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General Discussion and Questions regarding the project

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Public Beta this time
Your layout has been removed.
I'm going to take the blame for creating that beta tester thread too early. I expected we'd have a beta ready by mid-September, but it didn't happen until December. Some of the testers had even lost interest by that point.

...but yes. More time beta testing will certainly occur with this one.
Could somebody elaborate on the "blueberry controversy"?
I'm not really sure what you're talking about.
Re: silouhette level - there's a fifty/fifty chance I make an abstract level if I do make one, as.. tends to be a trend of mine. But I thought later lunar magic versions didn't like player exgfx, which is necessary for such an effect?
@raocaw: Custom player palette is enough

I believe we have a tool/patch that handles that

Extras



I should have something witty to put here (even if it's just to update dated info), shouldn't I?

Advertising Space

If I can get a level or two for this, I'll be sure to try and use the gimmick I had in my SMWCP level to a grater effect. (Including different Mario statues like Cape/Fire, adding the use of Green ! blocks as a way of progress/impeding, etc.) Hell, probably combine it with a Freezeflame/Shiverburn-themed level so it goes through smoother.

Since Donkey Kong was brought up, how about a minecart-themed level; or even levels based around gimmicks used in the later two DKC games?

Originally posted by leod
Public Beta this time

Oh yes. I don't know how many flaws which escaped through the clutchew of the beta testers last time, but it certainly was too many.

Maybe, as some people already have said, split the level design into two parts, design and testing. After finishing the level, the creator should send the level to the tester, then the tester would point out flaws, and the creator would fix them, until the level is bug-free and ready for submission.
aran - Graces of Heaven
Originally posted by Roy
Here's a tip for next time. More thorough beta-testing, perhaps more beta-testers if possible. v1.0 had a lot left to desire, luckily v1.5 is a lot more polished.

Not even necessarily beta-testers, but more people collaborating on levels, possibly reviewing them, adding suggestions on how to improve them and the likes. Not simply "claim - build - done" but rather working on them together.

What I would strongly encourage is not accepting every level the way it is. If people agree that it sucks, scrap it. Sounds harsh but in the end, it'll drag the hack down. Get together, discuss ideas, improvements and a boring level can turn into a fun ride.
I had a time-ish based level I was making a while ago for A2MT, but I since stopped working on it (and gave up my level slot). Maybe I can start on it again and use it for this.

Speaking of A2MT, they require you to post periodic updates of your level (or you lose your level slot) and you have to get your level cleared before it actually goes into the hack. I think we should have a system similar to this.

#w{|o}
A general theme I'd like to see left behind is the abuse of the p-switches and springboards. Sure, they're alright to have around, and can be pretty creatively used as a means of making a level more intricate, but ASMWCP really overdid it in that department! Some levels worse than others, but there should never be a feeling of "oh finally, a level that doesn't use p-switches for a change."

If these are kept to one out of every 3-4 levels, there wouldn't really be a feeling of dreading when you find that really tall wall or that one row of brown blocks impeding your progress until you find an item across the stage.
I'd like to see some sort of level where Mario comes to the castle of the current world, but finding the front door locked, he has to find another way into it that the owner overlooked.
Good fucking bye.
Originally posted by Supertails
We need more strict guidelines on what makes levels "fun" this time around. Carrying P-switches and springboards for screens and screens to solve obscure puzzles wasn't fun in SMWCP, and if levels are going to be this long again, we really need to use multiple midways.

This being said, I'd actually go for quality over quantity. I wouldn't mind there being less levels than SMWCP if it meant we had more room in the ROM and more resources, sample banks, patches, etc that could make it in.

We really need to develop Toad Town or whatever hub we use next time further. SMWCP's was a huge disappointment. An idea I had at one point was a "museum" of sorts chronicling a distant world of sorts, which would actually be SMWC's history.

I agree about the guidelines. I also think that this time around, levels NEED to be denied entry if they're too hard and/or too long. If they just need mere tweakings, leave that to whoever designed the level and no one else.

I think the reason we ran out of space was because people were spamming ASM and ExGFX on their levels, not because we used almost every overworld level. I hate to say this, but I think for SMWCP2, there should be limits on what gets used. For graphics, they should be decided beforehand by some people instead of letting the level designers just pick what they want. They may upset some people, but otherwise, everyone will just take ExGFX for the sake of ExGFX and all consistency is gone. Also, people really shouldn't just rely on one specific style for every level they make, if that is why they use ExGFX so much. For other ASM, just limit how much people get to use. A reasonable amount, yes, but not "take however much you want". I know these suggestions are very limiting, but how else are we to cut down on the space we use?

