Super Mario Bros. X Forums

Inspirited wrote:Why can't I enter intimidation 1? I press the jump button on the level on the worldmap but nothing happens :O

That's totally weird. Can you check how the level looks in the editor on world map?



And do you have the level file 101.lvl in your episode directory?

Ah, was missing level files 101-106 and 1010. Weird, I'm sure I didn't delete them. xD I've redownloaded the episode and copy pasted the level files I was missing. It works fine now.

Reign wrote:I uploaded a video, hope it's the level you mean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o97lix ... e=youtu.be

Thanks. I got through both intimidation levels now. stuck in culmination again but I'm trying to figure it out myself.

Hey, this episode looks really cool looking at the screenshots. I'm gonna download it.
By the way, is Oubliette inspired from Metroid Prime Hunters?

The thwomp boss at the end of Oubliette will rise higher continuously; and if you fight it too long it will completely vanish from the screen and never come down. That's odd. Also, I don't appreciate that if you die at such a boss, you also have to repeat the previous puzzle again; that wasn't the case in the original episode.

So I just got to the part where you get Link and here are my thoughts so far:
-The story is dumb. Really dumb. I'm trying my best to ignore it and it's quickly gotten hindering enough to make me skip through it completely.
-There are massive difficulty spikes at random. Some puzzles right in the middle of a set are extremely hard because they're very precise about their timing. This is something I especially noticed in the lava and castle worlds. (screw "make poison mushroom die" puzzles in particular)
-That said, some of the puzzles are really clever and I found myself bamboozled by their traps quite a bit after I thought I had the solution.
-THAT said, a lot of the puzzles suffer from extreme visual clutter which makes it hard to see what's going on without examining the screen for a few minutes. The traps I fell into were often caused by missing a tiny detail in the scene which didn't stand out as important because everything looks largely the same in most levels.
-In addition to that, some levels feature red herrings. These red herrings don't make a puzzle more difficult, they just add to the clutter. I don't like them. Example: -The correct solutions for a lot of levels is very obscure. Sometimes it's so obscure that I start thinking my solution is cheese but way easier to execute than what is expected of me. This, again, is caused by clutter and everything looking the same.
-I hate the onJump gimmick. onJump is janky and nobody uses it ever for exactly that reason. Most of the puzzles could've worked if you coded a proper jump detection system, and all of them would've felt much better if you did.
-I love the first Waluigi boss it's really nice.
-Some levels can be cheesed. A lot. I beat this one (not this run but the one after) with 40 seconds left on the clock by lowering the donut block without collecting the coin. It works because a coin hitbox has a width of 28 while the donut block has 32: -Literally every tutorial in this episode could've been done better. Considering this is a sequel AND an episode targeting a specific portion of the userbase (people who play puzzles) I don't think you have to introduce the concept of grabbing items or slashing as link. More obscure stuff like green arrows indicating level wrap or phantos just fucking you up completely is fine, though, as it's not part of the regular lineup of abilities.
-Speaking of arrows, I like how you put direction arrows over skull rafts to indicate their direction. I hate that you stopped doing that after just a few levels. It's inconsistent and weird.
-This toad is a liar: -Probably my favourite puzzle in the entire game so far is this one: It's not hard to figure out what you have to do, but its shape is deceiving and makes you think for a bit. Not about "what do I have to do", but rather "how am I gonna accomplish what I have to do". It's clear, easy to look at and was a lot of fun to execute.
-Screw item babysitting in most cases.

Will probably continue playing another day to see what else it has in store. Some concepts so far really surprised me while most levels were just a drag of carrying items around or hitting switches while trying to figure out what's asked of you.

I rate it with "fair" for now. Might change my vote later but don't count on it.

I agree to the part about storyline and tutorials (yes, it's partially tedious), but I think the puzzles are a lot more according to the meaning of "puzzle" than in the original. There's barely any plain survival challenges (like that one stage in the original where you had to dig down your way with a billy gun and were attacked by lakitus, or where you just had to survive a blast of enemies, oh boy), and the focus is a lot more on thinking and finding your own way and putting the solution together like a jigsaw. You can't expect to figure them out in just one go. The few times I had to ask around, it was mostly my fault (e.g. forgetting to throw a key up a bridge). I agree that any hazards which don't add to the depth of a puzzle could be removed, tho. I found the second "kill poison mushroom stage" a bit too deep (I helped myself by writing up the order of hitting the switches), but the first one was just neat, and overall it was a cool gimmick. Visual clutter? I think most of the stages are tidied up really well. Also, isn't the direction of skull rafts self-explanatory often?

