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14th 24hoSMW Contest - Discussion

24hoSMWDiscussion

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I want to also add that at least a number of people I know have been screwed over their levels because uberasm isn't optional, and the "bomb/rock" throwing moles, despite having "only" variants still throws the other sprite for no reason. My only guess is some vanilla sprites are screwing with it's checks.

I am in favor of making uberasm optional.
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Hey so...is the Megaman 2 LevelASM supposed to randomly kill me when the screen scrolls? It feels like total RNG as to if it'll work or not.
Ayo, MFG. I found a typo:
Originally posted by Rules and Submissions page
RGY Blocks and Switches

It should be RBY (Red, Blue, Yellow) Blocks and Switches, not RGY(Red, Green, Yellow).



Hoo boy, guess I won't stop procrastinating and make one level for this contest. Looks fun, though!
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Originally posted by Daizo Dee Von
Originally posted by MarioFanGamer
[image]

Real mature answer there leader man. Maybe next time have a non-intrusive and very non-orthedox way of inserting uberasm that more than 5 people understand without reading the literal pdf instruction manual.

I could have put the answer more friendly, that's something where I have to agree and have edited the post since then (of course, the damage is already done...).
Keep also in mind that le4che didn't ask about how to use UberASM but rather which levels had one inserted as well as which sprite has got which number.
It's also only unorthodox because it hasn't been done very often before but it is unfortunately necessary if you can't use UberASM itself to insert codes to the level as it guarantees that the codes are all unmodified.

Originally posted by GbreezeSunset
Not trying to knock on the contest organizers for this one, but for future 24hr contests, could we consider bringing back some of the vanilla-oriented and unusual ideas that we had back in the day? I never got to participate in those, but I always wish I had. Lately, all of the 24hr contests have either been boxes or one-word themes, and I just think it would be nice to have some more original and unique contest ideas (similar to what we had in the past). I'm not sure if others would agree, but consider this a request to the staff to maybe bring those back someday.

Honestly, you aren't wrong since I want to see some of the older challenges as well. At the same time, the only ideas I could have thought were repeating some of the old challenges (i.e. build level around vanilla sprite data, build level around vanilla foreground data) and I didn't want to run a vanilla-themed challange. Then again, some of the 24hoSMW are over five years ago so repeating them might not be a bad idea, especially since our community has changed since then.

Originally posted by Sancles
*words*

Trouble is: It can be difficult to run 24hoSMW since the host can't discuss with most of staff unless they are sure they won't participate in the contest. Furthermore, many ideas sound good on paper but it's only when the contest runs you can see how good they actually are in practice.

That being said: You don't have to use every resource for the whole level, just that they get enough screentime. For example, you can build your level on Mario-Sprite-Only blocks and Spikes but the first half also focuses on Boost Platforms while the second one on Venus Fire Traps and Air Jumps. Alternatively, these sprites and blocks appear in the whole level while the UberASM effect only appears in the secret exit route.
You still might that as shoehorning but I disagree with that one since it gives each resource some spotlight.

That also is comes to another point: I disagree with the part that the levels will feel same-ish if you know that you don't need to use each resource all the time. The L/R On/Off switch gimmick may be the most limiting of the five UberASM effects but even that allows for freedom if you consider that you don't have to use it all the time (e.g. you can either gain the ability later in the level or lose it at some point).

Final words: I always remind myself that you can't please everyone. In this contest, no matter which 24hoSMW runs, chances are, someone will be complaining if the userbase is large enough.

Originally posted by Scanles
Having a big manual is always going to turn people off from reading it, especially in a setting where the time limit is the key.

In my defense: It is inevitable because you otherwise don't know what each resource does, especially if these are new to you altogether. Don't forget that I have added some customisations to the sprites and the participants had to otherwise figure them out on their own.

Originally posted by Sancles
You can easily get makeshift sprite-only blocks which are gonna work in a high number of cases if you just use 1f0 instead so the sprite-only block, and you can use the red question mark as the mario-only block, thus making that choice significantly worse than the others and not worth picking

I'd say you're overestimating the advantages of 1F0 and red ?-blocks, though. The reason is that 1F0 is a one-way sprite-only block, it works to block sprites from the top but definitively not from the sides or the bottom. The red ?-blocks are closer to Mario-only blocks but they too have an disadvantage, in this case that they're sprites and you can't put too many of them onscreen even with SA-1. They have their uses, of course, but remember they don't fill up every niche of like those of the custom blocks.

Originally posted by Daizo Dee Von
the "bomb/rock" throwing moles, despite having "only" variants still throws the other sprite for no reason. My only guess is some vanilla sprites are screwing with it's checks.

Ah, it isn't an issue with vanilla sprites but rather that is something I truly messed up with the code. I had some beta testers but apperantly, they too missed the part that the moles still throws their projectiles randomly.

Originally posted by Sancles
Honestly, i would remove [UberASM] entirely but just making it optional would've sufficed.

Originally posted by Daizo Dee Von
I am in favor of making uberasm optional.

