AUBREYTHEBARD'S PROFILE

I knew today was the last day, but I hadn't noticed the event deadline was 6:59 AM my time. X) I'm sure nobody will mind me posting revisions here though, what with all the talk about extending the event.

Feel Invincible v1.2

• Gussied up the intro room a little, including adding a player 2 starting point.
• Fixed the problems with the cloned after-checkpoint section by making ANOTHER section by hand -- good thing there's only one screen's worth of space and most of the stuff comes before the checkpoint.
  
• Changed the way the final boss works by having the slimes come in from the side and capable of moving. That way Link has to watch his back while fighting Bowser, and the other heroes can't just bounce straight up and down fighting the slimes. Also, switched Link's fire flower out for hammer bros suit, which in his case gives him a beam projectile that doesn't reach quite as far. He can still hit Bowser from outside Bowser's hammer toss range, but has to stand closer than before. Much improved fight overall, I think.

Electric Daisy v1.0

• Added in the Daisy sprites, which it turns out were part of a publicly-available pack all along -- thanks jackalotrun. Also made a Daisy hero-switching block, which anyone can feel free to use.
• Altered the final section to prevent the dragon coin-carrying shyguy from randomly deciding to wander off the left edge at the bottom, and to keep the dragon coin from sitting tantalizingly at the bottom of the screen if the shyguy makes it off the edge before the hero grabs it.

Thanks, it's encouraging to hear someone express an interest. :) Unfortunately you'll be waiting a while as this project is currently on hiatus, but I do intend to get back to it.

Numbah two spot claimed with "Feel Invincible"! A few technical details I learned that might be useful for others to know: there is a HARD LIMIT on how many events can be in a stage. You can have 98 of them plus the built-in "Level - Start", "P Switch - Start", and "P Switch - End" ones. I wound up having to eliminate a few events by combining them into others in order to finish my stage, and even there I had to make the last interlude and chorus sections boss fights without a lot of synchronization to the music.

As it turns out, the concept described by Link_2112 about chopping a song into pieces and playing the later part after a checkpoint IS possible. HOWEVER, there is a big restriction: in order to play a different custom music, you need to do it in a different level section. This is because when you tell an event to change the music, you can only tell it to change to "Custom", which does whatever is entered in the Custom field for the current level section. The trick I came up with to make this seamless was to place an instant warp to a NEARLY IDENTICAL level section on the checkpoint, but hide its layer shortly after the stage starts. That way, the player can hit the checkpoint without going anywhere, then if they die and reenter the stage, they hit the warp and go to the other section with the other music, and there hit a trigger which starts events in the middle of things. Unfortunately, the "clone section" feature of the SMBX editor is buggy, placing everything a fraction of a brick higher than it should be in the cloned section. x.x This can be worked around to an extent, but it did seem to cause a minor graphical problem with a warp pipe at the end in my stage -- you're sent where you need to go, but you don't see your hero entering the pipe.

Also, SMBX apparently can't handle multiple checkpoints per stage. If there are multiple checkpoints, it won't send the player to the most recently reached checkpoint -- it will pick one randomly, presumably just using the first one it finds through some unpredictable process because it doesn't expect there ARE any others. I was puzzled by my second checkpoint seeming to be fixed and then not for a while, then I found this SMBX forum post going over the issue. I ended up removing the first checkpoint.

I'm considering churning out another stage using Electric Daisy by Lindsey Stirling. This one wouldn't be a synchronized stage, just a regular stage with that music. And Daisy sprites for Peach, of course. ;) If I can find some to use, that is. I'll try sending a PM to ask permission to use Sarasaland Adventure 2's sprites, but the dev's last post was in January of last year, so I don't know if he's paying attention to RMN anymore. Does anybody know of any freely-available SMBX Daisy sprites I could use? A quick Google doesn't seem to be turning any up.

author=halibabica
And that stage is why. No offense, Aubrey, but that level was completely impossible.

Aw, you're being hyperbolic. ;) I wouldn't have submitted a stage that couldn't be beaten, or even wasn't feasibly possible to win on first try. I can understand why you wouldn't bother, being a judge with lots of other stages to both play through and grade, and I don't blame anybody whose interest wasn't held by it -- the inability to include checkpoints was a major detriment. Still, I have to imagine that with the number of downloads the game got, somebody besides me was able to finish that stage.

With that said, if anybody does want to make a music-synced stage for this event, I recommend making it a lot easier to survive than Hipster Hop. I'm interested in passing on the technical know-how, not the final play experience.

While requiring a checkpoint is a good idea in general, it precludes a level type that would fit rather well with this project: "rides" where the level progresses in sync with the music. If there's a checkpoint, the level resumes in the middle, but the music will restart from the beginning, putting them out of sync. Maybe nobody will want to make that kind of level anyway, especially considering some of the other difficulties inherent in them, but could there be an exception to that rule for such cases?