Perfect SMBX Screenshot Thread 10

[Witchking666]

Curse Luigi for the random sprite in the grass.

Spoiler: show

There, perfectly vanilla...

That baackground doesnt fit.

[Snessy the duck]

That looks a lot like one of my levels, Funky Forest Fun.

See? The resemblance is definetly there!

Anyways, the SMB3 tileset clashes a lot with the rest of the level's SMW enemies and bgos, and I would recommend changing it. But this is pretty good so far!

Tile-wise? Sure. Design-wise? No, not at all.
And the tiles actually look nice next to each other imo. I prefer the looks of Tsutsumi's stage over those of your stage, in fact, as it's more vibrant and mixes assets in a non-boring way. I really like your use of the :3-Trees and pipes in particular.

I still do think there's some similarities in design, like the section right after the pipe in my stage looks similar to the section after the first water pit, and the length of the screens are almost the same. Also, I still do think that the tileset clashes with the rest of the level, mainly due to the color palette. Also, my stage was going for a more vanilla SMB3 style and I didn't really think on making it super vibrant or unique or something like that, but I can see your point.

[Enjl]

Tile-wise? Sure. Design-wise? No, not at all.
And the tiles actually look nice next to each other imo. I prefer the looks of Tsutsumi's stage over those of your stage, in fact, as it's more vibrant and mixes assets in a non-boring way. I really like your use of the :3-Trees and pipes in particular.

I still do think there's some similarities in design, like the section right after the pipe in my stage looks similar to the section after the first water pit, and the length of the screens are almost the same. Also, I still do think that the tileset clashes with the rest of the level, mainly due to the color palette. Also, my stage was going for a more vanilla SMB3 style and I didn't really think on making it super vibrant or unique or something like that, but I can see your point.

Re: Screenshots are of similar length:

In addition to this, your section ends at the end of the screen, Tsutsumi's doesn't.

Re: Similarities in design:
First off, there are 7 pipes in your screenshot. I have no idea which one you're referring to in particular because none of them are followed by an area that looks similar to the point where you can say "oh this is like in my level". If you were referring to the area after the first pipe, I think you can look for yourself how your area is more compact horizontally, spread-out vertically, a pit and has a connection to a platform up in the sky. The area itself is rather generic in both screenshots and is something which, if you try hard enough, you can find in many levels. I think this right here is already kind of a stretch.

Re: Clash:
I'm getting the strong impression you're under the assumption that "clash" is pretty much something that's gotta be thrown around as soon as style-mixing is at hand. Oh no, gotta call the pixelpolice! The colours are varying!
Clash simply refers to two or multiple objects not looking good next to each other. If style-mixing is your concern: A balance of two styles works well in letting different colours or styles next to one another work without clashing with one another. In Tsutsumi's screenshot, there is a fair balance of SMB3 and SMW elements, weaving the SMW elements naturally into the environment. I explain clash in more detail here, but please tell me how back in the day episodes like The Great Empire and Apocalypse of Foroze had nice looking levels with the same kind of style mixing when now suddenly it's a problem apparently.

Re: Vanilla SMB3:
If you have nothing in your stage that makes it unique, why would people bother to play it, rather than another stage which stands out more? This doesn't have to be anything enormous, but copying an existing formula is about as uncreative as you can get.

[bossedit8]

[Nepgya]

I think the level could use some more variation. Maybe try adding a second tileset to it or try making it more colorful?

[Enjl]

new tech?

[underFlo]

wow purple mario is looking good

[UltraEpicLeader100]

After a long silence from me... I return and so has Meta Knight....

[Enjl]

[UltraEpicLeader100]

Excuse me but what the hell is going in with the gif?

[Snessy the duck]

Tile-wise? Sure. Design-wise? No, not at all.
And the tiles actually look nice next to each other imo. I prefer the looks of Tsutsumi's stage over those of your stage, in fact, as it's more vibrant and mixes assets in a non-boring way. I really like your use of the :3-Trees and pipes in particular.

I still do think there's some similarities in design, like the section right after the pipe in my stage looks similar to the section after the first water pit, and the length of the screens are almost the same. Also, I still do think that the tileset clashes with the rest of the level, mainly due to the color palette. Also, my stage was going for a more vanilla SMB3 style and I didn't really think on making it super vibrant or unique or something like that, but I can see your point.

Re: Screenshots are of similar length:

In addition to this, your section ends at the end of the screen, Tsutsumi's doesn't.

Re: Similarities in design:
First off, there are 7 pipes in your screenshot. I have no idea which one you're referring to in particular because none of them are followed by an area that looks similar to the point where you can say "oh this is like in my level". If you were referring to the area after the first pipe, I think you can look for yourself how your area is more compact horizontally, spread-out vertically, a pit and has a connection to a platform up in the sky. The area itself is rather generic in both screenshots and is something which, if you try hard enough, you can find in many levels. I think this right here is already kind of a stretch.

Re: Clash:
I'm getting the strong impression you're under the assumption that "clash" is pretty much something that's gotta be thrown around as soon as style-mixing is at hand. Oh no, gotta call the pixelpolice! The colours are varying!
Clash simply refers to two or multiple objects not looking good next to each other. If style-mixing is your concern: A balance of two styles works well in letting different colours or styles next to one another work without clashing with one another. In Tsutsumi's screenshot, there is a fair balance of SMB3 and SMW elements, weaving the SMW elements naturally into the environment. I explain clash in more detail here, but please tell me how back in the day episodes like The Great Empire and Apocalypse of Foroze had nice looking levels with the same kind of style mixing when now suddenly it's a problem apparently.

