That's right!
After quite a few years of development, Mario & Luigi's Delightful Adventure-- An old, old SMBX episode of mine, has been Enhanced and improved thanks to SMBX2.0's tech!
This also part of something else in the future, but we're not here to talk about that!
THIS EPISODE REQUIRES SMBX2.0 BETA 4 PATCH 4 ONWARDS TO WORK.
But what's in here?
-Remade bosses
-Quality of life improvements
-Reworked worldmap, tweaked levels and other knick knacks!
-Accessibility options
-More cutscenes
-A postgame???
-MARIO IS IN THIS???
NOTE: The level design is mostly unchanged, the episode still tries to be close to the original while still improving some major flaws of the 2014 release (like for example Bubble Heaven being impossible to complete, and so on)
So as mentioned, level design is tweaked in some spots.
The Carob Kingdom is a far away realm on its own island, peaceful and thriving-- however one day, Bowser came to the Carob Kingdom to steal a powerful chest, said to contain incredible magic!
Worried of what Bowser could do, princess Victoria has called Mario, Luigi & Peach to come over and sort things out...
But a powerful alliance might be already in place...
if you decided to play, thank you! it means alot, really! if you can, give postgame a try ; ) . as you'd guess, a lot of life happens in four years. there were periods of inactivity admittedly but we pulled through! i joined DAE after it's parent project (DA2) was indefinitely put on hiatus due to needing the next beta (b4). as you can guess, DAE over shot that by a big margin. i was just going to do graphics when i joined, but i soon i picked up more things to do because i wanted to help any way possible. It was my first foray into pure lua bosses (and lua in general). big thanks for rixithechao for being patient and helping me learn it as well. i won't lie, i made mistakes and reacted poorly to others on the dev team throughout the course of it all. namely squp. i apologize profusely for treating you like your feedback wasn't useful or wanted. though i've come far, i'm still a little dissatisfied with some of my work. i suppose it's a case of imposter syndrome lol. the project did make me more active in the community, which i'm thankful for. it also made me help many others with my gained knowledge.
anyhow, thanks for checking this out. it's been delightful!
Last edited by KBM-Quine on Sun Jun 12, 2022 4:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
the levels do feel very mario (though i don't know how much my experience of them is affected by my using of vanilla physics) other than maybe the surprising amount of poison mushrooms and random banzai bills which i've died to way more times than i'm willing to admit. the little special mechanics present among the levels are neat too; the green stars fit into their respective courses very naturally (though if it were me maybe i wouldn't indicate specifically which levels they're in, just that there's one per world, but it's fine either way), however the invisible note block thing that appears like 3 times feels a little bit tacked on? extra coins/lives is fine but i think maybe something more similar to a dkc bonus barrel-type approach would've been more engaging. not really a complaint cause like it doesn't get in the way or anything but
the bosses are the definite highlight for me. they keep you on your toes just enough without just making you tank a free hit for not having superhuman sightreading abilities. they're creative and are just oozing with variety between the different fights and within the fights themselves, hats off to the boss designers, A+ stuff, i love to see it. a few minor nitpicks:
the lava in the world 5 bowser fight rises sort of without warning which might screw you over if you're standing in the middle. but it won't happen to you more than once i guess so not a huge issue.
during the final boss, sometimes you get pushed in such a way that the chest lands on top of you, clipping you through the floor and resulting in your untimely death. this has once killed me during the final phase, meaning it also killed me in real life. also maybe add a bit more of an indicator when the laser appears during the 2nd and 3rd chest phase, as the player is somewhat unlikely to be paying attention to the upper half of the screen cause of the bats.
the two extra levels were nice (i actually didn't read the sign on the bramble level at first and didn't even notice the janked-out hitboxes until i died to them near the checkpoint, so i think it could've honestly been salvaged and included somewhere). maybe i was hoping for some super unethical and unreasonable challenge levels (romhack brain rot) but these delivered a fun experience either way so i won't complain.
the boss rush was a thing that existed. maybe i'm just not transposing myself mentally into 2014 hard enough to enjoy it, but the iteration time was just bleh. 10/10 wonky hitboxes and weirdly placed exclamation markers, probably wouldn't play it again.
i don't intend to go for the hidden achievements cause i don't know what they are and reading the game files to find out is stupid to me.
overall nice work team, good luck in future endeavors ^^
The hidden achievements are either for jokes or doing the max amount possible, so i don't think you've missed anything by skipping them (though two are gotten in the retro rematch reward level ; ) ).
