MIKEMC'S PROFILE

Mushroom Fields: If you beat this level with Yoshi, even though he does not collect the star with you, you will have him on the world map and on the next levels until you die, or hit a checkpoint (in which case you'll restart with him at the checkpoint). Sometimes you may start the level with him, enter a pipe which erases him, and then he'll reappear after you reload from the checkpoint.

Hell's Mansion: I don't know if it was because I finished Mushroom fields with a Yoshi but I had him with me after switching to Luigi. He wasn't there when I entered the underground castle but he reappeared after restarting from the checkpoint, as mentioned above.

Well first off thank you for being so detailed and professional about it. Your feedback makes more sense with the included screen shot although there are a few points that I'm not understanding, some of which are side effects from the changes. However I do understand your decision to not accept the map.

The sewer originally had enough running room to slide under the 1 space hole. In Quake this was a place to crouch, so I decided to go with the running slide. If stuck, I am used to holding crouch and a direction, then jumping to jimmy myself out. Because of the clipping glitch, I added the hole to the right but then you do not have enough room to run..

The outside area with the dragon coin and para-koopa has a smaller issue: The castle tiles below the para-koopa are only on the ground. You should extend that tile all the way to the ground instead of having it rest on the grey cave tiles.

By 'ground' do you mean the bottom of the map? This was my attempt at choosing two similar textures that blended together. The iron-looking floor tiles are artificially placed, or built by the enemy. The cave stone underneath is natural stone found in the ground in this part of their world. The theme of this area is that the hallway was dug out of the mountain, and the outside area had to be modified to support wear and tear of boxes, crates and shipments.

The doors you can and can't enter need to be marked better.

The wooden door at the beginning wasn't supposed to be there but because a hole in the wall is apparently too difficult to identify as an open passage, the door was added. This is only an exit point for the secret room (dirt area). Thinking about it now, I should have added the SMB2 lock tile over it, but I felt rushed trying to re-fix things repeatedly that I missed this.

The other doors and yellow pipe have a dotted " ! " box next to them. In SMW those blocks often clued us in that returning to them once filled in is a good idea. The blue door had one of these instead of the ON/OFF box but for whatever complications it had to be changed. The yellow pipe sticking out of the ceiling suggests that there is another yellow pipe on the floor somewhere.

The big red door in the supply room above the sewer has a green dotted box above it, however there is no green " ! " in the level. The player was supposed to clue in that without a switch, the door cannot be opened. The only 'elevator' I make reference to is the ending big red door, which you can enter no problem. ** I haven't used NPC's like that yet so the thought never occurred to me! I'll definitely be using invisible NPC's for messages in the future, Thanks! :)

Stairwells - I admit now that after playing SMW people might want to just launch themselves up there, but cannot due to the solid walkways I was using. It's very late here and I don't quite remember what I was going for, except like you say, 'When in doubt, just walk up the stairs!' isn't viable in Mario. (it is in Castlevania)

And finally, the castle tiles that are above and behind the star door. These tiles are attached to the back wall and do not need to touch the ground. As with your new stairwell, the black tiles are in the background and the blue ones are foreground and surround the door like an archway. The fact that you can pass through them is because the only way to get them solid is to use the large 4x4, which prohibits you from exiting.

..yeah..
I'm tired, you're tired and he's starting to contradict himself.. I'll see what I can do when I get up later today alright.

We seem to have a ragequit.

Well I was trying to do something different that putting grass on the ceiling and making maps that are passed by running all the way in one direction. I'm using the tiles that are given to me (and are familiar to Mario fans) rather than building new ones and actually putting it into a story that doesn't involve the friggin princess for once. Yet all these ideas are shunned in a project in which people are invited to join without a reservation and add their own style for others to try out.

I fixed the error parts of the map and the rest is being left as is because that is MY style of mapping. I am upset because I have put a lot of effort into this, it makes sense to my friends, and you want me to just dumb it down into something I could have made in an hour.

- Mike

The brick background is the outer wall of the building you're in.
The granite ceiling is the roof of the cave and the dirt ground is so plants can grow.
The sand is because grass doesn't grow under water like that.
(The extra bg behind the water is because the graphics kept messing up there)

Is this SMB community so simple that any attempt at details are frowned upon? This is supposed to be a community project - not all levels have to look exactly alike! If that is the case then
a) Texture sets should have been specified at the beginning
b) This should have been a Chain Game

Look, this isn't the NES anymore; we're not bound by memory constraints; we don't have to use the same textures repeatedly in order to save space. There are 4+ games worth of resources available for mix-and-match. No, I didn't go and use all of them, but the ceilings and floors, walls and crates each have their own place as they should. Nothing is invented here - if you've played Mario 1-3 and World, everything is recognized. Crates are still crates, pillars are still pillars; if you remember it being a solid block in Mario 3, World 4 then it'll be a solid block here as well!

If it's really that hard on the eyes then just leave it out I guess.. Though I'd prefer it if you made it into a secret level for 1 extra star, like in Donkey Kong Country with the bananas.

- Mike