AntDude Agknowledged SMBX, But...

[Knux]

Here

Interesting to see a big Youtuber agknowleding SMBX, and as a matter of fact I have seen a few YouTubers doing this lately!

Yet, it had me wondering... AntDude mentions SMBX2 specifically, and goes on to say that it feels more like a multitude of other gaming properities. I must say that I haven't really advanced beyond 1.3, out of principial that I believe SMBX has lost its identity with these new updates from various sources. Granted, it's really cool seeing people push the editor to its limits, but does anyone else think we've lost our way a bit? Just me?

[ds-sloth]

What a great question. I'm speaking as someone who avidly played SMBX 1.3 and tried to make episodes (but didn't share them) in 2010-2012, then largely forgot about it until 2020 when I began working on TheXTech and playing some X2 content.

My personal opinion is that SMBX 1.3 was a masterpiece of game design. I don't think that there's anything truly missing from the SMBX 1.3 content standard. There is still a lot of room for pushing the limits of SMBX within that standard (as you and others have been proving). That's why I've focused almost entirely on quality-of-life improvements in TheXTech instead of expanding the content standard too much -- why fix something that isn't broken?

That said, I don't think that SMBX was ever exclusively about the kind of design virtuosity you've been exploring over the past few years. As I remember it, a lot of the excitement in the early days was from the shock factor of "you can DO that!?". I think that there's a bit of a treadmill effect where getting that same shock factor now requires much more technically-demanding features (like the 3D-perspective Minecraft battle field MrDoubleA shared yesterday). So in that sense, I'd actually say that X2 is in large part trying to create the same *feeling* that SMBX 1.3 created for me, at least, when I was much younger.

As a side note, the many X2 developers have different interests and a different sense of humor than Redigit, and that's naturally resulted in X2 having a different "feel" from SMBX 1.3 (in the added characters and NPCs, for instance). I was really happy to see The Conquest recently, and I think that (more than anything else I've seen from X2-land) that episode captures some of the feel of SMBX 1.3.

[deice]

the idea of "less is more" might lead someone to forget that more is still also more
it's probably not entirely unreasonable to consider a few smbx2 basegame features kind of "bloaty" for lack of a better term, but fundamentally fun level design beats fancy-schmancy presentation every time so if the remaining question is "do you want the ability to script entirely custom content from scratch to suit your needs or do you want to not be able to do that" i imagine the answer is clear to a lot of people

a niche example i feel might be worth bringing up is kaizo levels. smbx2 has a custom quick retry script that you can get on the forums. in 1.3, that is fundamentally impossible, and having what amounts to a 5-second loading screen every time the player dies will either limit your design or result in a level that severely disrespects the player's time and is significantly more frustrating than it would otherwise be. there are probably more similar examples, but the point is that i personally don't think building off the foundation of an engine that is inherently meant to be highly customizable (iirc it was discovered that a hypothetical new version of smbx by redigit would've had variables available for use with events, so scripting was never very far off) necessarily involves anyone "losing their way"