Re: Vanilla SMB3:
If you have nothing in your stage that makes it unique, why would people bother to play it, rather than another stage which stands out more? This doesn't have to be anything enormous, but copying an existing formula is about as uncreative as you can get.

1. Whoops, I didn't realize that. Maybe it was because the screens were shown to be the exact same size, or I could just be blind or something.
2. I should've said the FIRST pipe in my screenshot, sorry for not clarifying.
3. The area did look a little similar, such as having a similar block structure, but i guess it's a kinda common one then!
4. I still think mainly the colors, along with the shading clash quite a bit. It doesn't look the worst, but I still think it could be better by recoloring it or using another tileset entirely.
5. I get your point in this, however, I don't belive levels have to be super unique in order to be enjoyable and fun to make.

[Enjl]

No comment on the The Great Empire and Apocalypse of Foroze line? Darn, that's the one I was excited to hear more about.

[Snessy the duck]

No comment on the The Great Empire and Apocalypse of Foroze line? Darn, that's the one I was excited to hear more about.

Ok, I'll comment on it now.

Those episodes are old, and a lot has changed since then. The bar for level design has been raised much higher, and so has the GFX one. People are much more aware if something does or doesn't fit the level, while back then a lot of people didn't really care about that.

[Enjl]

No comment on the The Great Empire and Apocalypse of Foroze line? Darn, that's the one I was excited to hear more about.

Ok, I'll comment on it now.

Those episodes are old, and a lot has changed since then. The bar for level design has been raised much higher, and so has the GFX one. People are much more aware if something does or doesn't fit the level, while back then a lot of people didn't really care about that.

The question is... has the graphics bar been raised or are you trying to enforce arbitrary rules that random people came up with since then?

[Waddle]

No comment on the The Great Empire and Apocalypse of Foroze line? Darn, that's the one I was excited to hear more about.

Ok, I'll comment on it now.

Those episodes are old, and a lot has changed since then. The bar for level design has been raised much higher, and so has the GFX one. People are much more aware if something does or doesn't fit the level, while back then a lot of people didn't really care about that.

That's a stupid way to look at clash. Clash is often regarded as a bad thing since it's a "mistake" a lot of new users make. New people make bad levels, bad levels give bad reputations to the assets they use and thus clash was officially seen as "bad." In the examples provided by the Enjl, levels still manage to look good despite utilizing elements from different games. It's not as if people suddenly realized the concept of beauty over the span of two years; the only thing that factors into this is the higher available amount of custom graphics. I'd say it's even more impressive that people are able to make aesthetically pleasing levels with less available assets.

People are much more aware if something does or doesn't fit the level

This probably triggers me most. Just because a graphic has a slightly different style that does not at all automatically mean that it will not fit. You should definitely reconsider your view on this matter as it could very well change the way you design your levels and allow you to be more creative.

[The Dwarven Digger]

I don't really have much of an opinion on clash/style mixing/whatever you want to call it. All I know is that people just can't seem to agree on what's 'clash', what's 'style mixing', what looks good, what looks bad, if clash is actually always bad or not, etc. So I think it would be best if we just decide that there is no such thing as clash (Call it style mixing if you want) because different people have different opinions, and if you ask two people whether something is clash or not they'll probably say different things and start arguing about it. I think we shouldn't just ignore clash (you can still say if you don't like it, because some things most people will say looks really bad), but we should just use it as an opinion rather than a fact, as I haven't seen anyone actually define clash as something other than style mixing that looks bad. And as I've said above, one person will probably see something as 'good', but another person will see it as 'bad'.

[Enjl]

I mean there are people who say tomatos are fruits but that doesn't mean that dicussion should be laid to rest.
The problem with clash isn't that it exists, it's the uninformed opinions on it. Many people go out of their way to define the smallest instance of style-mixing as clash to somehow press levels into very defined styles. It's too broad of a subject to simply write off as "good" or "bad" and, if someone understands it, they can use it in their favour to create weirdly appealing artstyle mixes.
I believe in most cases people aren't writing something off as clashing and bad because they think so, but rather because that's what they were taught.

[Snessy the duck]

Well, guess it was kinda stupid that I said the whole thing about them being old without doing some reseach first, my bad!

People are much more aware if something does or doesn't fit the level

This probably triggers me most. Just because a graphic has a slightly different style that does not at all automatically mean that it will not fit. You should definitely reconsider your view on this matter as it could very well change the way you design your levels and allow you to be more creative.

When in that sentence did I ever say that they had to be in the same style? I said that people were getting more aware of if certain GFX were fitting against each other (Which they probably weren't), not that it had to be in the exact same style.

Just to clear things up, I'm not against style mixing at all, in fact, I just think that that paticular level had heavy amounts of clashage, but that's just my opinion, and I still think that it could look better with more consistent coloring, since I don't think the coloring and shading fits very well here.

Edit:

No comment on the The Great Empire and Apocalypse of Foroze line? Darn, that's the one I was excited to hear more about.

Ok, I'll comment on it now.

Those episodes are old, and a lot has changed since then. The bar for level design has been raised much higher, and so has the GFX one. People are much more aware if something does or doesn't fit the level, while back then a lot of people didn't really care about that.

The question is... has the graphics bar been raised or are you trying to enforce arbitrary rules that random people came up with since then?

Yeah, that was pretty stupid of me. I should've probably just not commented on it at all.

[bossedit8]

Spoiler: show

[Nepgya]