I rated "good" (I'm also halfway done).

ok I do have to ask, what is the point of the mushroom block on the third level of culmination 1? It must somehow be related to the thing that I just can't beat the timer...
Also I'm in disagreement with the story being dumb. Its kinda dark for a Mario game but at least it's more than just resquing someone and its presented very nicely.

alwahla wrote:Also I'm in disagreement with the story being dumb. Its kinda dark for a Mario game but at least it's more than just resquing someone and its presented very nicely.

I'd prefer to be able to just play the levels. I don't know about you, but I'm here for puzzles.

Supershroom wrote:I found the second "kill poison mushroom stage" a bit too deep (I helped myself by writing up the order of hitting the switches), but the first one was just neat

The first one had stupidly precise timing. These two stages are the castle difficulty spike.

Supershroom wrote:and the focus is a lot more on thinking and finding your own way and putting the solution together like a jigsaw. You can't expect to figure them out in just one go.

Not really. It's more about figuring out where everything is, planning your path and executing it. You can solve every puzzle in the game without moving your character at all until you got the solution.
Now, don't get me wrong. This is a good thing. I like that. HOWEVER! This game could've executed this idea MUCH better. I'll get to that in a bit.

Supershroom wrote:Also, isn't the direction of skull rafts self-explanatory often?

Dunno, you tell me which direction you'd expect the skull raft to the right to go. I got tricked by it and died.: That screen btw is a good examples for the element of clutter I brought up earlier and have a HUGE gripe with.
1. Levels are so busy that it's impossible to figure out where you spawn until the animation plays.
This doesn't sound like a big deal, but for me it shows just how hard it is to find anything in this game's levels. I can't even find myself half the time, so it'll likely take me a while until I find the rest of the elements in the level.
2. Speaking of that... you see those sparkles? They don't stand out against the aesthetic at all. I often found myself playing through the level, following my solution or trying to find one when I randomly discovered a sparkle portal right in front of me.
IMO the biggest element that plays into this is the high-contrast graphical style which doesn't care what property anything in the scene has. None of the items that are important puzzle pieces can easily be distinguished by floor, lava or other kinds of decoration. The aesthetic often gets in the way of the gameplay, which to me is a massive issue with a puzzle game.
But I guess it's not too bad because this game thrives to be a shitty creepypasta, right?

Spark wrote:Hey, this episode looks really cool looking at the screenshots. I'm gonna download it.
By the way, is Oubliette inspired from Metroid Prime Hunters?

Have fun! The name is not inspired by Metroid, I actually had no idea Metroid Prime Hunters had an area with that name.

Supershroom wrote:

Spoiler: show

The thwomp boss at the end of Oubliette will rise higher continuously; and if you fight it too long it will completely vanish from the screen and never come down. That's odd. Also, I don't appreciate that if you die at such a boss, you also have to repeat the previous puzzle again; that wasn't the case in the original episode.

This did not occur in the beta testing. I'll look into it and upload a patch later. The second thing was simply a design choice (which I did spend quite long deciding). The minibosses alone don't feel threatening enough if the time you spend fighting them is less than a minute. The levels before those are shorter than normal levels anyway.

Enjl wrote:-The story is dumb. Really dumb. I'm trying my best to ignore it and it's quickly gotten hindering enough to make me skip through it completely.

Fair enough. I personally think episodes without detailed stories are meaningless but this is obviously not the case for everyone. I also wanted to create something slightly different while still continuing the story of the original.

Enjl wrote:-There are massive difficulty spikes at random. Some puzzles right in the middle of a set are extremely hard because they're very precise about their timing. This is something I especially noticed in the lava and castle worlds. (screw "make poison mushroom die" puzzles in particular)

This I think is mostly based on the player. For example in the beta testing one person considered 52.lvl very difficult while another one breezed through it on the first try in two minutes. There might be some spikes though, I admit.

Enjl wrote:-THAT said, a lot of the puzzles suffer from extreme visual clutter which makes it hard to see what's going on without examining the screen for a few minutes.

I think you have said that about every episode I created. :p This is where our tastes differ. For me levels that have very few background objects or blocks/npcs look plain. Obviously if the screen is full of stuff, it becomes a problem so there is a limit. But this limit for you and for me is different.

Enjl wrote:-In addition to that, some levels feature red herrings. These red herrings don't make a puzzle more difficult, they just add to the clutter. I don't like them. Example:

Spoiler: show

The solution to this puzzle is to hit the red switch, kick the shell past the blue blocks and hit the red switch again. There is no need to ever press the blue switch in this level.

There is a 50% chance that the shell will hit lava if you don't press the blue switch.

Enjl wrote:-I hate the onJump gimmick. onJump is janky and nobody uses it ever for exactly that reason. Most of the puzzles could've worked if you coded a proper jump detection system, and all of them would've felt much better if you did.

