I remember playing The Reptile Starlight some time ago, and aside form the level being a little too long, I think it's definetly a great level! I love that you incorporated your O.C.s into the levels, making them feel super unique compared to only having toads! I may get around to play some of your other levels some day! I bet they'll be fun!
So, to start off, the very idea of a sports themed level is unique and something I've not heard of or seen before,
but unfortunately the level doesn't really live up to its based ideal.
Graphics
The over all graphical style of the level is alright, but the composition would suggest that the level takes place in a sports field, but it doesn't seem to actually be based in one (This could be me misinterpreting, correct me if I'm wrong)
The wires holding up the boxes, especially in section four seem a bit excessive in placement, again this is just my personal opinion and will not let it effect the over all score.
Although, an actual flaw that exists is the Trouters, they leave little to no distinction between the red and the blue ones, making it a bit difficult to tell them apart.
In section two there is a poison mushroom re skinned to be a purple jersey, whilst all the other power ups in the level are re skinned to be jerseys, punishing the player for something they couldn't have really known.
But I do like the way the jerseys are designed as graphics.
Level Design
The only thing that makes this a "Sports Level" are the Sports balls, though they're not even utilized at all,
they seem to be inconsequential.
You could've made it so you could have put a basketball through a hoop, or made it so you kick a soccer ball through a net, these are just some ideas how to make it more interesting.
Also rooms where you have to kill all the enemies aren't really enjoyable, or mentally engaging for most.
I'm also not certain what happens when you kill all the green jersey enemies as there are so many of them, actually attempting to kill all of them would be hell.
To continue off of that, this level is unnecessarily long, especially since it doesn't quite introduce anything quite new, I feel as if I've just played a standard level vanilla level that has been re skinned to be sports based.
The mid boss is a little too difficult, as the cost of failure is having to re do the entire first half of the level, which is already a bit excessive, as mentioned earlier.
Also another point as to why it's so difficult is that it just spams enemies, its just unjustifiably annoying .
And finally, the problem with the final boss is that it's even worse than it's mid boss counterpart in terms of spamming enemies, as it just throws them at you immoderately.
6/10
This theme was a good opportunity to introduce a sports gimmick to the level, but unfortunately I didn't see it reach it's full potential, as I said earlier I felt as it was just a vanilla level re skinned to be sports themed.
Even so, it wasn't bad, it was just average and I wish I could have seen you go beyond that.
Well, the review was okay for the most part but, i want to say that those "jerseries" are actually drinks, sorry for the misconception.
I didn't really realize what i had did wrong with enemy spam and such, i didn't really mean for it to feel like a vanilla level though.
Sorry about that.
The player one position is off, but I fixed it right away so don't sweat it. This is a theme you don't see everyday. A sports level is a nice twist. I like the graphics you use, and the music is great! However you could add more variety in your bgos and place them in some of the more empty areas of the level. The juice powerups was a a creative idea, though I found it weird seeing the blue juice magically floating down when I hit the block to get it. You're a little to happy with a handful of coin blocks having too many coins in them. I like what you did with the green jersey enemies giving you 1ups when you kill them. NPC placement was good for the most part, but you have some hammer bros and other npcs in difficult spots like the hanging crates. The dialogue was a nice touch to the level and brought more life to the sports team, but try to limit characters to one or two text boxes without having too much text. Also it's unnecessary having one of the blue team players tell you the switch gimmick; the player could easily figure that out on their own. The overall design is structured nicely, and it was good to make this level more open with multiple paths to go in each section without getting the player lost in the process. This does make the level feel long, so at least you have the option to fly through with exception to the kill all of the reds sections. The ball boxes are a cool idea as well, but it's a shame when you can only get one ball out of them. The level is a long one for sure with or without the open areas, so it got boring at times despite what's presented. The mini boss was cool, and the options to kill him are nice too. The boss fight is cool, but it's a hard one. Pretty unforgiving for the rexe's speed, invulnerability to jumps that hurt the player instead, and causes NPC spam. Another glaring issue is I kept running into out of script errors when playing through this. I couldn't play through the whole level at once for how many items there were in total. This happened on both smbx 1.3 and 2 when I tried testing this, so maybe that's just a mess up in my end. Overall though there are nice ideas with the long length and boss battles kinda killing part of the experience for me.
