Projects • Super Mario Zeal (Looking for Level Designers and Etc.)

I have an announcement to make. Increasing I find myself needing more help on hand to help with completing world 5 and 6 of Super Mario Zeal (as well as levels for the final tier of worlds, which includes World 7, 8, 9 and Bowser's Domain). So for the first time in a while I am taking a few more measures to get the assistance I need.
In the past I have consistently asked for help and volunteers in the end of demo level in my project but I find it's not enough anymore. Therefore I am just flat up saying it here. If anyone wants to help, they can reply in this thread or DM me. I have a few ground rules though.

Level Designers

• Reading the opening post to get an idea of what I'm aiming for with Super Mario Zeal is advised, if not required for understanding what I'm going for with the level design. I especially encourage people to watch Raocow's older LPs of SMW hacks or his current ongoing let's play of "Nonsense" (the current SMW Hack he's playing as of the time of this writing). I also recommend some familiarity with just a handful of the hacks I mentioned.
• Levels for the most part should feel like they would convincingly come out of a SMW Hack or be within that spirit, with a few understandable exceptions (such as World 6 (Wario's Island) more Wario Land 4-ish focus on the Frog Timer being the level ender)
• Each level for the most part has three star coins hidden in DKC2-3 inspired challenge rooms (with a few exceptions to the rules as needed) and five dragon coins that unlock a prize for collecting them without dying, the prize usually not being completion critical but usually a powerup, a few extra lives or a mount
• there are a few earlier levels that could benefit from a redesign but I have lacked both the time and motivation to dealt with them. 4-5 Sky High comes to mind as an example, with it's unreliable pendulum platforms and it's egregiously janky green coin bonus room that is literally a crime against nature or the rather anti-climatic second half of 2-10 Aquatic Adventure and how it utterly fails to do justice to the DKC2 Ship's below-deck level theme.

Programmers

• I also find myself still in need of programmers because the two I recently recruited are still busy in college and there's a few lingering under the hood problems that need a more skilled hand to resolve, admittedly I have not been doing the best to clarify what these under the hood problems are.
• Spencer Everly seems to have dropped off the earth and this is not good because I've been using his extrasounds api to add extra auditory polish to playing Super Mario Zeal, such as extra sound effects where there weren't before but I've been running into issues such as the jump sound sometimes not playing when I jump (and it's probably something to do with coyotetime.lua). There's a good chance that we might need to scrap extrasounds and start all over from scratch on that front.
• I still need an actual character unlock system that actually works, right now I have a janky situation where you can select Wario on the worldmap from the get-go despite the fact he really should only be unlocked on clearing his castle over in world 6 (and that comes with it's own minor issue such as glitched Wario Worldmap sprites that are really small when they shouldn't be. Not ideal)
• The world 1 boss needs to be recoded from the ground up and have better attacks
• The world 2 boss and both phantom train bosses needs to be converted from the vanilla event system to fully using Lua for attacks and health.
• Speaking of which, I need a universal health bar for bosses, but it needs to a vertical health bar (ala Castlevania Rondo of Blood and it needs to be able to work with vanilla bosses and layered bosses using the vanilla event system (which is kind of a stopgap). I have custom sprites for the aforementioned health bar that I sprited myself)
• The pause menu for when you are in levels needs to be totally redone, so it has an exit level option in addition to the save options.
• I still need someone to go into my physics tweaks so far and see what else can be tweaked to bring the play-feel closer to Super Mario World without breaking levels that use Barrel Cannons.
• There are a couple of staple SMW Glitches that need be implemented via coding, such as the "carry items while climbing" glitch and the "underwater fast horizontal swimming speed + subtle upwards push while carrying items" glitch
• there is handful of bosses that will require custom coding to fully realize, among side some sprites for them
• I would especially appreciate it if an alternate cutscene api that behaves like Romi's VWF Cutscenes tool were to be coded since the few cutscenes I have designed in this project are meant to resemble cutscenes created by the aforementioned tool and MDA 's Animationpal api, while nice for it's advance features is not quite what is desired or needed for this project. Faking it via the vanilla event system still leaves much to be desired in terms of both polish and execution, with the cutscene in the first Starfort especially being a victim to the shortcomings of the current method.
• there is still the matter of certain gameplay gimmicks that I need that I am still waiting on in one form or another, such as minecarts that actually behave like the ones from DKC1. (hence why 2-2 still doesn't exist yet after four years, an omission that nobody has noticed or commented on)
• and let us not forget lingering bugs and performance issues such as the coloured ropes in 2-7: Slipslide Ride Returns causing the game the game to lag.
• each town in Super Mario Zeal is meant to have one minigame in each of them that will award a star the first time they are successfully completed and I lack both the time and skill to implement them in a satisfying way. Mint Village's (World 1) minigame would be "Break the Targets" from Super Smash Bros. Kongo Jungle Village's minigame is already implemented but could be better coded and rewritten to account for later worlds, Hubville's minigame is supposed to be an adaptation of Mario Bros. (the Arcade game) but it's janky, relies too much on the vanilla event system and is unfair enough to flat up kill you. Other towns lack a minigame, as of yet.
• the current method for updating the in-intro credits leaves a whole lot to be desired, especially since it relies on the vanilla event system and layers and fails to account for choosing anyone other than Mario or Luigi and it's a pain to have to edit background sprites for the text crediting people. Ideally I would prefer a simpler method made possible through textplus and lua for crediting people.

Sprite Artists

• I appreciate all that Electro and others has done for the project so far but there are a few spots (and sprites) that seriously need to be redone for consistency (such as the all the Kongs in Kongo Jungle Village being a tad bit too big in comparison to Mario for scale. My scale assumption is that Mario/Jumpman in the original Donkey Kong arcade game is Small Mario and that original arcade DK and modern DK are exactly the same size, thus the Kongs and Kremlings should be scaled based around that assumption. The worse offender on this being too big issue is Candy Kong.)
• there are a few npcs missing NPC portraits and the current batch of NPC portraits leaves something to be desired in terms of consistency, Ideally I would like NPC portraits that are still pixel art based but are more in line with the official art-style for the Mario series (basically Yoichi Kotabe's art-style but in a pixel-ish form).
• and not only that but world 7's boss still needs to be sprited fully and I don't believe I have the skills to sprite him or do him justice, as well as sprites for a few other bosses.
• I may need extra sprites for certain gimmicks and concepts as needed, as well as sprites for npcs.
• the Maptiles for World 2 (Donkey Kong Island) needs to be redone with SMW tiles and in the SMW Style again while being faithful to Rare's classic renders of the island, the island as it stands has not aged gracefully in the four years it's been in the project.
• there are certain NPC concepts and even bosses that fully require unique sprites as I wish to empathize, such as certain rhyme prone Rare Witch who I intend to have players encounter in the world 5 town and as the world 5 boss, and maybe a rematch later on in the endgame.

I hope people will finally bite now that I have fully laid out the issues plaguing this project and keeping it from reaching it's potential.

Statistics: Posted by FireSeraphim — Wed Jun 19, 2024 8:47 am

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