Yeah that's basically where my concern comes from. It appears to be quite the romp at this point and that's something that can easily happen in SMBX water levels because of your rather limited movement options.Red Yoshi wrote:a bit of challenge and some feature that makes the level unique. But hey, water levels are considered hard to work with too.
I think the main feature from the original - the walls of brick blocks - should be incorporated into the level (else: why are you calling this a remaster of token water level rather than "a water level which happens to replace token water level because we don't particularly like the original for some reason"). There are a lot of things that are unexplored in the original that could easily spice things up in a remake. Here are some I could think of, maybe some will inspire you guys:
-brick block-made pixel art as obstacle/structure.
-multiple colours of brick blocks - a special colour could indicate unusual contents. If you use this - don't hide the key in one of those but rewarding/punishing the player for their curiosity can work. Make sure to not overexpose the player to negative contents, though, as that can easily kill the idea.
-abusing the properties of brick blocks for a bonus event involving p-switches.
-breakable bricks for small shortcuts, dodging a cheep around the corner or opening a path to a small bonus area.
-brick blocks attached to noblockcollision dontmove cheep cheeps as a floating field of bricks (note: dontmove because if they move they can despawn and the bricks will magically appear at the npc spawn position).
unrelated:
-if possible, minimise the amount of backtracking that needs to be done. Moving underwater in SMBX is very slow and makes it very easy for backtracking to immediately kill the fun in a level.
-i don't know what your plans for the shadow realm thingy are, but please make it more than just a lazy reskin with added enemies and slightly different structure. It'd be super cool if the levels actually had something that made them ominous beyond a simple recolour. This level for example has great potential for an additional, unique hazard if you were to add shadow jelectros that move to post as an extra obstacle.
Oh yeah! The invasion is back!
