The pride cometh before the fall.
Anyway, as I may or may not have said earlier in a hee-lariously ironic fashion, let's not fool around any further-here's
an IPS of a complete if still unrefined version of the entire level! How does
this strike you as an epic conclusion to our lovely little bonus world?
Initially I was planning to wait a few days until I could put a little more polish on this, but frankly, I'm getting tired of being goofily secretive about all this nonsense, and things are basically developed enough by this point where you can clearly see I'm going with this, so I might as well show what I have now.
Notes:
- The midpoints are only semi-functional, natch. For reference: The first one, in the intro, is just a dummy--it's just there because it was there in the original, and is not intended to have a midway bar. The ones in the cave and tower sections are real, but you can only hit one of them, so I've kindly made it drop you off in any area with two doors--the left one leads to the first (cave) midpoint, the right to the second (tower).
- Due to the silly things I do there, there is a possibility of vanishing sprites in parts of the second area. I'll see what can be done about this.
- The blue, fire-spitting heroin addict Pac Man things or whatever they are (besides grey Snifit replacements) don't turn around to face Mario, which is annoying in a vertical level. Iceman stated at one point that he was considering adding a few lines of code to the sprite to fix this, and I've tried to minimize the effect for the most part, but occasionally one will still ignore Mario and boldly do battling with the tower wall.
- The flames are currently solid, which I'd rather they not be, but the all alleged non-solid normal hurt block currently in the ROM is apparently a non-solid top-only hurt block, which doesn't work terribly well. I don't think we ever quite got to the bottom of this.
- The first area still doesn't have a proper background, for the same reasons as before. The tower has part of a background (which suits it quite well, if I may say so myself), but I'll probably add something to the sky later.
- The eerily familiar undead sorcerer who stalks you throughout the stage will be getting upgraded graphics eventually (as will likely his master). He'll still remain the same eerily familiar undead sorcerer, but will be dressed somewhat like a Pionpi.
- The thing Mario lands on at the end of the section following the one-on-one battle between Mario and the above foe will likely have blinking eyes where those large dark spots (which I've decided to interpret as eyelids) are.
- The cutscene is very much jury-rigged, since I have no clue how we'll be handling those. I have no idea why the speakers' names are slightly cut off.
Let me know if you spot anything else, which you invariably will, as I know for a fact there's still rather a lot of kinks to work out. I'm also interested in knowing what you think of some of my kookier and less orthodox ideas as a whole--I very much tried to go all out here and do all manner of ridiculous things, a befits this world, and I'm curious to see which of them work. Most curious indeed...