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A sequel to the first Castle of Oddities (go figure). For those that didn't see the previous Castle of Oddities, the Castle of Oddities episodes are oriented around the Wario Movement Pack by Master of Disaster. Instead of the primary objective being to reach the end of a level, the primary objective is to collect a lot of points and then reach the end of the level. In most levels, Wario is unable to die by any means other than the escape timer hitting zero, though taking damage incurs a point loss.

Unlike the previous Castle of Oddities, the following changes have been made:

• The Wario Movement Pack has been updated and now includes the ability to run. Wario also has a couple abilities exclusive to this episode as well!
• After taking a hit, the lost points are scattered out as red coins, allowing a partial salvage of the lost points.
• Goodbye, stars! In this episode, you need to collect points in order to impress the gatekeepers and allow yourself to proceed to later worlds, making the score attack aspect more crucial to gameplay. Target scores still exist just like in the previous episode, but you may have to find a way to enable them...
• If you fail to complete a level within the time limit, it will begin rapidly draining your points before causing a loss, similar to Wario Land 4.

The download is in a new place this time! I decided to try hosting the source code on GitHub. The download can be found here.

as per usual if i did anything stupid please yell at me

just finished the episode and it was quite a bit of fun! right off the bat the new progression system is much better than the in the original castle of oddities, which on top of the fact that these new levels allow for more creative routing makes clearing and shooting for high scores way more satisfying.
i also like that more effort was made to give each level its own identity and make it stand out more. while the levels of the previous entry weren't necessarily forgettable, their structure and ordering sometimes just made them feel a little too derivative of pizza tower, and the idea of taking the things from it that inspire you and then putting them to use with design elements and concepts so as to play to the strengths of smbx specifically is a better approach in my opinion.
all in all, a blast to play through and find routes for high scoring, great work.

though i do have two minor criticisms: one, some of the levels (e.g. submerged underground) felt a little too short in terms of the ratio between time spent in the level and actual things you get to do. i understand that in an episode with a lot of levels this kind of thing is bound to happen but it might be worth doing an additional sweep through all the levels once you're done with the initial designs (since they're fairly short to begin with). two, and this is probably not something you can do much about, but i'm fairly certain antizip hasn't been made compatible with beta 5 yet. this leads to a lot of unfortunate interactions such as wario sometimes teleporting upward if he takes damage while crouching or random damage while slowly rolling. not something i'd expect an average person to be able to fix, but it's probably worth giving the heads-up anyways.

deice wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 13, 2024 8:55 am

this leads to a lot of unfortunate interactions such as wario sometimes teleporting upward if he takes damage

i'm fairly certain this is actually my fault. this is also an issue in castle of oddities 1, and by the time i noticed its existence i was fairly far into making the second episode and thought the bug was fun enough to leave it in. it doesn't really give a huge advantage unless you know what you're doing, and there aren't really many places where you can trigger it on accident