That being said, the more I think about it, it might have been a good idea to make it optional. But it's unfortunately too late to change it.

Originally posted by Herega
Hey so...is the Megaman 2 LevelASM supposed to randomly kill me when the screen scrolls? It feels like total RNG as to if it'll work or not.

That one is definitively a weird bug since I have never seen something similar with this UberASM code before, not even during the tests. I can see why that happens, though, considering the death barrier is still active so if you're falling fast enough, there is a very real change you can die.

Originally posted by Klug
Ayo, MFG. I found a typo:
Originally posted by Rules and Submissions page
RGY Blocks and Switches

It should be RBY (Red, Blue, Yellow) Blocks and Switches, not RGY(Red, Green, Yellow).

Fixed.

By the way, I have seen complains about broken sprite display. That one is easy to fix: Due to use DSS, traditional sprite display doesn't work in Lunar Magic. As such, you should be coming with auxiliary files (every file with 24hoSMW as well as ExternalGraphics) which should be put in the same folder as the SMC with the same name as the SMC.
I at first forgot to include the first version of the baseROM while the second version had one named BaseROM.smc, though you can rename it easly. I have updated it again with the proper name since yesterday but didn't mention it because it was past midnight and wanted to respond to all the posts as well.
It's finally time to reveal the judges. And they are...

 MarioFanGamer,  Anorakun,  DeppySlide and JamesD28!

We'll certainly look foreward to play the entries!
Originally posted by MarioFanGamer
It's finally time to reveal the judges. And they are...

 MarioFanGamer,  Anorakun,  DeppySlide and JamesD28!

We'll certainly look foreward to play the entries!

I'm actually pretty interested to see James here, I've really liked almost every custom sprite of his that I've seen. I think he'll be a good judge
Check out my WIP romhack!
All Entries, Obfuscated

I'll be using this zip folder of all of the entries for my fanjudging. Others can feel free to as well.

(hopefully i didn't do anything wrong when i made this)
First 10 entries from the zip judged by me here
Alright, so now that I've played all of the entries for myself, I can give my two cents on how this contest went. I'll release my fan judging document a bit later (also, judges, don't look at the rest of this post until after you finish).

Alright, so all of what I'm about to say is excluding the issues with my own level that I talked about in the Discord server (tl;dr AddmusicK messed with the air jump a lot and it was impossible to fix the normal way because UberASMTool was not compatible with the baserom; I also didn't learn about AMK's tweaks.asm until it was too late for me to do anything about it).

Honestly? The overall level quality of this contest was...not great. Mind you, I've played all of the entries from VLDC12, the previous 24 hour contest, and OLDC2, so I'm not just saying that out of nowhere. I feel like by this point, I know what a good SMW contest looks like. The aforementioned three contests all had levels that varied in quality (like literally any level design contest does), but in this contest in particular I feel like there were only a few levels that I personally would consider good (around 3 or 4 out of 28), and a handful more that I would consider decent.

Now, I mean no disrespect to any of the entrants when I say this. I'm only saying it because I don't think the low quality is the fault of the entrants at all. The issue is less with the levels themselves and more with this contest's organization. The designers simply were not given good assets to work with. Sure, you can technically argue that a good level designer should be able to work with whatever they have with the whole "a bad workman always blames his tools" mentality, but the rules were so vague and the baserom was so unintuitive (especially to people that didn't already know how to use custom sprites and/or UberASM) that it was kind of a recipe for disaster from the beginning (especially for a 24 hour contest). I think this is also the reason why this contest had so few entries compared to the other level contests we've had recently; I saw multiple people in the Discord have to scrap or completely rework their levels because they didn't realize they had to use a sprite from EVERY set or something similar, and a lot of those people probably just gave up because they figured they wouldn't be able to finish their levels in time.

To get into specifics, I'll talk about the UberASM first. Personally, I had no problems with the air jump or Mega Man-styled vertical scrolling because both of those still opened up a lot of possibilities and gave designers a lot of freedom. The L/R gimmick was okay, but it kind of depended on how it was used. The problems came from the low gravity and Money is Life gimmicks. To put it bluntly, at least in my opinion, the low gravity gimmick that this contest used is not good. I elaborated on this quite a bit in my fan judging doc, but the tl;dr is that its movement is incredibly sluggish and overly floaty and it just doesn't feel good to control. As for Money is Life, that gimmick is just so overbearing that it almost always winds up completely hijacking whatever level it's part of, no matter what other gimmicks or sprites the level has. The gimmick would be okay for a JUMP-styled hack or something like that, but not for a level design contest. I think if a contest like this is done in the future, we should stick to simpler gimmicks like the air jump if we want people to use certain UberASM stuff.

The other big issue was the sprite selection...I feel like some of the sprites here were just inherently easier to design around than others, leaving some of them extremely overused (and others underused). I can only think of maybe 2 or 3 levels that used carryable pipes or TNT or the custom timed lifts, but a TON that used boost platforms or bouncing spiny eggs or Piranha Plants or Spikes. The poor sprite selection combined with the UberASM choices just led to a bunch of same-y feeling levels with similar setups to each other (aside from a select few standouts; and mind you, even my own entry used a bunch of those "overused" sprites because they were just simpler to build around within the time frame we had).