-Minor graphical changes (namely all levels in world 2)
-Made world 2's green star easier to figure out where it is, and added an easy pipe to leave once collected
-Made world 3's boss' controls snappier
-More backgrounds have been parallaxed
-Fixes to some lua stuff regarding some bosses
-Version mumber in pause menu
-Other assorted polish
-You have been added to the episode, give me your liver.
How are you supposed to tell that this rope is climbable without throwing your face at it? Here i'm thinking that it's supposed to be a standable rope because it looks exactly like a standable rope, and then i pass right through it. If I were using these, i'd also have an accompanying climbing koopa or something. and not make it required until a ways into the level.
I wish the way of getting the green star was more fun than "swim under the level". There's even options that are more fun that exist in the level already, like "killing all the fish" or "collecting all clam items"
I beat Lightning Pidgit and the knockback from the final hit dropped me into the hole on the side. Intentional?
Not intended per say. That's meant to save the player after having taken the controls away if their over a pit.
We'll look into a better implementation soon
Rixi i love you to death but I have never had a more miserable experience than with the Osoroshi boss fight. If the postgame is just boss refights and like one or two extra levels I honestly don't want to go through the effort of completing the game. I give up.
MY ISSUES:
He's too tanky. Nine hits for a phase is too much. Even if you bring it down to something reasonable like six hits, you'll still easily be able to see all his attacks.
Too much going on. I made it to the third phase twice, and both of those times I was overwhelmed with the lasers that turn into fire bursts, panicked, and died before I could make heads or tails of what was happening afterwards.
Glowing rocks effectively useless. I don't know where to throw to actually hit him with a rock. Even then, in the slam attack he destroys the rocks he creates before the player can actually pick one up.
THE BIGGEST ISSUE
He's a giant spike of difficulty right at the end of a really easy game. Every level up to Osoroshi has been a straightforward romp that can be completed with basically no trouble, and then Osoroshi himself is a gauntlet of quick, hard-to-dodge-even-with-tells attacks with which Mario has no counterattack. Even the bat attack which leaves him vulnerable is extremely easy to mess up and lose a leaf on. 75% of my deaths before I stopped playing were to him. It's kind of ridiculous how much more difficult he is than everything else.
Sorry to hear you didn't have fun with the fight! I do wish Darkonius' exams weren't a factor so we could've waited a bit longer and gotten some external testing before releasing the game; the main focus still would've been catching game-breaking bugs and errors, but if I had gotten feedback about the final boss like this I could've adjusted it accordingly before we put out v1.0.
With that said, here's some more specific responses:
He's too tanky: I think this is the first time I've heard that specific complaint about him? Some folks have said he's difficult but not that he has too much HP. I can see about lowering it, though I'm sure being able to hit him more often would help; you can bop him at least a couple times per jump with the tanooki glide, and being able to hit him with the rocks or fireballs should make a difference too. On that note,
Glowing rocks effectively useless: You throw them at his head, same target as the fireball (and tanooki tail if anyone wants to attempt that); I figured that between bopping him on his head being the consistent form of damaging him in other attacks and having half his body behind the arena during the clap attack, that'd help clue players in. I'm down for adding something to try and help convey that more, but I don't want to resort to just using the arrow. As for not being able to pick the rocks up, the sweep timing and speed was already pretty toned down from how it was when I first implemented it, but I can see about how Darkonius and Quine feel about nerfing it further.
