[Forest] Yoshfeeding

[Akromaly]

My SLAM level is finally done! It's a forest/grassland-themed level designed with Blue Baby Yoshis and Ptooies.

Exits: 1
Star Coins/ Dragon Coins: Yes
Characters: fully playable with Mario and Luigi, beatable but unable to get some Dragon Coins with Toad.
Powerup filters: I don't think there are particular powerups that break the level but I placed a mount filter at the end of the level so you won't keep the Blue Yoshi.

Screenshots:

Spoiler: show

Download: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FFJlx ... t9HBZyyAhW

[Valentine]

This is alright, would work fine for world 2 or 3, I don't think it needs any changes (though the talking blue yoshies are honestly pretty unnecessary)

[Akromaly]

This is alright, would work fine for world 2 or 3, I don't think it needs any changes (though the talking blue yoshies are honestly pretty unnecessary)

Thanks for the feedback, why do you think the talking Yoshies are unnecessary?

[Valentine]

they don't really add anything to the level, not even some sort of personality.

[Akromaly]

they don't really add anything to the level, not even some sort of personality.

Yes but they give the player some tips that could help him

[Emral]

they don't really add anything to the level, not even some sort of personality.

Yes but they give the player some tips that could help them

Hardly.
The first one warns of the inedible plants, but not the inedible chucks. You encounter the chucks first, so it can lead to a situation where players think "oh, so only the plants are inedible?" and they run straight into a chuck. Best to distinguish edibility by design in some capacity. Currently it's consistent in that everything smaller/equal in size to yoshi can be eaten and larger things cannot. Players can easily figure this out without a potentially misleading Yoshi hint.
The second one describes what the player is already seeing. Stuff coming out of pipes. It's pretty redundant, but not misleading at least.

As an aside: The visual effect seems like something that's yearning for being done with a shader.

[Akromaly]

they don't really add anything to the level, not even some sort of personality.

Yes but they give the player some tips that could help them

Hardly.
The first one warns of the inedible plants, but not the inedible chucks. You encounter the chucks first, so it can lead to a situation where players think "oh, so only the plants are inedible?" and they run straight into a chuck. Best to distinguish edibility by design in some capacity. Currently it's consistent in that everything smaller/equal in size to yoshi can be eaten and larger things cannot. Players can easily figure this out without a potentially misleading Yoshi hint.
The second one describes what the player is already seeing. Stuff coming out of pipes. It's pretty redundant, but not misleading at least.

As an aside: The visual effect seems like something that's yearning for being done with a shader.

Hmm yeah, that's interesting to hear that the first advice may be misleading. The main reason why I did that is that like you said chucks surely aren't edible but ptooies are, at least in basegame, for design purposes I thought it was better not to allow it so I used that talking Yoshi to clarify just that, to prevent the player from trying to run into them. As for the second advice, I placed that because maybe the player couldn't notice the falling balls at first glance, but if you think it's unnecessary I can understand.
Then, for visual effect you mean the gradient of the ground, right? I like to mess with foreground bgos and I really wanted to give this touch, could I improve it someway?

[Troopa Koopa321]

Are we seriously nitpicking a perfectly fine level about some friendly npcs giving some dialogue? For anything it could be for aesthetic purposes. The only thing I’d criticize is the piranha plants being inedible since yoshi could always eat pirhana plants ever since he was introduced. I think the change was pretty unnecessary. More unnecessary than the yoshis talking to Mario. Also I didn’t like how brightly colored the background hills were. I think a deep shade of blue or grey would fit the level better. Other than this, the aesthetics,level design and everything else was pretty great.

[Akromaly]

Are we seriously nitpicking a perfectly fine level about some friendly npcs giving some dialogue? For anything it could be for aesthetic purposes. The only thing I’d criticize is the piranha plants being inedible since yoshi coild always eat pirhana plants ever since he was introduced. I think the change was pretty unnecessary. More unnecessary than the yoshis talking to Mario. Also I didn’t like how brightly colored the background hills were. I think a deep shade of blue or grey would fit the level better. Other than this, the asethics,level design and everything else was pretty great.

