After quite a bit of work on the world 4 boss and a stressful semester in general, I'm happy to announce that world 4 is now finished! And that I'll hopefully have the next couple of weeks to devote to hacking.
Now that all four worlds are done, what's left to do? A lot, unfortunately, but at least I've started.
This is the final world (Bowser world, Bowser's castle, you name it). I spent the past couple of days working on the map, and the past couple of
years wondering what it'd look like once I finally get around to making it. It's pretty far from the vague vision I had, but I think it's come out alright!
(Also, this map is chock-full of ASM and special effects. This is basically a shwocase of all my HDMA tricks at once, and I just about fit it into five channels.)
My first draft of this was a plain old Bowser's Castle with stone bricks and towers and whatnot, but then I remembered I wanted to give it a factory theme, and considering I'm not great at drawing architecture, that went pretty well! I think an industrial setting makes for a good contrast to the previous four worlds which are all about nature. It's not meant to be a heavy handed good-versus-evil plot element - this looking like a factory has no significance other than wanting to set a mood with pictures.
This world is only going to have one level, which I should be able to get to making soon.
(In all my hacking years I've never made a fifth world before. This feels like a surreal milestone!)