GAMEACTIVE'S PROFILE

author=Isrieri
If you can't beat it, and you made it. That's not a good sign. Might want to rethink some of that level design.

A rule of thumb I learned the hard way is that people like to make stuff that challenges them, but because you're making the game and have to playtest the hell out of it, you'll actually make it totally impossible for anyone playing the game. The trick to avoid that is to dumb it down and make it SO easy that you can consistently breeze through all of your levels every time without taking any hits. It will seem dumb to you and you'll want to make it harder, but for the newcoming players who don't know what to expect it will be hard enough as is. Super hard stuff that's challenging for even you belongs in some secret post-game area. Not the last levels of the game.

Well, technically that level is part of a “secret” post-game area (doing a side-quest offered after beating the final boss unlocks a secret extra world), but I do agree that the difficulty needs to be chiseled down. For one thing, the warp pipe needs to transport faster, and the water causes my character to move slower than the screen. I’m still keeping the reversed-scrolling gimmick intact, but I’m trimming out some of those cannons and adding another power-up midway through the area. I swear, compared to the rest of the secret levels, this one might as well be from SGL: The Lost Levels… which will never come out, so don’t ask for it.

author=kentona
when will you be releasing a stand alone level editor? :)))

Never. A level editor would be too much work to program, and I have my doubts that it’d really be used seriously. I might pack in a live-editing feature as a cheat code or an unlockable mini-game or something.

(By the way, cheat codes disable saving just like they do in SMBX. The difference here is that the cheat that re-enables it has a 255/256 chance of giving you an instant Game Over instead.)

“Obtain and Extra Star” Exploit:

I obviously can’t read, I just noticed the sign-up date range… oh well.

This is the first event I’m participating in, and I’m curious on how we should rank the difficulty of our level. Is there a guide on this site for it, or is it just re-testing the level under various conditions (small Mario only, no killing enemies, ect.) and scoring based on that all right? Or am I even going to be given a chance since I’m so late?

Also, I’d just like to point out that I make up my levels as I go, and play-test the crud out of them. I’m going on the “GreyOcean Ravine” theme, and I’ve gotten maybe about 5% done since I started a couple hours ago…