AndrewPixel wrote: ↑Thu Feb 20, 2020 2:37 pm
Then, for visual effect you mean the gradient of the ground, right? I like to mess with foreground bgos and I really wanted to give this touch, could I improve it someway?
It does look very nice, so I had to take a look at how it was done. It looks like it must've taken a lot of time to get right, and would be a great hurdle in adjusting the level in the future.
I don't know how much you know about working with shaders, but the approach to make the texture automatically adapt to the environment would basically pull from one or two random-ish noise textures that combine to create a never-looping overlay. The way this can be done is if you check a pixel on a texture and add purple to the level depending on the colour of the backdrop (only apply it to the teal ground) and the whiteness of the texture:
This particular noise is medium-grainy perlin noise. It's a common way of making random textures.Think of this being like a looping parallax layer, but it moves at the speed of the level, and applies purple to the ground and bgos the closer the texture is to white. The Underwater effect in SMBX2 does something very similar, if you are having trouble visualizing it.
It's certainly not a necessary or urgent implementation, but it's fairly simple shader code that would make the level easier to edit in the future. So even if not now, it might be worth looking at once the project moves closer to polishing of individual levels.
Troopa Koopa321 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 20, 2020 2:54 pm
Are we seriously nitpicking a perfectly fine level about some friendly npcs giving some dialogue?
Your tone in many of your posts is quite abrasive. Consider changing that.
For these comments in particular: It's a detail that's good to learn and easy to fix up. Dialogue is tricky to get right in a platform setting. Reading distracts from the action, so it's best used sparingly. And when used, it should be for good reason and well-worded to not cause any ambiguity like in the case of the first message in this level. Ideally, platformer levels communicate as much as possible through their design to let everything seamlessly flow together and make sense on their own. This is difficult to do with controls (and mechanics to some extent, so if reworded I wouldn't mind the first Yoshi). If a message is necessary, it's often a good idea to try to disguise it as part of the world as much as possible. Instead of "Plants are inedible" or whatever it says I propose something like "Be careful of large opponents! Us Yoshis don't have a good way of dealing with them. They're too big for us to swallow!" and then the player has to decide what "large opponents are", but they know about the rule. It could also work as a message box (similar to how many jump and jumphalf level-gimmicks are explained): "Yoshis in this area have evolved to have pitifully tiny jaws, unable to swallow anything larger than a berry." (with a berry nearby to demonstrate)
Of course, flavour is also a valid reason for having dialogue (sparingly). If there was a scenario building off this initial warning, another Yoshi could comment on it. "If we could equip those Fire Flowers, dealing with the large enemies would be so much easier~", "Hey-hey! You've dropped <number of Yoshis dropped into a pit> of my friends into pits. What's wrong with you? No bonus for you, you monster!"
I could make a ton more comments about different aspects of the level's design, both positive and negative, but I don't think my suggestions in those areas would respect the vision behind the level and also take way longer to address, so I'm leaving those be.
The reason why I made the Ptooies unedible is because it'd have made the level way too easy and you could have made Yoshi grow too much easily since there are a lot of Ptooies through the way. I wanted them to be a solid obstacle that you couldn't just eat.