Super Mario Bros. X Forums

Stars of the Mushroom Kingdom

Plot: Bowser has found the star ruins in the northern Mushroom Kingdom. He has captured all of the stars that reside there. With the stars he plans to super-charge his minions, and take over the Mushroom Kingdom. But for now, he has given the stars to the Koopalings, and the bosses of his spiral towers. Can Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Peach, save the Kingdom before it's too late?

Gameplay: This project is designed around being a semi-open-world style, where you can play stages in a non-linear style. The playable characters are Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Peach. The main goal is to collect stars.

Level Screenshots:

Is this your first project? It is great for a first timer, but I am going to point out a few issues: The pipes in the last screenshot are cutoff, the ladders are cutoff (The one made of multiple ladders and the small one on the first screenshot), and there is a lot of clash and style mixing (do not confuse the two).

Jayce 777 wrote:Is this your first project? It is great for a first timer, but I am going to point out a few issues: The pipes in the last screenshot are cutoff, the ladders are cutoff (The one made of multiple ladders and the small one on the first screenshot), and there is a lot of clash and style mixing (do not confuse the two).

Yup, this is my first project. I'll fix the issues you mentioned. It might be pretty hard to fix the clash and style mixing, though, because what I try to do is keep levels to a certain theme, instead of a certain style. But you are right, there is a lot of clash, especially in the levels I choose to screenshot.

Try to avoid using 1x1 pixels in your graphics at all costs. They really don't look good with everything else. Some of the graphics are also sloppily made; some lines should be straight, patterns randomly cut off, and some tiles don't merge well. Level design looks okay except for the lack of coins and the Piranha Plant without a pipe, so really aesthetics need the most attention here. Also, 26 stages for one world is kind of a lot

PixelPest wrote:Try to avoid using 1x1 pixels in your graphics at all costs. They really don't look good with everything else. Some of the graphics are also sloppily made; some lines should be straight, patterns randomly cut off, and some tiles don't merge well. Level design looks okay except for the lack of coins and the Piranha Plant without a pipe, so really aesthetics need the most attention here. Also, 26 stages for one world is kind of a lot

I'll see what I can do about the graphics. This is my first time making custom graphics though, so thanks for the feedback. I'm working on fixing the coin issue and the piranha plant is designed to sink under the quicksand (which is in the foreground), but I might fix it. I think world one has about 13 stages, the rest are for world 0 and other unfinished worlds.

Added new and zoomed-out screenshots of (almost) every level so far.
Here's one of Coral Cavern

Why don't you use one water zone in the first spot on the left instead of more than 10? This level doesn't look too bad, although I'd suggest you use SMB3 Vines, not SMB2, and put coins in the air, not on the ground. To get an idea of good coin placement check out any of the Features Episodes (in the SMBX Worlds tab at the top of the page) or any levels in The Best.

The biggest errors that are prominent throughout these levels are poor style mixing (sometimes referred to as "clash"), meaning blocks, NPCs, etc. from different games that don't look good together, cutoff, unfinished bits of tiles such as blocks and BGO, such as the bit of a tree in the one screen and especially a few screens have many cutoffs in blocks, such as Jungle Jam, and coins placement as I mentioned above. It's off to a good start though since there's lots of creativity, good gameplay from what I've seen here, and variety