26th SM63 Level Designer Contest

[Konradix]

By the way my level designs are supposed to be difficult,I realized that evil Bully-Bomb combo last year and has been using it ever since.(The trick is to trigger the Bob-Omb's fuse then wait for the Bully to be blasted away.)

Or jump above the Bully and in front of the bomb, so you get squashed. Then jump and get shot away from the platform so you land. Easy mode. The infuriating part was the bombs near the bridge. They get hit by a Bullet Bill, explote and in the combo explosion I get thrown off the cliff. God, was that annoying.

[1018peter]

This post by 1018peter was thumbed up by:

CedarBranch (April 12th, 2014, 3:43 pm)

[Harmless]

Wait a second, there was a level limit?

...........

Totally missed that part. >.>

[Volkove]

3rd place seems about right for a last minute & incomplete submission. Congrats MP3 & Yuri.

The third room annoyed me a lot, didn't really like the glitch you used in this room.

If you don't like using them, you could use a different route to reach the top instead.

The platform in the first boss room is placed too far right and therefore allows the player to fall down there.

Could you elaborate? What platform?

If you had made this into a series, I could only imagine the following it would get.

There already is one, actually. The link to Savage Labyrinth isn't direct at the moment, but even so, it would fit within there.

[Nwolf]

3rd place seems about right for a last minute & incomplete submission. Congrats MP3 & Yuri.

The third room annoyed me a lot, didn't really like the glitch you used in this room.

If you don't like using them, you could use a different route to reach the top instead.

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The platform in the first boss room is placed too far right and therefore allows the player to fall down there.

Could you elaborate? What platform?

The metal platform when you enter the room and the fire rain starts. I tried to evade something and then just fell down there.

[Harmless]

By the way my level designs are supposed to be difficult,I realized that evil Bully-Bomb combo last year and has been using it ever since.(The trick is to trigger the Bob-Omb's fuse then wait for the Bully to be blasted away.)

Or jump above the Bully and in front of the bomb, so you get squashed. Then jump and get shot away from the platform so you land. Easy mode. The infuriating part was the bombs near the bridge. They get hit by a Bullet Bill, explote and in the combo explosion I get thrown off the cliff. God, was that annoying.

Wow I pulled off a bunch of fireworks this time,it's all intended,I guess not everyone appreciates the challenging enemy placements.

I dunno, I don't mind difficulty where it would normally be appropriate. Too much difficulty chokes the level though.

[~MP3 Amplifier~]

This post by ~MP3 Amplifier~ was thumbed up by: 2

CedarBranch (April 13th, 2014, 8:08 am) • ~Yuri (April 13th, 2014, 8:00 am)

[~Yuri]

Amp just said what I was going to say.

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-0.5 Small typos, prison is spelled prision, "pride isn't" instead of "pride doesn't", "captain" instead of "capitian", "So, I better" instead of "So, it's better".

I double checked the dialogues, and the only typo I saw was "prision"...

First of all, Yurimaster, why link your dialogue ingame? It ruins the point of the competition. Next time there is an anonymous structure, PM the host your dialogue.

Sorry about that... I wanted my post to be clear, with only the name, the music, and the level, and I didn't want the player to switch between windows just to check the story. While doing this, I completely forgot about this system...

[~MP3 Amplifier~]

For the first time in a while, I'm responding to my judgings. Also, I think the scores are all accurate now? Would I be able to hand out the medals soon?

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(like the 1-block gate/block/gate/etc. jumps that annoyed me a bit) (not that I fell down there but it was annoying)

Yeah, that challenge was a bit risky, although the reason I went through with it funnily enough is because I didn't find it very hard.

-0.5: Losing the invisibility star in the garden because of entering the temple results in not being able to return

Ah yes, I was aware of that bug just after the deadline. Was annoying. I'll have to figure out a way to fix it if it gets entered into a WITBLO.

+0.25: Wolves <3

<3

Speaking of playing levels again, the difficulty curve wasn't too
steep and was well-paced, however that being said, the levels were not all that challenging, and most of my deaths
came from careless mistakes.

Yeah...I have a bad habit of making my levels fairly easy. It's usually because I'm too paranoid that if I make them harder it'll be near impossible to play. That has happened once before.

Speaking of coins, the coin distribiution was not great. In easy areas, I was given many coins, where as in more
challenging places there were no coins. Lastly, the story slowed down the gameplay a bit, but it did not bother me
that much.

With the coins, I tend to just scatter them. And I sometimes don't always remember where the hardest parts are in my levels, because for me they may be fairly easy. But I think in the sections where I thought it was necessary, I put the coins there. If there were a lack of coins in some places, it may have been because I gave you some enemies to get coins from instead.
Also, I wanted to limit the story as best as I could, but I kind of had to add more in as I went along or I was in danger of it not making any sense. To be fair though, my other past story levels have been worse at times.

No real cutoff either, though in some places I could see a weird, unnatural pattern.

That's meeee.

Oh yeah, and just a tip with the other section, you start at 3 and add/take points from there. I'm quite relieved you didn't follow that though, otherwise my level would have had above 5/5 in Other, which wouldn't have made any sense. :p I am honoured though, you picked out a lot more good points than I thought there were.

It's an ingenious way to use platforms, but it's buggy. I in fact found that you didn't even need all three platforms.

Yeah, this is the same problem I had when I was playtesting. I tried to look for a way around it, but every time the platforms stopped they shook way too much, even though they shouldn't have at all because I set the offset direction to 0. In the end I figured, I'll add all 3, and make it a non-priority to get all of them, even though every time I played them, unless my timing was just right, I needed all 3 to get to the top.

A major drawback of having a large exploration based area is that you typically end up having a lot of space filled in with one tile. I can't help urge you to fill those in with some sort of detail.

Ah yes, I really wanted to fill those parts in with more décor, but I was incredibly aware of the lag level rising, so I tried filling them in with a few clouds. (if you're talking about the part I'm thinking of anyways)

But stalactites looked very strange, and I realize it's an attempt to make one larger item out of many small ones. It just doesn't work.

Ah, with that section I was following the actual dream I had that inspired the series. In my dream, I had 5 unusual plants to collect. You might think it weird that I wanted to stay so close to the original source, but well, I just loved the concept of making new plants.


On a slightly different note, with the patterns in hell, part of me did want to just do random tiling, and I agree that would have been better looking back on it. Doing graphics for hell was very uncomfortable, because I couldn't make it 'beautiful' like I usually love to do. I'm no good at making levels look evil. :3

[Harmless]

Srsly though, why the pessimism? I know the LDC didn't go to plan for a lot of you, tbh not even for me as I would have preferred someone else to win. But let's just accept what happened and apply what the judgings said to the next LDC.

This was just an all time low for me. And a massive disappointment.

Also, I wanted to ask Konrad where the giant difficulty spike was. Part 5?