Episode 1 Level Review Thread

[Doctor Shemp]

Town 5 by Demolition
Wasn't there a size limit? 15.5 MB seems a bit much. If nothing else it seems to make the editor hang a lot. Anyway, on with the corrections.

Typos & Grammar

First house: both the Raocoins on the right are using splice commas. Replace them with full stops/periods. The guy on the top has ".." instead of "..."
Guy to the right of the second house: "ocasionally" to "occasionally"; "lovecraftian" to "Lovecraftian"
Third house, first room, pink bob-omb: "Pickles" to "pickles"
Boom Boom on the roof: "i've" to "I've"; "inocent" to "innocent"
Last house on the right, room to the right of the leek sanctuary, girl on the left: "he was" to "He was"

Had to abandon the rest of the review due to time constraints. I'll return to it later.

[Sturg]

SAJewers was there during the creation of the town, he said he was fine with it.

I don't think you have seen the part of the town that takes the most space yet.

[SAJewers]

As long as the music isn't too grossly huge, I don't really mind.

[SAJewers]

My world 5 town (Mantreopolis) is completed (exept for a bit with the leek sanctuary)
https://www.mediafire.com/?7a6zwlzizm94okz
Reviews would be very nice

Couple things I noticed:

- Killing the cars with your cape cause the Rabbit death effect to appear.
- In the leek room, could you add a Stone leek Statue that says "World 5 Mantreol" or however the other worlds have it?
- Some of the default musics don't really fit. I'm heading out right now, but when I get back, I'll try to suggest some better fitting music.

EDIT: Ok,
Section7 -> Rose Town
Section9 -> http://web.archive.org/web/200503062355 ... tering.mp3
Section10 -> Star Reactor
Section11 -> SMB Water
Section12 -> Mario's Pad

EDIT2: Also, for any Town NPCs, go with the convention of Name: Text

[Demolition]

Town 5 by Demolition
Wasn't there a size limit? 15.5 MB seems a bit much. If nothing else it seems to make the editor hang a lot. Anyway, on with the corrections.

Typos & Grammar

First house: both the Raocoins on the right are using splice commas. Replace them with full stops/periods. The guy on the top has ".." instead of "..."
Guy to the right of the second house: "ocasionally" to "occasionally"; "lovecraftian" to "Lovecraftian"
Third house, first room, pink bob-omb: "Pickles" to "pickles"
Boom Boom on the roof: "i've" to "I've"; "inocent" to "innocent"
Last house on the right, room to the right of the leek sanctuary, girl on the left: "he was" to "He was"

Had to abandon the rest of the review due to time constraints. I'll return to it later.

Have you played the rest of the level yet?

[Septentrion Pleiades]

I plan on doing a Stream for level design. You can get your levels reviewed if you show up.

Thurday the 19th, 7PM Pacific time(10pm eastern)
http://www.twitch.tv/septentrion_euch0reutes/

[Septentrion Pleiades]

Ztarwuff's Gravity Falls

-Potrait room adds no gameplay, and may take forever to figure out. Completely change this room or remove it.
-Boss self kills.
-Music too generic and unfitting.

LP factory by sajewer

-Some npc sprites are bad
-Secret exit should require more thought/effort

IT'S GOT A MIND OF ITS OWN!!! Dangtater
-Autoplay broken

War Machine - Dangtater
-Filter might kill demo - plus obsolete

Steve and George Go On Parade -Dangtater
- Unfair section with crushing blocks not visible
- Lazily filling in sections that might be confusing for player.
- Interesting concept.

Edit:

World 4 town does not enable side exits.

[Unaniem]

World 4 town does not enable side exits.

What is it with my levels supposedly breaking after they have been uploaded despite being thoroughly tested and looking fine during that???

I'll upload a fixed version later today, thanks for the notice.

[ztarwuff]

Septentrion, thanks for the review.

Ztarwuff's Gravity Falls
-Potrait room adds no gameplay, and may take forever to figure out. Completely change this room or remove it.

Yeah, you're right. I'll just replace the key with a 1-up beet and make the entire puzzle optional.

-Boss self kills.

I'll give it a bit more thought.

-Music too generic and unfitting.

Oh, okay. I'm not changing that yet, though. Not until the default music package is finalised and even then, not until more people complain. I see what you mean with the other points, though.

[Septentrion Pleiades]

Mabel - Elevator of Rage

-The first waves of enemies can give way to many lives with little effort. Please remove a couple of them
-The lava is clearly only one row. If you can come up with a death electric ray or something, that would be great. However, adding more lava underneath will technically fix this.
-The middle splitting off isn't well signaled. The coins aren't a good enough clue that it will happen.

