Postby Marina » Tue Nov 18, 2014 10:40 am
Mushrooms on the mountain
Design: 4/10
This was a pretty solid beginner level, a bit short but solid. The mountain looked a bit more like a volcano to me, with the brown rocks and the lava, but it still stuck to it's theme, so that's cool. The graphics you made were nuce, although I'd recomment making the two block high mushroom platforms have round edges on the bottom side instead of squares. My main complaint about this level is that it was kinda empty, I strongly reccomend you to put in more coins and blocks to fill the air. Also since it's a level that works with height differences in form of mushroom platforms and a mountain theme, I recommend you go a bit more into height. The level height was the standard 20.85 blocks that a level has when you create it, and to me that felt like I was closed in by the level ceiling. Mountain & Mushroom levels are a great way to work with heights and you should really make use of that. Besides that, while it is no necessity, maybe put in a bonus underground room or something, like most SMB1 levels have, to give the player a bit more to explore. The music was your typical SMB1 music you'd have to go with a SMB1 styled level. While it was kinda out of place, considering it was a mountain/volcano, I'll let it slip, as it's not extremely out of place. Another thing that's already been mentioned above is the block height. There needs to be more space between the ground and the bricks and ? - blocks or the player gets killed by anything coming through without a possibility of escape.
NPCs: 4/10
There were your standard SMB1 enemies. Goombas, Koopas, Piranhas, Para-Koopas and even some Hammer Bros. While I guess these were ok, I maybe would've liked to see a few more enemies you'd found in a mountain world, like maybe Bullet Bills for example. The NPC placement was okay, there weren't any frustrating moments, but at one point there were two goombas walking directly next to each other, with one of them falling through a gap between a brick and a ledge while the other one just turned around upon touching the former Goomba and disappearing offscreen. This looked a bit clumsy and I say if you put one of those two-goomba-next-to-each-other like the original SMB has lots of them in, I recommend you do it in a place where they actually present a hazard for the player, instead of one of them just being useless and walking back offscreen.
The powerup placement was okay, the second powerup could've been placed a bit earlier in the level, but besides that no complaints here.
Like I already mentioned in the Design section, there is a severe lack of coins, and the level just looks empty and bland without'em.
Gameplay: 4/10
This was a solid beginner level, like I already said. There were obstacles for the player, you had a few underground parts through the mountain, and you had some nice basic mushroom parts. When I looked at the screenshots I admittadly thought this was going to be less linear, and it really disappointed me that it turned out to be a level where you have to get from the very left to the very right. The mountain & mushroom theme had so much potential, but it got lost because someone apparently couldn't figure out how to change the height of their level :P
Besides that, there is really not much to say about it. The level didn't have any sidetracks, gimmicks or anything that I could talk about here. It was mostly just that, a linear level with a few ups and downs and a few enemies.
All in all, this was a short and okay level, but there's more potential to it than you were able to show. I hope to see bigger levels from you in the future, keep it up mate. 4/10, moved to Average.