Originally posted by Minuy600Oh, thanks a lot! I already was wondering why people didn't get insane from patching so much, lol. Now I understand. I might want to do the same as some are doing right now and be a little bit of a judge. Is that okay with everyone?
e: Ahh nuts, i've tried a few and now I get the feeling my optimistic flow of my level is not really justified. I don't want to go all negative here but I am slightly dissapointed in myself.
Don't get discouraged, it takes a really long time to be able to understand good flow and enemy placement in a level. Yet, I will say that there are ways to get good at it quicker, and it's good to at least know what you're aiming for when making a level.
So first of all, your level's name is "Bullet Bonanza". I'm gonna explain why this level name could be much better, and it's not just because it almost matches the ironic naming chart that I made a few posts back. Bullet Bonanza is boring, and already before playing your level, I have this feeling that it will be a level with bullet bills making up the primary enemy. So already, nothing about that name is making me excited to play the level, since I have played plenty of bullet bill levels before (and they tend not to be that great, since the bullet bills are luck based). I have played lots of levels that had absolutely incredible names, that ended up not being that great (example: Sky At The Weird). But, that is at least better than a level with a boring name, where the design ends up fulfilling the blandness insinuated by the name.
The problem with Bullet Bonanza, or any level that uses the main sprite as the first part of the name, followed by an overused action phrase, is that nothing unique about that level could possibly be inferred from the name. However, if I name a level "Chains of Atrophy", well now, that is interesting. What are the chains going to be? Why are they falling apart? It turns out, the chains are creating/eating brown blocks, but it's an interesting name that really draws you in. Now, not every level has to have this random nonsense VIP styled name to be interesting. Actually, you can have a pretty standard level name, but still capture the attention of people. Take these for example: "Ice Cutting Site" or "Gambly Night". These work because they have a really pleasant and unique ring to them, without using overused tropes like "Bonanza". The "cutting" in Ice Cutting Site comes from the grinders, without implying immediately that they are grinders. Imagine how much worse "Ice Grinders" or "Grinder Snowland" or "Grinder Ice Mountain" would have been.
One of my favorite level names is "Green Palace of the Alchemist" by worldpeace. It's insanely creative because it turns a rather hard to name level concept (the green switch) and makes it interesting by calling it a palace. The alchemist is a joke, since the gimmick involves silver (and alchemy is the process of turning metals into precious metals like gold). If you have a level with bullet bills, even something cheesy like "Bill's Backyard" or "Ready, Aim, Fire" sounds better.
I also checked out some of the other videos on your channel. Why in the hecking actual heck would you name a world in a hack "Plain Plains"? There is nothing exciting about "Plain Cave" either. In fact, there is something extremely UN-exciting about having the word "plain" in any of your level names. I suggest scrapping all of those names and thinking really hard about something that would be humorous and/or interesting. If English isn't your first language, that's all good. I use a thesaurus sometimes to come up with interesting synonyms to common words. For example, in my OLDC level "Agaric Sabotage", "Agaric" is a type of mushroom. Sounds a lot better than "Mushroom Sabotage" right? Do you think I'm an expert on mushroom etymology? Nah, I just googled it, no one will care. It helps make the level name better.
Now, as for the actual level, you said in the description that you made your level similar to the original SMW, but I'm not sure about that. Your level is pretty different than anything in Super Mario World, for various reasons. One of the biggest reasons is that Nintendo only used munchers in like two levels (Mondo and the Vanilla Secret ice level cave place). But I won't get into that, because who cares? We aren't trying to copy SMW anyway, so don't worry about studying the design style of Nintendo over 20 years ago (Nintendo sure doesn't copy their old design style when making levels for Super Mario Odyssey).
Now, your level goal should be to make something fun, not copying Nintendo. So I went ahead and watched your level, and I can point out ways that would make your level a lot more enjoyable. First of all, you have bullet bill shooters frequently on the ground, in shooting range of Mario. I believe the only level that did that was Outrageous, in the original SMW. The difficulty that comes from using that setup is fine, but the annoying part is how randomly the bullet bills shoot. You'll just be chilling on the ground, when a bullet bill randomly ambushes you. So you can use bullet bill shooters, but try not to put them on the ground. It will be a challenge enough not getting hit by them when you jump.