Second half

-The boss is easily cheesed by picking up a item and running to it. This can actually be solved by making Kood or raocow play it with the picked-up NPCs having flags set to width=24. If you do that, you'll probably need to change those NPCs' graphics.
-The wait out death should be cleaner, with lava or something deadly at the bottom

Dr. Pepper - Calleocalla

-The grass is a brighter color on many slopes in the level.
-The level is quite featureless.

[docopoper]

Dr. Pepper - Calleocalla

-The grass is a brighter color on many slopes in the level.
-The level is quite featureless.

Good job on noticing those off colours, apparently neither of the greens on paint.net's colour pallet are actually fully green, and I guess I accidentally interchanged between them.

Yeah, the level is quite featureless - but I don't feel like it really suffers from it. The fight is intense enough with only two elements for the player to avoid, and it was more meant as something to have the player scramble over. Either way, changing that would mean redoing the entire level when it's already fun anyway... And I aint doing that. xD

Also - Dr, Pepper? Where did that come from?

[SAJewers]

Demolition - Garish Battle

You can freeze the enemies near the generator so the generators don't spawn anything for the rest of the battle and it nullifies the entire difficulty of the level.

Don't post bugs/issues here, use the wiki, please. I guarantee this is going to get lost.

[Isrieri]

I've compiled a review of all the levels housed in the Episode 1 level list.

I've put a link to it up on the Bugpage. It's a long text file I didn't feel like putting on the wiki entry by entry, so you can either download it or read it on mediafire.

http://asmbxt.wikia.com/wiki/Episode1/Bugs

[docopoper]

Aww, I'm sad you couldn't get any of my three levels working. (The Floor is Lava is worth replaying with LunaDLL too since apart from the secret exit I also controlled the layer movement with it)

The only two things you should need to check to get those levels working is that you are using the correct a2mbxt exe and that you have the latest version of LunaDLL in the exe's folder. And both of those come with the latest devkit.

Overall, from just so far skimming it this is an amazing review of the game and made me cringe that we're having the same damn quality problems and boring levels at the start of the game. >.<

EDIT: Oh - is the problem that dll that you need Visual Studio for? Because I notice that wasn't included in the latest devkit. I'm disappointed because my levels were by far the most LunaDLL intensive levels in the game and I kind of wanted to have your rating of my levels to compare when looking at other levels to get a judge of what you consider good.

EDIT 2: Aww, now reading these reviews makes me really want a review. xD You're really good at pointing out the gameplay aspects to a level and what is and isn't making it fun.

[Sturg]

World 5 Best World.

But seriously, I'm beginning to think we need to get all the level authors back and just have everyone re-do their levels one way or another. There just seems way too many problems with both difficulty as well as just being boring/annoying.

Good Job Isrieri.

Also with Electrifying Eupotamics:

I'm pretty sure you played a much earlier version of that level since a much newer version has the early exit gone as well as some additional ceiling where there's water to make those switching parts easier.

I'm glad the level was kick-ass though.

EDIT: Also I think that because LunaDll wasn't working for you that made a lot of levels unplayable, including the Final Level Name Pending since that one uses a crap-load of lunadll.

[Demolition]

Could you review towns as well?
If you do I will make you the mayor's assistant in my town.

[Isrieri]

Could you review towns as well?

Will do!

[Doctor Shemp]

Replies to Isieri's criticisms of my levels:
A Short Stroll

[*]The blargg's mask is still the yellow submarine. They'd still be really hard to see if they were colored black as it is. Wouldn't it be better to make them purple?
The blaargs - and indeed nearly all of the graphics - have been replaced in a newer version that's on the wiki but not in the devkit yet. This fixes the mask issue.
[*]That tiny lava pool has it's lava on the same level as the standing blocks, so lower the lava by a tile so you don't get pixled unfairly.
Will do.

Note to SAJewers or someone else important: I will release a final version of A Short Stroll soon that will fix this one problem and revert the uber-piranha plants to the new default graphic since that's appropriate now (or perhaps a variation on them). As none of the previous bunch of rapid revisions have been acknowledged, please make sure you include this final version in the game and in any upcoming testing level packs.