I think if you ever do another contest like this, you should have a set of simple enemy sprites and a set of gimmick/platform sprites to pick from and that's it. I'd say let people pick maybe 3 enemy sprites and a platform sprite, and then let them use whatever blocks and UberASM they want. I've also seen people say that a contest like this should've been a 48 or 72 hour contest, which I agree with (especially considering that this contest came with a rather large PDF manual).

Check out my WIP romhack!
I know what happened is not a big deal, but I would still like to apologize and explain my dumb mistake.

So in synthesis I accidentally referenced a terrorist and his book in my level, let me explain.

I was looking for an industrial-themed title and found a meme of a guy reading this book called "Industrial society and its future". The book itself (or at least its introduction) didn't seem that controversial so I didn't look further into it and decided to use it as the title, I then sent the level and posted a clear video.

After a while, people pointed out that the reference was rather questionable, I was confused so I looked up who this Kaczynski guy is and he's none other than the Unabomber.
Not only that, after further research, I found out that not only the book and its author are questionable, but so is the guy reading it, this video pretty much covers everything.

Luckily, the people in the server understood that my mistake came purely from ignorance and the controversy was pretty much over. I still deleted the clear video and asked to send a new version with all the references obfuscated in order to distance myself as much as possible from that monster.

Moral of the story: always look up the memes you put in your romhack

I suck at ASM and AMK
I agree with everything Sancles and Jupi said. I can't really think of much to add without repeating points, but just putting it out there that I agree.

That being said, I don't think the blame can be piled entirely on the contest organizer. I think the primary issue is that of logistics. Staff (and other users) seem to be having trouble coming up with good 24hr contest ideas because a lot of the staff want to actually participate. This means that, instead of having a lot of discussion and oversight on contest themes, these 24hr contests are being delegated to one or two people. The lack of discussion and oversight means that these 24hr contests can be a lot more rough around the edges.

There's only really two solutions I can think of to this. The first (which I've brought up before) would be to brainstorm a ton of 24hr ideas (maybe a dozen or so), and then each year, staff would select a volunteer to run the contest and randomly pick from one of the dozen ideas. That way, we're using themes and ideas that have been discussed and deliberated on by a wider group of people (perhaps even gathering input from the userbase).

The second would just be similar to what we're doing now, but have significantly more staff (and at least one or two people who are heavily involved in level design and preferably have experience judging or running level design contests) to provide oversight and advice for the contest. Unfortunately, they won't be able to participate; they will have to just take one for the team. I personally like the first solution better, since it gives more people the opportunity to participate.

Originally posted by MarioFanGamer
Honestly, you aren't wrong since I want to see some of the older challenges as well. At the same time, the only ideas I could have thought were repeating some of the old challenges (i.e. build level around vanilla sprite data, build level around vanilla foreground data) and I didn't want to run a vanilla-themed challange. Then again, some of the 24hoSMW are over five years ago so repeating them might not be a bad idea, especially since our community has changed since then.

I'm positive that all of the staff and userbase combined can absolutely come up with some good ideas without reusing old ones.
For the sake of transparency, yesterday I made a thread in our PR forum regarding a lot of these issues (at least what Gbreeze pointed out, since I can't read Nerdose/Jupihornet's comments yet). Namely, more discussion/transparency on 24ho contest themes; more user input regarding these contests (i.e. taking theme suggestions and helping new people host/judge); and better supervision/planning of this contest in general. Of course, feel free to continue providing feedback on this contest, as we appreciate all input we get.
I've judged all the entries!
Boop
Originally posted by DeppySlide
For the sake of transparency, yesterday I made a thread in our PR forum regarding a lot of these issues (at least what Gbreeze pointed out, since I can't read Nerdose/Jupihornet's comments yet). Namely, more discussion/transparency on 24ho contest themes; more user input regarding these contests (i.e. taking theme suggestions and helping new people host/judge); and better supervision/planning of this contest in general. Of course, feel free to continue providing feedback on this contest, as we appreciate all input we get.

I agree with pretty much everything that has been said, as those were my reasons for not participating this time. I would also add that i didn't like the readme at all. Like, for something like BLDC, it's fine having a big readme explaining every sprite and such, but on this you had to spend quite some time only for understanding how to insert things on the rom (and that's speaking from someone who already knows the basics; for someone new, it would even be harder. In fact, only inserting a sprite and the extra bytes can be difficult if you don't know about how bits work). I would have liked the contest a lot more if the participation period were a bit more than 24 hours.

I also didn't like the intrusiveness of the base rom, even forcing things like SA-1 and maxtile (which btw they also prevented me from testing with LMSW, something that I always do). I liked the freedom of the previous 24hosmw contests, where you could start from blank, or even from your own baserom, and install retry, for example.
I have finished my fan judging. I have collapsed everything just to ensure that the official judges do not see my own personal scores and comments, as well as the authors who made each level.

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24hoSMWDiscussion