Re: Are You A Master Mario Maker 2020 - Grand Final Results PG 36!

Struggling to find time to get my level together this round.


Didn't have much of a chance during the week and then hadn't realised the wife had agreed to do a zoom quiz/party with friends last night so that time has been used up as well

I'll get something together before the deadline but apologies in advance if it's shite

Annoyed more than anything as I had a whole bunch of thoughts about what to do with the move set that Link brings.

Submitted mine yesterday, looking forward to the stream later and more Zelda levels especially - I'm sure you'll still put something good together Jen!

Submitted. It's been an effort to get this level into shape. I hope I haven't bungled it up somehow with my "cleverness". It's happened before...

I'm in totally the same boat as Jen. Yesterday I was in the mind-set of 'well, this part of the level is a lost cause but it's too late to go back to the drawing board', although after last night I'm feeling a little more confident...but only slightly.

Not gonna lie, Link is the hardest element to structure a level around, at least in my experience.

Going LIVE with Week 7 levels!

http://www.twitch.tv/grcadeuk

This weeks levels!

Mushroom Group

SupaChipz
Trials of the Sword
7GL-3VN-JVG

OldSoulCyborg
Door-Block Dungeon
9MN-93D-JJF

Jenuall
Leaves
9M2-GVQ-F1G

Yubel
Subterranean Navigation
W63 - B11 - DFF

Flower Group

Qikz
Ludwig's Tower of Terror
WQR-JHV-CJG

Karl
The Plumber of Time?
RGD-2JW-XXG

OrangeRKN
Bowser Jr.'s Final Flight
KR0-7WJ-3XG

SuperDragon64
Castle Escape
5HR-K4W-QHF



As usual I need your votes in by 8pm Sunday (31st May)!

Was watching quietly on stream - my laptop crashed again so I ended up watching on another but not logged in! Missed most of SuperDragon's so looking forward to playing that basically blind, otherwise saw the rest! Once again Cyborg taught me a new mechanic with the door blocking (and the respawning vine blocks?!). Wanted to comment on the triforce too that chipz did, that was neat!

Thanks! I tried to go as Authentic Zelda as possible this week with the sound effects, boss music etc. the boss is a play on the Ocarina of Time Boss fight also.

Just watched my level in stream (I don’t watch the rest until I’ve played and beaten them to avoid spoilers. Dev did indeed cheese a couple of the screens

Going last, Dev seemed a little Frustrated, did he have another fun run?

Obviously he can speak for himself but I think it's fair to say that Devlin is a little frustrated with Mario Maker in general at this point (though I think some levels including mine did add to tonights specific instance of frustration! )

Jenuall wrote:Obviously he can speak for himself but I think it's fair to say that Devlin is a little frustrated with Mario Maker in general at this point (though I think some levels including mine did add to tonights specific instance of frustration! )

Yeah I think I'm done with it now. I've gotten everything I need/want from it and I've no longer got the patience that I once had for it.

It's not my intention to take it out on people's levels, but I know that's happened a few times now, so I'm sorry to those it's happened to.

On the subject of the contest we only have one set of guidelines after this before we enter the last three stages.

As a reminder there are three stages after the groups.

The Quarter-Finals, Semi-Finals and Grand Finals.

The two WINNERS of the Groups (The 1st place ranked makers) go straight into the Semi-Finals.

The 4th placed makers in each group are eliminated from the competition.

The 2nd and 3rd placed makers in each group will go through to the Quarter-Finals with the 1st and 2nd places moving onto the Semi-Final.

The 1st and 2nd places in the Semi-Final move on to the Grand Finals.

So the next two sets of votes are going to be crucial.

As things stand the scores are as follows.

Well I for one just want to thank Devlin for sticking with it! This competition, as always, has been a welcome distraction from everything else that is going on! Hears to a competitive last few weeks

Agreed! With myself while I played a fair amount of the first game on WiiU, this game is when I've really gotten into it (with the WiiU I only ever had it set up in the living room of a house share so I didn't have the freedom to get into the competition back then) so I've really been enjoying being able to take part and see my levels played alongside others on streams

Just took a peek at the stream.

Thought the levels were cool as usual! All the concepts were great. Small observations: @OrangeRKN: I was SCREAMING at the little Bowser Jr rocket car, that's amazing. And the helicopter of course. @Jenuall: Weird thing to notice but I really liked how you drew the big sword in the wall at the start of yours!


Re: my level: I'm glad it mostly worked though Devlin did find a way to skip a little bit! My fault...

@Qikz, @Jenuall, I think you both spotted this: basically, you're supposed to take the blue Mechakoopa and use its beam to break the yellow blocks next to the yellow pipe, but Devlin found you could just spin-jump under them instead. I actually tried to do that & was like, "ah no it's fine, you can't get enough momentum off that little ledge," but he made it look very easy, haha! Kicking myself! Anyway, that's why one of the rooms looked a bit "optional".

I think it's fun if you play along and use the Mechakoopa, so hopefully people will give that a go, but apart from that everything worked out OK on the stream luckily!


@Devlin: Sorry to hear you're not having very much fun with this at the moment. For what it's worth I think we as competitors are having fun making & playing! But for sure you've got the hardest & most visible job every week. Appreciate you powering through despite maybe having fallen out of love with Mario Maker. Thanks!

