The key is just not to make it too cramped (or too open), is all. It can be a delicate balance sometimes, and you often have to analyze it contextually...

These blue turtles literally are way too fast! I could barely make it past the first area. I'm not sure who made them, but they need to seriously tone the speed down.

This particular was near impossible as Big Mario.

This pipe leads to the beginning, which is both not warned at all and a little unfair.

These blue turtles literally are way too fast! I could barely make it past the first area. I'm not sure who made them, but they need to seriously tone the speed down.

Overall, some difficulty spikes, but honestly a great level. Nice work

This Goomba is relatively pointless since he just walks right off of the edge.

Minor issue: the girder gets cut off by the corner of the ground.

This part is a little -too- tight, even for my tastes. Try lowering that bottom pipe a bit and getting rid of that Koopa.

Honestly, I don't feel that this tileset is appropriate here. I'd rather see the cave tileset from the first section used here (the blue one with the rainbow rocks).

Now, I have a rather interesting proposal here. You see, I don't exactly feel like this level fits the abstract world - rather, it feels like an extension of the Norveg plotline. What I -do- feel it fits perfectly, however, is the Mock Bonus World theme. Under the assumption that DgBarca and SLBros cannot complete that level in time, I was wondering how you'd feel if this was turned into that level instead? That little "bloody" ending area you made there would be a perfect place to reveal the hint which leads to world 9.

It's up to you, ultimately, but I feel this would be a much better placement for this level.

Even though it somehow failed to make it onto the list aside from a small mention in a copy-and-pasted comment from MrDeePay (for alas, everyone forgets about poor World Post-Norveg), Asteroid Antics is actually in need of quite a few extra elements. 13A, 150 and 151 still lack backgrounds, the non-looping background in 153 tends to appear cutoff when one enters some of the side rooms from 150 and 151, and the gas/electricity in 150 151 still don't have proper graphics/animations. As such, I decided to try my hand at adding the long overdue final æsthetic touches to the level, as well as scattering the pages from Doc's notebook mentioned in the script (reworded slightly to sound a little better) throughout the level, setting up the backstory for World 9.

13A:



A brown-paletted version of the World 5 mountain BG with some clouds taken from the island BG make up the background here. The brown hues suggest more of a connection with the desert which immediately neighbors this stage on the overworld, and the BG is positioned in such a way as to suggest that Mario is fairy high up, explaining the slight difference in climate in this particular area.

153:



Looks essentially identical in-game, though I sliced the BG in half and shifted things around a bit so it will display properly in the side rooms, and shifted two colors around so that messages would have the proper palettes. Speaking of messages, here you can see the first of the notebook pages (the actual graphics for which could be a little better, but drawing is not perhaps my best suit), along with a helpful (animated, blinking) message on how to read it (this was already included-yet-unused in ExGFX155, so why not use it?). The notes themselves are sign blocks, which access the level whose messages they are to use from a few lines of LevelASM code, allowing two blocks to handle all six notes.

150:



Since layer 2 was needed to avoid cutoff with the gas, this prevented a normal BG, so instead I made a Mega Man-esque pseudo-BG of pipes, girders and animated fans. That's probably not a bad thing, though, as it strikes me as suiting this area far better than any of the cavey BGs I had previously been considering, all of which (aside from the one with the water, which wouldn't work here) feels a little too enclosed and flat.

The gas itself has also been given proper graphics (based on the clouds from Tropopause Trail and Dynamic Disarray), which have both a poisonous glowing animation, plus an expand-contract effect to make them look more cloud-like. While it can be difficult to see in this small image, there are also many small, animated bubbles in the cloud, which especially congregate around the cracks in the pipes, giving the effect of the gas properly leaking out of them.

The gas itself (as well as the electricity in 151) previously used the uninserted block 334, which was intended to be a kill block which is non-solid for sprites. However, 316 (kill if Mario is inside), fulfills both of these functions, and in fact works better than the intended block, since Mario now falls slightly inside the gas-electricity before perishing, rather than dying the moment his little toesies touch the edges, which makes more sense for non-solid bringers of death. Purely personally, I think very the best choice here would actually be block 34F, the (also uninserted) non-solid hurt block, since quite frankly, there's way too much instant death in this stage (which leads to a very silly obstacle to obtain the first P-switch in 153), but I'm only making æsthetic changes/repairs here, and avoiding unilaterally making changes to the author's design which have a direct effect on gameplay, so for now, they're still all instant death block, as per the original plan.



151 has been given the BG from Reclaimed Refinery, as per its role the highly mechanized core of the asteroid. The electricity has also been given a proper animation, as have the bolts around the electrified blocks. The palette of the blocks themselves alternates between the original version and a whited-out version, in sync with the appearance of the block-surrounding bolts.

Here is a video showing both of the major animations. Unfortunately my recording software hates the gas animation, and renders it a muddy mess, with the bubbles heavily smudged and hard to see properly, but the electricity animations comes through pretty well here. This video also demonstrates the nature of of block 316.

Opinions?