I actually had problem with recording the level in the Level Editor of SMBX. Does one of these can have world map access for SMBX launcher? i would review this soon.
EDIT : Another problem. At Berry's Day In Subcon, i can't find the .lvl files. I keep finding it and none is found. So.. Can you fix this?
1AmPlayer wrote:I actually had problem with recording the level in the Level Editor of SMBX. Does one of these can have world map access for SMBX launcher? i would review this soon.
Sadly, none of them have any kind of world map access, your able to play them on the editor though.
1AmPlayer wrote:EDIT : Another problem. At Berry's Day In Subcon, i can't find the .lvl files. I keep finding it and none is found. So.. Can you fix this?
I'm not sure what kind of useful feedback you're expecting for a level you submitted to a contest and already got judge reviews of (to the point of displaying what rank it got there), but I might as well oblige.
Eclipse Temple Bots
This feels like something to address on open design terms rather than specific nitty-gritty terms. One can potentially use enemy reskins to all resemble the same enemy despite giving them different mechanical functions, and one can make a level jam-packed with enemies, but putting these both together are at obvious cross-purposes, because they already both serve the purpose of increasing the difficulty of parsing a level chunk. Neither conceit is entirely implausible to use and obfuscation isn't inherently completely miserable, but have to be treated carefully because they're easily excessive and frustrating to play. It muddles the set-up even further to use a broad roster of enemies.
Repeated sprite to enemy functionality can be seen in SMW's Charging Chucks and a passable VLDC9 level. Both of these have consistent responses to jumps, restraint on their overlap placement, and discrete functions but both of these have a consistent response to jumps and a fair bit of self-restriction on when they'd overlap. The rainbow of bots here include regular jump-response enemies, block-top enemies (some of which one might be able to pick up, some one can't), shell-bounce enemies, spin-jump enemies, and npcs- but they all respect gravity and possess little functional seperation beyond their response to attacks. Fireballs, iceballs, and walking into enemies with pots all have a very few exceptions in a giant roster that is placed with dense enemy overlap, too, but these are all rather effective and the enemy placement versus terrain is rarely precise enough for the majority of the weaker enemies to matter outside of such. The overall effect in this level is an undistinguished melange, which works heavily against the point of emphasizing an enemy-based gimmick.
Enemy density is... honestly, the first thing that comes to mind is what I've made myself, and I'm hardly much confident in it. Dense enemy arrangements need to be paced with discrete sections, discrete behaviours, and discrete zones of appearance so that one can properly compartmentalize and judge threats as they come. They also need terrain to compliment their use and clear safespots amongst the enemies. In this level the terrain actively works against the majority of enemies in the second temple (bots getting stuck in blocks, platforms clear over most enemies) while mostly being static whenever it'd be relevant. There's a few nice parts- the leftmost climb in the first temple, for example- but the second temple in particular is flat to a fault (see: the boss).
...also, more diegetic cues could have been used for some of the more obtuse level elements- something beyond a few NPC messages for a bunch of stumbling blocks. To indicate where pits and non-pits are in the first temple, or to go to that temple's rooftop, or to kill all of the enemies in the second section of the second temple, or the presence of the fake floors in that temple's third section. For the first temple this is what coins are for, though background objects could replace them due to the pot gimmick in this level. Making a more obviously arena shape for the enemy killing (and making most enemies visible onscreen at once) and playing a dramatic track for some kind of self-sealing ambush (akin to Zelda!) would help with the second temple's second section, and showing a few enemies falling through the floor would aide the third section.
There's the barest form of potential here but very little care in how each section feels, just passing through a large slice of ideas (reskinned enemy parade splattered over a level, loose level shape to find and cart around keys / npcs in, many Yoshi eggs, an enemy-clearing room, fake floors) without much precision for any given element and a grand goal of a big level with a lot of gimmicks. Focusing in on maybe two different elements with some degree of restraint would be a good grounds for the fundamentals clearly dismissed in this level.
So, i've updated the thread and have publicized my SCC entry, also, i want to mention that i gave it a very slight update, now you only have to watch
the intro cutscene once, so if that was something that penalized me, i'd like this to be re-reviewed. I still would like another review either
way but yeah. I'd like to hear some sort of feedback.