Yeah it's a shame you're not having as much fun with Mario Maker these days Devlin but I'll echo what others have said that I've really been enjoying the competition and it has definitely encouraged me to get more out of the game which is great!

Karl_ wrote:@Jenuall: Weird thing to notice but I really liked how you drew the big sword in the wall at the start of yours!

Thanks! I was hoping that would get deciphered correctly and that people didn't see it as some kind of religious symbology or something!

My original plan if I'd had more time was for the opening section to be a pure Mario area where you had to follow a sort of breadcrumb trail of sword icons across some standard platforming sections to find the cave where you then get the master sword and the Link fun begins. As I was short on time I just dropped Mario at the entrance to the cave!

Karl_ wrote:@Qikz, @Jenuall, I think you both spotted this: basically, you're supposed to...

Interesting, I look forward to playing it myself!

I'd just like to echo the sentiments of everyone else here. If it we'rent for this competition, I would've been holding on to all sorts of ideas with no compelling reason to actually make them - admittedly some of these should've laid dormant and, while I've made peace with them as each week rolls by, there's a lot to be said for hindsight.

Karl_ wrote:
Thought the levels were cool as usual! All the concepts were great. Small observations: @OrangeRKN: I was SCREAMING at the little Bowser Jr rocket car, that's amazing. And the helicopter of course.

That was all really playful and like you, seeing the helicopter and rocket car section had me screaming on the inside for sure.

@Karl I liked the concept you had and I did pick up on the idea that you wanted the player to take an element from the future (mechakoopa) and use it to solve a problem in the past. At least I hope that was the general idea.

Yubel wrote:

Karl_ wrote:Thought the levels were cool as usual! All the concepts were great. Small observations: @OrangeRKN: I was SCREAMING at the little Bowser Jr rocket car, that's amazing. And the helicopter of course.

That was all really playful and like you, seeing the helicopter and rocket car section had me screaming on the inside for sure.

I had tried something similar last week with the side scrolling shooter, but ultimately didn't use it because I found it too easy to break with the free movement of the clown car. Here I could keep the player a lot more restricted. The actual inspiration came from two weeks ago and Cyborg's squirrel level! He had that section with the hard blocks platform on the tracks, where as you spawn in the blocks all fall onto the track from different places in order to have them fit together with no gaps. That was a lightbulb moment for me!

Also a shout out to your previous level Yubel where you used single blocks falling off tracks to detonate bob-ombs (used to very great effect in the opening cutscene!). I completely stole that this time and made heavy use of timed explosions - for timing the lift at the start, for controlling the "doors" closing, and for setting off explosions for general effect.

I've played all the new levels now, spoilering a few comments (in an effort to actually comment more on people's levels without spoiling anything for those yet to play through them!):

Qikz wrote:.

Yubel wrote:.

Jenuall wrote:.

OldSoulCyborg wrote:.

OrangeRKN wrote:

Jenuall wrote:.

You may notice from the level comments that I managed to softlock myself The final red coin to the right that you're supposed to arc an arrow into I jumped into with a running jump from on top of the box bit to the left. It would have been fine if I could have just restarted at the checkpoint, but there was no way to kill myself and for some reason the game only lets you restart the level completely from the pause menu! I got it on my second attempt at least

Ah that's annoying! I had tested to see if the player could get in there but I reworked the layout of the red coin area quite late on so that's probably what went wrong there! I was already up against it time wise and had already reworked a couple of things during my "final" clear check run so just didn't have time to go back and refine/tests parts like this as much as I would have liked!

OrangeRKN wrote:

This was a really clever level and once again taught my some new mechanics! The only part I wasn't a fan of was the respawning vine block. I think the concept of destroying blocks to unlock doors is strong and novel enough that the subversion of it wasn't necessary and was a bit too tricky - thankfully I had seen it already on stream! If it had somehow been set up as an optional secret I think it might have worked better (relatedly I did really like the hidden 1-up room off the final screen!)

OldSoulCyborg wrote:

OrangeRKN wrote:

This was a really clever level and once again taught my some new mechanics! The only part I wasn't a fan of was the respawning vine block. I think the concept of destroying blocks to unlock doors is strong and novel enough that the subversion of it wasn't necessary and was a bit too tricky - thankfully I had seen it already on stream! If it had somehow been set up as an optional secret I think it might have worked better (relatedly I did really like the hidden 1-up room off the final screen!)

I definitely felt a bit guilty when Devlin was stuck on that bit!
Opinion: When it comes to puzzles it doesn't matter how strong an idea is, a subversion of that idea will always be a good thing (if done right).

I can think of a couple of ways I could have improved on the implementation of that puzzle without changing much or perhaps even anything about the solution itself. There's already a few hints about that puzzle, both in the room itself (the shape of the room and the vines already there, + the block under the sideways spring (has a vine inside it, so will respawn when you re-enter the room)) and leading up to it (the "Yay!" blocks, believe it or not (to make the player realise that blocks on tracks can be hit even if they're overlapping ground tiles (to be fair I could have done without those if I'd changed the puzzle just a bit))), but some of those hints could perhaps have been a bit stronger.

I could write a paragraph or two (or ten) about a lot of the puzzles in the level... I might.

I thought this when watching the stream, that was a nice bit of signposting to use the yay blocks!

OldSoulCyborg wrote:I could write a paragraph or two (or ten) about a lot of the puzzles in the level... I might.[/condense]

This would definitely be interesting!