Description



37 years Mario has jumped through hoops, bounced over mountains, trekked through deserts and crushed thousands of fungal opponents in the endless quest to keep the danger-prone princess out of the clutches of one Bowser - everyone has their calling - Mario's just happens to be damsel recovery

But a man's gotta keep things fresh right, between those hikes to the Dark World and back, he's found time to stretch his legs in football, tennis and golf, fancies himself a world-renowned racer and even has a life-sized board game for his own personal R&R time

But in those 37 years, you know what never changes?

The music

Mario appreciates those talented Nintendo composers but after 37 years of video game instrumentals, he's not sure he can take it any more - he's going mad, crazy even. His brother Luigi has enlisted the help of a very strange group of individuals to help Mario out of his rut here

Oddly enough, these strange individuals are us

The green brother has enlisted our help to produce a menagerie of levels with what we consider the best music of our colourful world to bring some variety into his stressed sibling's job

When the event ends, this levels will be compiled into a hub-centered SMBX game and sent to Mario by express mail. As per standard, it will also be downloadable on RMN, because of course it will




- This is an SMBX event, you will need to submit levels created with the SMBX engine, specifically, RMN's classic fav, the SMBX 1.3.0.1 engine (I know there's fancier and arguably better engines out there, but I'm aiming to try and keep this a simple casual event, so we'll stay tried and trusted for now)

- Your level must utilise your favourite song as it's sole and only theme, remixes and alternative versions can be used in conjunction but it must be clear that the songs are obviously related.

- Your level must have a checkpoint, 5 dragon coins and end with a SMB3 star

- Your level must not contain SMW stars or the infamously buggy duo of Unskinned Dry Bones and SMW Bowser Statues, it is possible to get textures for dry bones that avoid being buggy and SMB3 Bowser Statues work much better

- Take this from the man himself, there is nothing worse than trying to guess "Am I allowed to swim in THIS water?" Water must be swimmable and waterfalls must be decorative

- All characters must be able to clear a level unless a level is made with a specific character in mind, then you must make sure the player is definitely that character before they begin the main meat of the level

- Avoid pesky softlocks, there should be no situation where you are still alive and yet unable to progress

- Try to avoid one-block high dead end gaps, this causes SMBX's infamous zipping trick and can cause some unwanted effects

- Luigi would like to remind you that the Mario Bros. are generally a U-rated brand and while he will grant some slack, if a song is too vulgar, he will kindly request you to either find a less vulgar or censored version or in extreme cases may ask you to use a different song. if you're not sure, leave a link in the event comments and he'll let you know

- The level must have Luigi of Mushroom Kingdom's Seal of Approval. The level will be judged and feedback provided in order to make sure there is a consistent level of quality, once all feedback has been taken care of - the level will be accepted

- There will be a strict one level at a time rule, you will be allowed to make another level (presumably with your second favourite song and so on) upon the acceptance of the previous

- And finally do not begin work on your level until the event's official start date: November 10th

Details

  • 11/10/2018 12:00 AM
  • 12/09/2018 11:59 AM

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Posts

Ah, I see. So version 1.1 doesn't have the Daisy sprites. Got it.

And *oh*, I didn't think about that. I tend to check the different sections of a level for stuff if I don't see the player start positions on the first one visible, so when I saw that those didn't have music I immediately "fixed" it.
I hope it doesn't somehow mess anything up ^^;

author=AubreyTheBard
Well, it's like this...when any of the other heroes take a hit, the action may pause for a second while they lose their powers, but the music will continue uninterrupted. That causes the stage to get out of sync with the music. Link doesn't happen to have that issue (except when he uses fairy powers), so I recommend using him. It's a weird little snafu that comes with trying to do something (a music-synced stage) which the developers of the game didn't anticipate.

I'm glad you said this because now I won't bother with trying to do long audio-syncing at all. It doesn't sound worth it. Maybe a short section, but not my original plan that's for sure.
Well, there are other tricks you can use...a hero on a mount (Yoshi or Kuribo's shoe) won't cause a pause when they take a hit. That's why in "Hipster Hop", I forced the player to shrink to small size and ride a Yoshi -- they can take hits and recover as long as the Yoshi doesn't fall off a cliff or anything, but you never end up with a situation where the music is forced out of sync. That wasn't very well received though, so this time I figured, let 'em play how they like, I'll just give that one recommendation for the sake of guiding them to the "optimum intended" experience.
Hm...
Think anyone could help me out?
I'm making a level for the song "Candy Candy", and I already started placing tiles and stuff but I'm not sure whether to use a different tileset yet. Can't find a good enough "candy" tileset - current one is just *pink* everything, and I was tempted to use the Strawberry Cake tileset instead but I want it to be specifically candy so I'm not sure? ^^;
I guess I could probably find a way to mix the two, perhaps?

Meanwhile, think anyone could help me with candy-themed bullet bills(maybe a peppermint look to them?) or pirahna plants?

Edit: BTW, Hali's stage "Hocus Pocus" is really infuriating, sorry. ;3;
I've moved on from my crusade on the unkillable Orange Magikoopas, because that first fucking screen.