As for the hub, I agree. I think the hub should be made first, to ensure everything intended to be there is there.
<Adam> I feel like smwc is a prostitute now, because we put up a porn ad for money
I think that in this hack we have to check more the levels with P-switch or springboards puzzles that were really annoying in SMWCP I! And we make more effort to make this game fun than hard.
Also i think that we have to keep long levels for the later world and made short-medium size levels for the first 3 or 4 worlds (also i think that long levels hasn't to be longer that 900 seconds of the time limit)
Oh oh oh! I have an idea!

The best way to describe it is to show you this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4tr_AFj0uc


Come to think of it, in many area in the original smwcp, there were areas that i couldn't pass unless I took a hit. Maybe we can fix that?

Extras



I should have something witty to put here (even if it's just to update dated info), shouldn't I?

Advertising Space

Also since SMWC shenanigans was brought up. An idea I thought up during the Rainbow Finale fiasco (before it became Megadmin) during SMWCP would be to have a special-type level that references some of the more higher-regard hacks on the site. You know, either through cameos, doing tasks related to those hack, stuff of that like.

Originally posted by Riolu180
I think the reason we ran out of space was because people were spamming ASM and ExGFX on their levels

ASM takes up very little space unless you are using tables (And even then, only if you are using very large tables). ExGfx I can see though.
If I get a level for ASMWCP2 (which I'll honestly try to, I think I did well with both of my levels for the original, but now that the community is actually interested, there's no way in hell I'll be able to claim more than one (much as I'd love to)), I'm definitely going to use some of the thoughts and inspirations that have come to me through playing through the original ASMWCP. When I designed my levels, I was under the impression that everything was going to be pretty much vanilla-only, but after seeing some of the awesome stuff other people pulled off...it left me feeling a bit inadequate.

That being said, I hope that level sign-ups can be carried out in a manner that will give everyone a pretty fair chance of getting in. If it's "first come, first serve" like with ASMWCP, then a lot of people are going to feel left out, I'm sure (mostly because I imagine the levels would be filled up in less than a day, maybe even before the routine sign-in times of the hopefuls wanting to get in!).

Also: my God, I'm gone for two hours and look at all the responses to this board already. o_o

Oh, and here's an idea: create a list of the levels, and if a level has a specific gimmick, make a note of it so that the other people designing levels in the same world might not accidentally re-use the same gimmick in their own stage. This'd also help people further tweak the difficulty of said gimmick(s) in their levels if that gimmick appears earlier in the hack.

It might sound like a strange idea, but the absurd number of p-switch and springboard puzzles coupled with the fact that I'm pretty sure Amethyst Vein is the very first level of ASMWCP with p-balloon segments (noteworthy because it's in world 8 and these sections aren't at all easy and assumed that there'd be one earlier in the game to warm the player up to it) pretty much begs for something like this so that a better difficulty curve and gameplay flow can be established.
I don't think we should limit ExGFX and ASM usage unless absolutely necessary. The only reason ExGFX limiting was brought up in the early development of SMWCP was because map16 space was still an issue (1.7x hadn't been released yet). Yes, the rom got full, but we can allay that this time. Supertails has a point, if we need to decrease the total number of levels to make everything fit well, so be it.

That said, what's stopping us from expanding to 6MB like DW:TLC did? Or was it the fact the IPS patch was full?
Originally posted by FirePhoenix
That said, what's stopping us from expanding to 6MB like DW:TLC did?

We're all too lazy to code levels in hex.
Originally posted by Mineyl
That being said, I hope that level sign-ups can be carried out in a manner that will give everyone a pretty fair chance of getting in. If it's "first come, first serve" like with ASMWCP, then a lot of people are going to feel left out


I welcome suggestions for "better" ways to handle the sign-ups for levels. I know I have my own timezone, and opening the thread up at, say, 6 PM my time may give no Europeans a chance for a level. I should probably note I'm already planning on only allowing one level per claim at the start (and then if any slots are left over after a while, then someone else can claim two). This way, everyone will be on a equal playing field and a deadline can be set and met fairly.

And for those wondering: it was the ExGFX, not the ASM. Some people made minor edits to ExGFX files (one tile, most of the time) and submitted them. Planning things like tilemaps out this time should help us substantially.
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