The other thing is, you should place your sprites so that they present actual obstacles, or setups. Most of the clapping chucks are placed right next to a wall. Actually, you can just avoid all of them by jumping right past them. It would be even better if you just placed the chucks right in the middle of the ground, with nothing around. But theoretically, the chucks present an obstacle whenever you jump, so you should include some sort of jump next to that chuck, so that it is an interesting obstacle that actually does something. There's also a couple setups that involve a trail of coins on the ground, with a banzai bill right above it. I personally think it would be more interesting to have the banzai bill closer to the ground, with coin guides indicating a jumping motion, which requires you to jump on top of the banzai bill. If you think about it, people are gonna follow the coins and go into the pit. Now, all they have to do is just sit there and watch the banzai bill fly overhead of them. You used this as the very last setup to the level right before the message box, and it was pretty nice. You should have used that setup more in my opinion.
Also, you had a lot of 1 tile gaps to fall into, along with chargin chucks. That can turn out badly for the player, cause you'll be in the 1 tile wide gap, and a chuck just follows you right in and ambushes you from above. Totally uncool!
There's a short little cave area that you can take a pipe to in the level as well, with coins and multiple coin blocks as a reward. This is uninteresting, not just because coins are a bad reward, but because the only thing you do to grab the coins is jump. Nintendo had a far more interesting bonus room in their second level, which was as flat as you can get for a SMW level.
You have to work hard for the 1-up in this bonus room area. It's actually a really good room, because it introduces the concept of throw blocks, while giving a cooler prize than coins (a 1-up). You can trust the player to work harder to grab the coins though. For example, stick a winged hammer bro next to some throw blocks, with coins in the air. Players will have to kill the hammer bro and jump on the winged blocks to grab the coins.
By the way, your best setup is right here:
Action packed and a completely :accurate: coin guide trail. Make the rest of your levels more action packed and clean looking like this. Try using more actiony stuff with athletic levels as well, such as grey falling platforms and basically any platform sprite in the mushroom tileset. Since you were using the banzai tileset, you could have used carrot math platforms as well, which combine very nicely with banzai bills by the way.
You also put coins in strange places, such as between bullet bill shooters. Two coins is not worth the reward for risking getting hit like that. Also, someone might think there is a secret invisible mushroom there or something, and risk going into the gap, only to get two coins.
Last thing is, your level breaks the fourth wall at the end in a really strange way. You should never have message that breaks the fourth wall by saying "congrats on beating my level" or "here is my entry" or "I worked hard on this level" because it looks really weird. Same with the feedback thing. It's gonna look weird in the final collab because the contest is already over. Now granted, I guess I did give you feedback after the contest ended, but still, post something like that in the forums. Message boxes should be used to explain something, or they can be used humorously. But, they shouldn't be used to bridge the gap between "player" and "hacker" unless it's like the credits level of some hack or something.
So yeah, there is no need to be disappointed, don't worry. Your level isn't bad, it's pretty good, and well, it's pretty good when compared to the other pretty good levels out there. I'm just telling you all this crap so that you can think about ways of improving your levels for future contests. A lot of people think feedback is "yea this level is nice, here's some cutoff there, but nice level". I think this "feedback" isn't really helpful to anyone. Thankfully, people gave me honest feedback when my levels were bad, and unfortunately, I didn't always get feedback when my levels were bad (and I didn't realize), and I wish I had. My OLDC level would be a lot worse, if it wasn't for someone basically telling me that the third section of my level wasn't that good.
There are things that are good in the level, and you should focus on those good things. I notice you do have a good eye for coin guides in your other levels, so keep using them! Coin guides are a really good method of guiding the player through the level. Don't get discouraged about this contest, because I'm sure you'll level will do fine. But I'm giving my honest opinion, it's not top 3 quality, so I believe that working on things in your levels will help you improve. Another thing I think is a re-occuring thing in your levels is the randomness of coins. The coin guides are nice, but the random coins on the ground aren't great. Sprinkling coins around isn't a bad thing, but using small pockets of coins tricks the player into thinking that "something" is being indicated.
Also, it's okay to not be pleased if your level doesn't rank as high as you want, but it's not the end of the world. But really, you should never be disappointed in yourself, because think about it. You are only as good as you are right now. I am only as good as I am, 'right now'. Same applies to everyone. If you do your best, you did your best. I can't be disappointed when worldpeace always makes levels better than me, no matter what, because I'm happy with how my entry turned out according to my skill level, if that makes sense. Now, if I rushed a level and threw it together last minute, but I knew I was capable of doing better, that would be different.