To me it works well enough to not warrant coding something I'm clueless about. As far as I understood from the testing, there were only minor issues with the puzzles and they should have been fixed for the final version.

Enjl wrote:-Some levels can be cheesed. A lot. I beat this one (not this run but the one after) with 40 seconds left on the clock by lowering the donut block without collecting the coin. It works because a coin hitbox has a width of 28 while the donut block has 32:

Spoiler: show

I'm not aware of all of SMBX's glitches and the levels surely aren't designed around all of them, but I actually don't understand how you pulled that off. Would appreciate if you could share a video.

Enjl wrote:-Speaking of arrows, I like how you put direction arrows over skull rafts to indicate their direction. I hate that you stopped doing that after just a few levels. It's inconsistent and weird.

This is an oversight, all of the rafts should have arrows. Will be fixed.

Enjl wrote:-Screw item babysitting in most cases.

Not only experienced players play this episode. For the previous episode I made, I had two questions from the members of rpgmaker.net saying they did not know how to enter the first level (you were supposed to press down while standing on top of a pipe). Basic instructions and babysitting are required in some cases. :p

alwahla wrote:ok I do have to ask, what is the point of the mushroom block on the third level of culmination 1? It must somehow be related to the thing that I just can't beat the timer...

Enjl wrote:The first one had stupidly precise timing. These two stages are the castle difficulty spike.

I'm almost sure you did something I did not anticipate in the testing. The timing should not be that precise. Here is a video:

https://youtu.be/3OeixgNGnaE

Yo thanks for your reply. It really helped clear some things up, but I'd like to go more into detail with some others:

Reign wrote:

Enjl wrote:-THAT said, a lot of the puzzles suffer from extreme visual clutter which makes it hard to see what's going on without examining the screen for a few minutes.

I think you have said that about every episode I created. :p This is where our tastes differ. For me levels that have very few background objects or blocks/npcs look plain. Obviously if the screen is full of stuff, it becomes a problem so there is a limit. But this limit for you and for me is different. :)

For me it's not about whether or not the level looks plain. I just want to be able to identify puzzle elements without playing "Where's Waldo?" on them. The sparklies are an asset I repeatedly overlooked because it blends in really well with a lot of backgrounds. Simply using a more prominent sprite for those would help immensely. This mockup might not look as fancy, but it's easily visible against any backdrop and lets you easily colour-code different portals to make it clearer which portals correlate to one another:

Reign wrote:

Enjl wrote:-In addition to that, some levels feature red herrings. These red herrings don't make a puzzle more difficult, they just add to the clutter. I don't like them. Example:

Spoiler: show

The solution to this puzzle is to hit the red switch, kick the shell past the blue blocks and hit the red switch again. There is no need to ever press the blue switch in this level.

There is a 50% chance that the shell will hit lava if you don't press the blue switch.

The blue switch has no influence in the likeliness of the shell hitting the lava. This is the shell's path:

Reign wrote:

Enjl wrote:-Some levels can be cheesed. A lot. I beat this one (not this run but the one after) with 40 seconds left on the clock by lowering the donut block without collecting the coin. It works because a coin hitbox has a width of 28 while the donut block has 32:

Spoiler: show

I'm not aware of all of SMBX's glitches and the levels surely aren't designed around all of them, but I actually don't understand how you pulled that off. Would appreciate if you could share a video.

As I explained in my previous post, the hitbox of donut blocks is wider than that of coins, allowing you to inch towards the donut block one pixel at a time and landing on its edge. The window is 4 pixels from either side.

Reign wrote:

Enjl wrote:-Screw item babysitting in most cases.

Not only experienced players play this episode. For the previous episode I made, I had two questions from the members of rpgmaker.net saying they did not know how to enter the first level (you were supposed to press down while standing on top of a pipe). Basic instructions and babysitting are required in some cases. :p

Item babysitting is the term used for "carry item from point A to point B". It has nothing to do with a player's skill level.

Reign wrote:

Enjl wrote:The first one had stupidly precise timing. These two stages are the castle difficulty spike.

I'm almost sure you did something I did not anticipate in the testing. The timing should not be that precise. Here is a video:

https://youtu.be/3OeixgNGnaE

I see. This is my path:

I guess my timing issues came from waiting for the mushroom to turn around so I could pick up the block in the beginning.

I'll look into the lava level with the blue switch again. Hopefully can release a new version this week. Thanks for the feedback.

Something's weird ... I can't enter "Guidance of a Warrior" as Link, even after unlocking him, I always enter the door as Luigi (I guess it's set this way). Am I supposed to find another way?

