finished playing through this yesterday, pretty neat little episode.
the enemy placement in particular is surprisingly very well thought out. though it does get a little spammy when at its worst, i never felt cornered into a situation that seemed impossible to sightread, even without any powerups. i'm not a speedrunner, but i imagine that this episode would be incredibly fun to speedrun because it felt really satisfying whenever i happened upon a way to weave through an arrangement of enemies that at first glance seemed like it would require me to wait a cycle.
the levels are also paced pretty nicely, if not a bit short at times. (except for that one autoscroller in world 7, that one was an absolute drag and i implore you to always set a slightly faster scroll speed in the future)
there's only two real gripes i have pertaining to the content of the episode itself:
- lack of audiovisual polish: the volume of the custom sound effects isn't balanced whatsoever, meaning some sounds are very loud while others are very quiet which is often jarring to listen to. there are also numerous graphical issues such as effects missing their masks or not being recolored to match their respective npcs, backgrounds having frame sizes set incorrectly making them kind of jitter around during their animations, backgrounds being stretched and blurry etc.
the latter is an issue mostly because it can affect gameplay. enemies with badly ported graphics sometimes have vague hitboxes which can result in the player tanking an unfair hit.
- questionable level design choices: this one's not really major, but some levels feel like they're subverting their own gimmicks. for example, the level where you have to carry bombs to blow up brick blocks has several tail powerups in it, letting the player ignore just about every bomb setup without even having to bring powerups from outside the level. the lakitu level has several koopas placed immediately next to each lakitu's spawn point, letting the player effortlessly take them out with a shell toss. i'm all for letting the player choose how to approach an obstacle, but i also think that the player has no reason not to completely eliminate an obstacle when given the choice, if there's no incentive to keep it around.
as for some more meta stuff:
- i wasn't able to find any credits for the custom assets used. it's generally considered poor form not to credit the people who've worked hard to produce the custom content that you're using, so if you haven't included a credits file anywhere i recommend you either add one to the episode or edit your post here to include them. if you really can't remember the source of everything used in this episode specifically, at least keep it in mind for things you create in the future.
- custom graphics can be placed in the episode directory along with the world map graphics, making them apply for the whole episode by default (unless overridden in a level folder). this is ideal for the mario/yoshi/koopa/etc. graphics you're using for example because it wouldn't be necessary to copy-paste them into each level folder.
all in all, good work. i hope you continue to hone your skills.