we'll try better in the future" or if the criticism is actually off-base (which based on the responses I'd imagine not) a retort. I dunno. It makes everything lamer when someone does that.

Anyway, what I've played of the game so far has been fun and what raocow's played so far has been fun to watch. I thought the troll-face trap was kinda ass and shouldn't have been there, but still..IT'S NOT PERFECT HAR HAR HAR (see how dumb this is?)

[raocow]

IIRC hip hopping about has a really hidden secret exit

it is?

[Vergalon]

Is it perfect? Of course not.

Everyone is making the game seem terrible when everyone keeps answering any amount of criticism with well, it's not perfect. I'd rather hear "we'll try better in the future" or if the criticism is actually off-base (which based on the responses I'd imagine not) a retort. I dunno. It makes everything lamer when someone does that.

Anyway, what I've played of the game so far has been fun and what raocow's played so far has been fun to watch. I thought the troll-face trap was kinda ass and shouldn't have been there, but still..IT'S NOT PERFECT HAR HAR HAR (see how dumb this is?)

I was just pointing out that we (read: everyone who contributed) tried to use the engine the best we could, and while the results weren't perfect, they were the best we could do. Though in hind sight, it wasn't the best way to phrase it. also for me the word 'perfect' has a negative connotation

Not bashing anyone here, just explaining :<

Long story short, I'm an idiot

[Mochtroidprime]

IIRC hip hopping about has a really hidden secret exit

it is?

Well there are a lot of other pipes that try to fake you out and just end up leading to other bonuses

But it's kind of put in a really random place.

[Holy]

It's too bad raocow slide over a specific block at the end of that Pacifist level. Some some reason, and I have no idea how they did it, the block underneath the leet makes you kneel, essentially having your character kneel before the gaint Blood Drop for the cutscene.

It has a resprited SMB1 axe set to, upon death/activation to run an event to cause the player to press down, then a couple ticks later cause a neutral event.

Yeah, except I could swear in an earlier version I actually was stuck kneeling until the textbox went away, which was wonderful, instead of this where Demo and Iris just kind of trip and stumble as they skid past.

The event's always been the same, the engine acts really weird with it: No matter how long I made the kneeling event, as soon as demo stops moving, she stands up. So people who ran into the room directly up to mr. comma got the cool actual kneel, the people who kind of cautiously walked up to him got the stumble.

Also I liked the sussing out of the secret exit, interesting how raocow tried to play the pacifist. I'm not sure frozelar even realized the no damage gimmick as he methodically murdered everyone on the first run, heh.

[XutaWoo]

Also I liked the sussing out of the secret exit, interesting how raocow tried to play the pacifist. I'm not sure frozelar even realized the no damage gimmick as he methodically murdered everyone on the first run, heh.

You have no idea how many times I went through the level trying not to fry or stomp on anyone, only to find out that's not what you're supposed to do. It's surprisingly hard, especially before you realize they don't hurt you.

No, I didn't realize they didn't hurt you until like my third try at the secret exit.