You made sure that player 1 won't get hit by the Red Magikoopa on the first screen, but a player 2 if they don't move dies from it. Shouldn't the player be safe to start the level without an unkillable enemy firing at them?
Also, that first power-up. I don't see that as the "beginning of the stage", even though it's on the first screen. That's because to get to it you have to get through enemies, and that's considering the placement of the player. It gets into a lot of technicalities, but in this case, power-ups guarded by 2 unkillable enemies with homing projectiles and another killable enemy with their own projectiles. Think about it like this: if the player dies in this stage or came from another stage with no power-up, they are doing all this... for a mushroom. You fall down the hole while getting shot at, have to dodge a bunch of projectiles immediately to get to the block above the spikes, then get out of that little alcove to actually start the stage, with the potential of losing that power-up you had to fight to gain.
At the beginning of the level.
I'm sorry, I'm not intending to be rude, these are just my honest thoughts. There's too much to deal with in that one beginning screen just to start the level.
I'm back as a participant again! Yay! Still working on my level though. I've tested everyone's levels except Hali's. Got some kind of error that I can't remember right now. Guess I'll just have to redownload it.

EDIT: Just noticed that event extension. That's not much of an extension at all!
author=Animebryan
I'm back as a participant again! Yay! Still working on my level though. I've tested everyone's levels except Hali's. Got some kind of error that I can't remember right now. Guess I'll just have to redownload it.

EDIT: Just noticed that event extension. That's not much of an extension at all!


I kinda agree, but to my understanding, there's a chance this event is gonna be open-ended, so even after the event "ends" we can still send in levels for a short while through PMs and stuff.
It's not a chance, it's downright a guarantee at this point, but basically Liberty sounded pretty peeved I extended it THAT much so that's the most I can do
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
Tell her I extended it. And I could extend it again and there's nothing she can do about it.
author=Solitayre
Tell her I extended it. And I could extend it again and there's nothing she can do about it.

I couldn't tell my cat that I petted a different cat, telling other humans things they might not like are usually in a no-go zone
Aaand I'm back out
Had to pawn my computer.

Again.
So I have to wait a month to get it back.
Again.

I highly doubt even if open-ended I can get my computer back before all level submissions are closed. -.-
So I decided to try again and duh, my error was so obvious. I was treating it like VX Ace, where 600 is frames, so that's 10 seconds haha I was telling the engine to wait 600 seconds, then 600 seconds, like 4 times and it came back with 'nope'.

I made my adjustments and my idea actually looks pretty cool :D The only problem is collision, but I'm working on it I fixed it.

Btw, I'm doing 2112. This stage may take 20 minutes of epicness to complete.
I was hoping to make a surprise submission before the official event deadline, but life didn't work out that way. X) Anyway, I'm working on another stage, with ironic appropriateness using the song One More by Superchick. It's a diagonal autoscroller, climbing up a mountain. Seems like checkpoints don't play nice with autoscrolling stages, so I'll have to beg exemption on the checkpoint requirement.
Meanwhile, I'm still working on my level but came to realize that I've been doing it all wrong this whole time. So I'm scraping the current version & redoing it. Sorry my entry is taking so long.

Btw, I tried testing Hali's Hocus Pocus again but 2 gif files seem corrupted which gives me a Invalid Picture error. The 2 gifs were effect-143 & 145. Maybe I should download it again?
halibabica
RMN's Official Reviewmonger
16873
How strange. I don't know what must have gone wrong with them. They're koopaling death effects, so you wouldn't miss out on much if you just deleted them.
Here's my final contribution:

One More v1.0

A couple notes for those who like to poke at things in the editor. Level Section 2 is set up as an intro area, but when I tried actually using it as such, I found that Section 1 had started auto-scrolling before the player even gets there, causing them to warp in off-screen and die instantly. Perhaps the info NPCs in the intro area could be placed in the hub world of the final game instead? Might be a good idea to have such NPCs to list the music used in all the stages, actually.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of this, but I came up with a nice little hack to fill in space that's supposed to be solid rock. I was using a single-block tile for most of the land in this stage because it happens to look more like a mountain than anything else available, but if I'd had to fill in all the underground parts visible to the player, I might well have hit the 20,000 block limit. So I tried to fill the space in with sizable blocks, which worked fine technically, but I couldn't find anything that really looked good for the purpose, especially since there were visible seams between the sizable blocks. Then I realized, duh, I can change the graphics to anything I like! So I created a sizable block graphic that was really just a 9x9 copy of the single block I was using, and viola, it looked like solid rock. There was a tiny graphical oddity at the upper corners of each sizable block, but I was easily able to hide that by having the single blocks overlap them. If you want to see clearly how this works, try temporarily renaming or moving the file block-240.gif.
halibabica
RMN's Official Reviewmonger
16873
from AubreyTheBard
There was a tiny graphical oddity at the upper corners of each sizable block

Did you replace the corresponding mask file? If you use a solid black 96x96 box and name it block-240m, that should clear it up.
My level is slowly coming together. It's gonna rock.
So, with the celebratory season over, it's time for a roll call
I need to know if anyone's still making levels and if they can/intend to have it out in the near future, as long as no-one is going to be lobbing me a level in a couple of days, I'll begin compiling it into a small game
If you absolutely 100% intend to put in a level but know that you won't have it in soon for whatever reason, what I can suggest is send it to me when it's done and I will update the game to include your new level
Welp, the turnout for the event was admittedly low but the levels we got in were great, so I'm pleased regardless, thanks for joining those who did/could
halibabica
RMN's Official Reviewmonger
16873
As before, I've made my contribution. I hope others can throw in something, too.
Apologies for the incredibly late update, I've been messing around the past few weeks trying to do a DBS check of all things; fun

Hopefully I should now be able to begin compiling it, thanks to those who made levels for the event again