Inspirited wrote:Thanks a lot for playing, and for that review. Your complaints matches with someone else suggestion I got, that said "the sections should be single screens, instead of having pseudo-exploration". I made these big sections because I've been using another game-making engine for the longest time, and in that one you couldn't have a room bigger than the screen (ala Zelda 1, or VVVVV). So the big rooms you can make in SMBX just fascinated me too much. I had a hunch that this would be a problem, so I made sure to never have a super hard challenge at the end of a level at least.
The rooms don't necessarily have to be single screens, or even shrunken down that much at all, depending on what fix you make. There are two in particular I can think of:
1. Re-make each room so that the completion time is one minute, tops.
2. Add checkpoints between parts of rooms. Each room can typically be broken down into distinct chunks, which I'll highlight in the second room:

Personally I would add a midpoint at the third part, so that the player doesn't have to do a ton of backtracking if they died at that point.
The theme stays the same throughout the whole level.
This probably wasn't the best of ideas then, for such a long level. Even Enjl's SCC level, which doesn't take nearly as much time as yours, changed its music halfway through to keep the feel of the level fresh. I'd recommend changing your entire aesthetic if you choose to do so, however, since it's only made up of three things anyway.
I've explained in the first post how you can instantly skip a section, in case you wanna take a break from level and get back to where you were.
This is true, but you also said:
(this is considered cheating and gets you no points).
Implying this method isn't intended to be used.
If you need help with preserving checkpoints when the player exits the level, I'll gladly contribute to that.