Month of July

[Quill]

Hey SMBX Community, it's July! I hope everybody enjoys their Summer.

The Staff have decided to do something a little new. Every month, we're going to have an announcement detailing things to look forward to during this month as well as the foreseeable future.

We'll also use this thread to feature an episode and custom graphics pack, similar to the Featured Episode and Graphics sections we used to have in the past. The picks may be recent or may be hidden gems from the past that we think deserve some more time in the spotlight.

___

Here are the announcements:

- The new Community Contest is soon! An exact date hasn't been finalized yet, but it will be arriving early this month! This new Community Contest will include many new judges, in addition to changes to how the contest is run to make the overall experience better. It's time to get excited!
- A new system to encourage reviews is coming. Levels on the forum haven't been receiving the attention they deserve. We're planning to introduce a new system this month that encourage users to review levels more often. It won't be the return of Level Judges, in case you're thinking it's that, but it should hopefully increase the amount of reviews levels see.
- SMBX Worlds and SMBX GFX will be updated soon. These pages haven't been updated since 2014 and were once used to display the featured Episode and Graphics of a particular month. These pages are planned to be updated in August to highlight the very best episodes and custom graphics, including the ones featured in this thread. Stay tuned for more information!
- Discord cleanup. On July 5th, we'll be making some changes to our Discord server. During this period, the server will be unavailable for an undecided amount of time, but it will likely only be a few hours at worst. Once it's back up, you'll have to request access through the #welcome channel. After that, things will be back to normal. The cleanup will likely take place early in the morning for people in America, since that's the most prominent timezone.

___

Here are the featured picks of this month:

Featured Episode

Level Contest Japan

For those unaware, an SMBX level contest was hosted earlier this year by iguzamini. The levels submitted to this contest are now available to play in episode format. There's an incredible world map made by Enjl and snoruntpyro added too. It's definitely worth checking out.

Featured Graphics Pack

Squishy Rex's CGFX Pack

This graphics pack originates from 2014, but we're featuring it for the huge variety of graphics it has. There's bound to be something here that you can use for your own levels, so feel free to take a look if you haven't already.

___

And that's it! Thank you for reading through this. We plan to expand the featured section in the future, possibly including individual levels or Lua APIs that everyone should be aware of.

See you next month!