Thanks for your feedback too The reason why I made the Ptooies unedible is because it'd have made the level way too easy and you could have made Yoshi grow too much easily since there are a lot of Ptooies through the way. I wanted them to be a solid obstacle that you couldn't just eat.

[Troopa Koopa321]

Are we seriously nitpicking a perfectly fine level about some friendly npcs giving some dialogue? For anything it could be for aesthetic purposes. The only thing I’d criticize is the piranha plants being inedible since yoshi coild always eat pirhana plants ever since he was introduced. I think the change was pretty unnecessary. More unnecessary than the yoshis talking to Mario. Also I didn’t like how brightly colored the background hills were. I think a deep shade of blue or grey would fit the level better. Other than this, the asethics,level design and everything else was pretty great.

Thanks for your feedback too The reason why I made the Ptooies unedible is because it'd have made the level way too easy and you could have made Yoshi grow too much easily since there are a lot of Ptooies through the way. I wanted them to be a solid obstacle that you couldn't just eat.

Perhaps it was a nessecary change come to think about it.

[Emral]

Then, for visual effect you mean the gradient of the ground, right? I like to mess with foreground bgos and I really wanted to give this touch, could I improve it someway?

It does look very nice, so I had to take a look at how it was done. It looks like it must've taken a lot of time to get right, and would be a great hurdle in adjusting the level in the future.
I don't know how much you know about working with shaders, but the approach to make the texture automatically adapt to the environment would basically pull from one or two random-ish noise textures that combine to create a never-looping overlay. The way this can be done is if you check a pixel on a texture and add purple to the level depending on the colour of the backdrop (only apply it to the teal ground) and the whiteness of the texture:

Spoiler: show

This particular noise is medium-grainy perlin noise. It's a common way of making random textures.Think of this being like a looping parallax layer, but it moves at the speed of the level, and applies purple to the ground and bgos the closer the texture is to white. The Underwater effect in SMBX2 does something very similar, if you are having trouble visualizing it.

It's certainly not a necessary or urgent implementation, but it's fairly simple shader code that would make the level easier to edit in the future. So even if not now, it might be worth looking at once the project moves closer to polishing of individual levels.

Are we seriously nitpicking a perfectly fine level about some friendly npcs giving some dialogue?

Your tone in many of your posts is quite abrasive. Consider changing that.

For these comments in particular: It's a detail that's good to learn and easy to fix up. Dialogue is tricky to get right in a platform setting. Reading distracts from the action, so it's best used sparingly. And when used, it should be for good reason and well-worded to not cause any ambiguity like in the case of the first message in this level. Ideally, platformer levels communicate as much as possible through their design to let everything seamlessly flow together and make sense on their own. This is difficult to do with controls (and mechanics to some extent, so if reworded I wouldn't mind the first Yoshi). If a message is necessary, it's often a good idea to try to disguise it as part of the world as much as possible. Instead of "Plants are inedible" or whatever it says I propose something like "Be careful of large opponents! Us Yoshis don't have a good way of dealing with them. They're too big for us to swallow!" and then the player has to decide what "large opponents are", but they know about the rule. It could also work as a message box (similar to how many jump and jumphalf level-gimmicks are explained): "Yoshis in this area have evolved to have pitifully tiny jaws, unable to swallow anything larger than a berry." (with a berry nearby to demonstrate)
Of course, flavour is also a valid reason for having dialogue (sparingly). If there was a scenario building off this initial warning, another Yoshi could comment on it. "If we could equip those Fire Flowers, dealing with the large enemies would be so much easier~", "Hey-hey! You've dropped <number of Yoshis dropped into a pit> of my friends into pits. What's wrong with you? No bonus for you, you monster!"

I could make a ton more comments about different aspects of the level's design, both positive and negative, but I don't think my suggestions in those areas would respect the vision behind the level and also take way longer to address, so I'm leaving those be.