Too much going on: I have wondered on occasion if the screenshake during the fireball ring vortex section was too much. I can look into toning that down as well as tweaking the timing and intensity of things overall to see if that makes things less overwhelming.
Difficulty spike: Honestly, I would've liked to tone up the difficulty of the later worlds a bit to make for a smoother difficulty ramp, but there's only so much that can be done without reworking the level design. And while we polished the visuals and replaced old resprites with the proper X2 NPCs, keeping the levels' layouts, enemy placements, etc largely the same was a major priority for the project so that part of this episode could still serve as a time capsule of sorts.
I will say, I do understand Bowser's cheeseability doesn't help with Osoroshi coming right after him, though at the same time I'm not sure if I want to change that...? I very much prefer to design fights whose pacing is driven by the player, and we didn't have much of that in this game (in part because the original plan was to finish it in three months lol). Hopefully the sequel's bosses will do more in that regard; I'm only going to be working on a postgame fight for Delightful 2 myself.
In the time it took me to write this post, Darkonius and Quine have already started discussing your feedback in the dev chat, so I'll join that conversation when I'm done here and see what changes to the fight we can potentially include for v1.2.
If you want to give the final boss another go in the meantime, my advice is to experiment with the powerups provided before the fight as well as look more into the assist options, especially the one to restart from phase checkpoints; if you have that enabled you'll restart the fight from the latest vulnerable phase you reached, so that should help make it less of a marathon.
As for the final reward in the postgame, if you choose not to go for it:
If you clear Retro Rematch, you'll unlock a bonus area that gives joke cheats, unlimited powerups (the full set of basegame powerups, mounts, etc), some dev trivia, and access to a variant of the A2XT2 Gaiden costume testing level (since this episode's player animation tech was partly based on Santa Calleoca). The two other levels don't unlock anything.
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Something else for v1.2, while I'm at it: we're reworking the game settings prompt in the intro. Instead of just being asked to check the settings after the title, you'll be able to configure non-gameplay settings before the intro cutscene even starts:
And then after the title you'll pick from one of three presets for the gameplay settings -- Enhanced, Classic, and Speedrun -- or just configure them with Custom.
wrt Tankiness and methods of attack - I, a blind player, thought that the rocks in the slam attack were meant to be things to dodge, solely because he creates them and then promptly gets rid of them- it wasnt until I got to the phase three rock attack, where they actually stay around, that I considered their actual use. With the leaf, i managed to get ~six or seven head bops during each clap bat attack, during the times where i didn't flub up and lose my leaf. I didn't consider the fire flower because he's never really on the player's fireball level and it's kind of hard to focus on both dodging things and throwing fireballs at the same time.
I have a bold suggestion: I'd like there to be a mercy accessibility checkpoint at the start of each phase IE the part where you have to bring the chest to him. I don't like how I could only get to the third phase twice and had to redo everything up to that point every time.
Ah, fair enough with the rocks. They do use an edit of the diggin' chuck rock sprite... and dagnabbit I thought I edited them to flash like held ice blocks but all this time they weren't and I guess I just got too used to their graphics to notice
I'll try that, and if they still don't have strong enough "hey you can pick this up" affordances I'll experiment with other graphics that might.
You can shoot fireballs at an upward angle, and aside from the phase 3 juggle attack and the start of the fist pound attack he's usually within range for that. I like to do it while dodging the bats in the phase 1 and 2 clap attacks (phase 3's bats move too fast), but I'll admit that's a lot less feasible when playing with a gamepad.
As for the additional checkpoints, those would actually be messy to implement because of
- how the fight internally manages its phases and subphases,
- how the attacks and checkpoint system tie into the phase tracking, and
- the need to implement an alternate start for the wind subphase that'd change or disable things like Victoria appearing, Oso's dizzy state, the location of the chest, etc
So, not promising anything on that front, but I'll see what I can do.