Blue Surfer

[*]I was able to beat it this time! I think something like this belongs in World 8, not 6.
I agree, although I seem to remember someone saying something about being able to enter any world at any time which would mitigate the issue. If the worlds are linear then I agree, definitely move it to World 8.
[*]The second section was oddly easier for me when I didn't attempt to shoot anything and just dodged.
That's my strategy too. The mental challenge is in realising you can set your own pace now that there's no autoscroll, so just go as fast as you can.
[*]The Lakitus are super hard to avoid/shoot, are awful, and need to be cut if this wants to stay where it is.
Really? I never found them that and I'm worse at the game than you are. Then again, I did test this with the old Lakitu graphics that were twice the size of the new ones. Any idea what would work as a substitute? Alternatively, if the worlds could be entered at any time or if this was in World 8 do you think they'd be appropriate then?

[Holy]

Hmm. I didn't really think my level would be that hard!

The wording in the review makes it seem like you were trying to slow the shell to a stop on the elevators. I think the trick is to do more of a swerve.

The blue shell part I'm iffy on. I know where to jump because I made the level, and I can do it every time. I tried to help out the player with coin trails but I've got no idea if it's obvious or not. The "trick" is to jump onto the little upper part of the moving platform, turn around, and jump back.

I don't get how you thought the green shell on the rainbow shell would be any more difficult than the first section. Don't they both involve picking up an object and then navigating around on top of a rainbow shell?

I think I will take the banana snakes out, though. They seem unfair.

[Septentrion Pleiades]

I'm not sure if it would be better to have everyone resubmit the levels at this point or just fix them in the game. I the Sloppy sand is too long and that we might as well take a hatchet to it and cut of huge parts. As for frozelar's cave, that thing is quite ridiculous. Might as well responded about my levels.

A World One Level
I agree about it not being in the right place as the very first level in the game. I always thought it would be sort of like a sister level to Totally Trollied. Well I'm not in charge of the level order.

Science
I agree about there being a need for a power up, but nearly everyone though the battle was cool.

Final Battle

I don't know much to say about this. I can't pass sheath's part at all.

[docopoper]

I'm beginning to think we need to get all the level authors back and just have everyone re-do their levels one way or another. There just seems way too many problems with both difficulty as well as just being boring/annoying.

I would love that so much. If every author came back and fixed all the problems listed - the game would improve so much.

Can we also please not be too conservative on cutting levels (it's not even all that harsh to have a level cut - it just means that it gets put back in the general level list and might be used in a later episode if it's improved enough).

I find it both aggravating and difficult to deal with that it seems to be specific level creators that are massively dragging the quality down - but honestly at this point even if we end up cutting most of a particular person's levels - we should just do it. Because what keeping them in ASMBXT did to the game really annoyed me.

EDIT: Also I think that because LunaDll wasn't working for you that made a lot of levels unplayable, including the Final Level Name Pending since that one uses a crap-load of lunadll.

Either way I still really dislike the final boss, which sucks - because ASMBXT did the final boss so well. The level itself is pretty fun I find - except I find the miniboss horrid.

Honestly, if I could - I would cut the final level and have it redone to be less of a monolith with a stupidly difficult ending, but that is a heck of a lot of work and a lot of the level is actually good anyway.

[raocow]

I know I tend to be kind of weird about these things but I'm really not a fan of removing levels which we have basically already said they would be in, you know? It's kind of a jerk move for what is supposed to be a fun group project thing.

[Sturg]

For the main level of the Final Level would people rather:

Have 4 character doors with stars or just one singular required path (like SMW Bowser's Castle. We could also have just one single path.

Final Battle

I don't know much to say about this. I can't pass sheath's part at all.

Really? What was so hard about it? I personally found it to be not too difficult...

[Doctor Shemp]

It is a jerk move to cut them now but I would say it's more of a jerk move to make other people play levels like USS Suboptimal, Fluffly Quest, Tewi whatever it was called and so on. Besides, it's a jerk move to submit shitty levels in the first place.

[docopoper]

I know I tend to be kind of weird about these things but I'm really not a fan of removing levels which we have basically already said they would be in, you know? It's kind of a jerk move for what is supposed to be a fun group project thing.

Yeah, I know how you feel - that's exactly how I felt about it during ASMBXT. But I also remember how much I ended up resenting those levels after the game came out. It really felt like a lot of people weren't going to give the game a chance because of those levels. And after having worked so hard on my own levels - that felt incredibly unjust and heartbreaking.

So when we started making this game and I heard that we were putting in extra QA I was really hopeful that we wouldn't have those levels. But while it sounds like it's an improvement from ASMBXT - I still feel like it's going to be a repeat of the last game.