Supershroom wrote:Something's weird ... I can't enter "Guidance of a Warrior" as Link, even after unlocking him, I always enter the door as Luigi (I guess it's set this way). Am I supposed to find another way?

Probably the fact that your LunaLUA is outdated. It worked just fine on my end.

Supershroom wrote:Something's weird ... I can't enter "Guidance of a Warrior" as Link, even after unlocking him, I always enter the door as Luigi (I guess it's set this way). Am I supposed to find another way?

Nope, you are supposed to enter Guidance of a Warrior after unlocking link. If you enter Link's house again, is Link there or is he missing? I wonder if the data class somehow did not work. I'll try to send you a file in the evening when I get home.

My LunaLua is just the built-in Lua from the 2.0 Beta 3 download. All I did was first entering the stage as Luigi and exiting, then going downwards on the map to Link's house where he is introduced and it just says "Link joins your team" and he disappears, then you can select him on the world map via pausing, so I switched to Link but came out as Luigi again. It's just like generally stages are set to use a special character so they won't allow to be entered with any other.

Also the story has become repetitive or even flatulent at that point. Mario and Luigi etc. don't always have to lengthily introduce themselves to others and say what they're doing, and the amount of consecutive dialogue indeed becomes tiresome; you could try cutting it a bit down.

I had no issues at all with the teleporting sparkles. They are easy to see. I also like the concept of them not being color-coded or something like that, but instead there is this rule that a sparkle will always take you to the nearest other sparkle. I like that, even if it didn't come into play that often. About the beginner tutorials, they helped me personally. I'm not that familiar with SMBX. I really like this episode xd The first Mario Enigmatic is nothing for me, because it's all about luck, platforming and skill. I still wish there were timestop puzzles in this episode

Supershroom wrote:My LunaLua is just the built-in Lua from the 2.0 Beta 3 download. All I did was first entering the stage as Luigi and exiting, then going downwards on the map to Link's house where he is introduced and it just says "Link joins your team" and he disappears, then you can select him on the world map via pausing, so I switched to Link but came out as Luigi again. It's just like generally stages are set to use a special character so they won't allow to be entered with any other.

Yes, every level has a lunalua.dll file where the character is determined. However, the Guidance of a Warrior lunadll.lua file checks whether or not the player has obtained Link and then determines the playable character based on that. And something is now obviously going wrong for you.

https://www.sendspace.com/file/beu0rz

That zip includes both the lunaworld.lua and a data class file that has been set up in a way that Link has been obtained. Please see if either of these files is missing from your Super Mario Enigmatic 2 -folder. After both these files are in the folder, you should be able to enter the level as Link (it makes no difference which character you have on the world map).

If you are using some other save slot than save 1, you need to change the file name of LuaData_Save1_switchPalace.txt accordingly, for example to LuaData_Save2_switchPalace.txt.

Let me know if that still does not work. Also, the data class is used for the big boss fights so that the intro dialogue will not be repeated if the player dies. Has the data class worked for you on the Waluigi fights so far, so that if you died, the boss fight starts directly with no repeated dialogue? If not, I'm wondering if your pc somehow isn't allowing SMBX to create these data class files at all.

About the story, I'm willing to fix things that affect gameplay but not willing to make changes to the dialogue at this point. In my opinion you can skip it relatively quickly if you are not interested. There are two long story sections quite close to each other after the second Waluigi boss, but not so much later, just one long one on the snowy island.

The Data.txt file was missing, but still it doesn't work. Do I have to put it somewhere else other than the general episode folder? If so, what level name is behind "Guidance of a Warrior"? Also on the first two Waluigi battles the story was repeated after dying, so I guess I didn't accomplish to download any Data.txt files at all ...

Supershroom wrote:The Data.txt file was missing, but still it doesn't work. Do I have to put it somewhere else other than the general episode folder? If so, what level name is behind "Guidance of a Warrior"? Also on the first two Waluigi battles the story was repeated after dying, so I guess I didn't accomplish to download any Data.txt files at all ...

The data files actually aren't there in the download, the episode is supposed to create them when a certain event has been activated in the episode. Now that you have a manually created data file, it seems that for some reason I don't know, your SMBX does not create data files and can not read them either. Perhaps some LunaLua expert has an idea about that.

http://wohlsoft.ru/pgewiki/Data_(class)

This is the only part in the episode where using the data class is necessary. Since that does not work for you, here is a bubblegum solution: Go to Super Mario Enigmatic 2 -> Link2 -folder, open lunalua.dll and on line 22, replace CHARACTER_LUIGI with CHARACTER_LINK.

The download has also been updated, a few fixes for exploits.