[Valentine]

Are we seriously nitpicking a perfectly fine level about some friendly npcs giving some dialogue? For anything it could be for aesthetic purposes. The only thing I’d criticize is the piranha plants being inedible since yoshi could always eat pirhana plants ever since he was introduced. I think the change was pretty unnecessary. More unnecessary than the yoshis talking to Mario. Also I didn’t like how brightly colored the background hills were. I think a deep shade of blue or grey would fit the level better. Other than this, the aesthetics,level design and everything else was pretty great.

The level is good enough to be approved in my opinion, but why would you stop at enough, the level can always be made even better, so that's exactly what I'm trying to facilitate here.

[Troopa Koopa321]

Are we seriously nitpicking a perfectly fine level about some friendly npcs giving some dialogue?

Your tone in many of your posts is quite abrasive. Consider changing that.

For these comments in particular: It's a detail that's good to learn and easy to fix up. Dialogue is tricky to get right in a platform setting. Reading distracts from the action, so it's best used sparingly. And when used, it should be for good reason and well-worded to not cause any ambiguity like in the case of the first message in this level. Ideally, platformer levels communicate as much as possible through their design to let everything seamlessly flow together and make sense on their own. This is difficult to do with controls (and mechanics to some extent, so if reworded I wouldn't mind the first Yoshi). If a message is necessary, it's often a good idea to try to disguise it as part of the world as much as possible. Instead of "Plants are inedible" or whatever it says I propose something like "Be careful of large opponents! Us Yoshis don't have a good way of dealing with them. They're too big for us to swallow!" and then the player has to decide what "large opponents are", but they know about the rule. It could also work as a message box (similar to how many jump and jumphalf level-gimmicks are explained): "Yoshis in this area have evolved to have pitifully tiny jaws, unable to swallow anything larger than a berry." (with a berry nearby to demonstrate)
Of course, flavour is also a valid reason for having dialogue (sparingly). If there was a scenario building off this initial warning, another Yoshi could comment on it. "If we could equip those Fire Flowers, dealing with the large enemies would be so much easier~", "Hey-hey! You've dropped <number of Yoshis dropped into a pit> of my friends into pits. What's wrong with you? No bonus for you, you monster!"


I could make a ton more comments about different aspects of the level's design, both positive and negative, but I don't think my suggestions in those areas would respect the vision behind the level and also take way longer to address, so I'm leaving those be.

I apologize for my rude commments lately. But I’m just saying that I felt the complaints with the friendly npcs was just awkward and unnecessary. Sure they could of had better dialogue like the ones you have given examples of but that should have been it with critiquing the npc dialogue and not making the issue a chunk of the comments here.

The level is good enough to be approved in my opinion, but why would you stop at enough, the level can always be made even better, so that's exactly what I'm trying to facilitate here.

I never said that its good eneough. Levels are always open for improvements. I just thought the complaints were pretty nit picky since the talking yoshis didn’t effect the level gameplay wise and it seems like such a small problem. Like if you were required to talk to them and if the dialogue is pretty weak and irrelevant then yes this would be a reasonable problem to complain about. While the dialogue for the yoshis wasn’t the best, it should be the least concern compared to other problems with the level.

[Valentine]

if I don't have big problems to complain about, obviously I'm going to complain about the smaller problems, and I think the friendly npcs just don't help with the vibe of the level at all, therefore they're unnecessary.

[Emral]

They certainly affected my gameplay more than your comment about the palette of the hills. I've already talked about the ambiguity so I won't repeat it here. If avoiding players from checking if Yoshis can eat chucks for 30 seconds/making fun of the messages in the level doesn't improve gameplay then please tell me why changing the already-fitting palette of the hills in the background does.

[Cedur]

I checked out this level myself a few days ago, I don't really care about the talkable Yoshi's ;p

I'd just suggest that since this is Blue Yoshi, maybe use his ability somewhere?

[Akromaly]

I checked out this level myself a few days ago, I don't really care about the talkable Yoshi's ;p

I'd just suggest that since this is Blue Yoshi, maybe use his ability somewhere?

While designing the level I came to the conclusion that special abilities could cause some struggles. In fact, I originally had the idea to put a purple yoshi in the second section, so that he may use the ground pound to break blocks. But as soon as I tested, I realized that Baby Purple Yoshi triggers a shake every time he eats something, and that would break the level incredibly.