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Posts by katun24

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There's a good number of DKC 1/2/3 hacks, and a few of them are completed as well as good fun to play.

Check this link for a list of all hacks found by the community: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19IH3owCACgiWgHqSXtqupB5WeFXXz4UmCB9JvwsQWUg

The DKC2 hacks I find highly worth playing are Unveiled, The Lost Levels, AneSDK2, and The Kremling's Revenge.

DKC2 hacking tools are quite limited/basic (I believe the most commonly used tool is called SDK2 Editor), and hackers in this community generally don't like sharing their information.
Hi Atari,
Sorry for being late on the topic (found the thread just now) but I felt like leaving my two cents here in case it's still welcome.

First off, I am greatly in favour of 'Kaizo: Light' hacks being clearly separated from hacks that were intended to be played with savestates in the middle of a level or with TAS scripts or frame advance (currently Kaizo: Hard and Kaizo: Pit), since the differences in their level design styles typically lead to them feeling like completely different sub-types of the 2D platformer genre in general. Moderators are currently doing a great job at separating Kaizo: Light from Kaizo: Hard/Pit (and 'Standard') hacks, however these moderation standards have not always been the same in the past and as a result we currently have roughly about 15 (old) hacks listed as Kaizo: Light that would definitely not have been listed as such with todays moderation standards. I know this is being worked on by the moderation team and I know this is not the exact issue of this thread, but I do like to stress that relabeling these hacks under Standard: Hard or Very Hard (and perhaps a new 'Puzzle' category) should go before any potential future difficulty relabeling of kaizo hacks.

I feel that the majority of the kaizo community is unhappy with with current labeling of 'light' vs 'hard' in kaizo. 'Light' vs 'hard' are labels that most people associate with difficulty, rather than what it really is - a genre distinction. 'Kaizo: RTA' vs 'Kaizo: Tools' would be a much clearer distinction.

As for difficulty ratings within the current Kaizo: Light category, I am against any further subcategorization here. As you stated, this is highly subjective. Everyone would agree that Robfather World is easier than Elephants and Snakes and Crocodiles, but if we want to clearly distinguish between difficulty categories, we need clear guidelines on how to do so, and I can only see a bigger debate arising as a result of this than the one we're having now. Moderators would be the most objective agents to analyze hacks in this regard since they've played many different hacks, but then again they might be biased because of their long-time experience with them and overall high skill level as a result of that. The alternative would be a community-based difficulty rating system similar to the 5-star one we currently have to rate the quality of the hack. However, this 5-star system is currently not being used much at all, with the great majority of hacks having 0 up to less than a handful of ratings (while in the meantime their download counts aren't low at all). If somehow a difficulty rating would be magically much more popular than the quality rating system, it would still be greatly skewed towards the expectations and therefore skill level of the player. A player who would try Akogare Mario World as their second hack after Quickie World 2 would rate it much higher in difficulty than someone who has played Elephants, Search For Salmon and Precision86 would rate it. I think the hack descriptions on this site as well as people's stories on Discord/Twitch etc. should provide adequate information for new players on roughly how difficult a hack is.

Please don't stress yourself working on this, but I'm looking forward to this issue being resolved some time in the future; hopefully we can reach some sort of consensus in the community.
I'd highly recommend Super Swunsh World (a bit harder than Shell's Retriever but great fun) and if you're in for the hard stuff, try Super Sheffy World 2 and Glitchcat7's single-level hacks like Various Dragons and Thumbshredder.

Ninja World, Super Denis World and 'super you are the best' are pretty shelljump-heavy, though they're all easier than the hacks you mentioned.
Essential:
- the framerule fix
- the wallclip fix
- the double spin hit fix
- the spinthrow direction fix

If you're going to have cape in your hack, I'd recommend the cape flight turnaround patch, which makes it so you always flip the flight direction instead of it being random.
Can I ask you to please not use SA-1 for your new hack? SA-1 has major compatibility issues for many kaizo players - we cannot play Exodius and Hope's Wind on console (Super NT from SD card or SNES with Everdrive) because of SA-1. This results in many players leaving the hacks behind since it's a pretty bad experience having to play hacks on emulator once you get used to console. There really shouldn't be a good reason to use SA-1 for kaizo hacks that outweighs the disadvantage of so many people not being able to play it at all. A little bit of lag is totally tolerable, but in kaizo hacks this usually isn't a problem since there usually aren't many sprites on the screen.
I'd be happy to help testing or make suggestions for lag reduction if that's an issue.
Anyway, keep up the good work; the screenshots look promising.
I wonder if users realize that this name change thing will probably affect credits in hacks. Let's now credit 'bunny' instead of lx5 for the retry patch.
You can, but I didn't realize the name changes at all until after having written down some names wrongly already. All fine now. In the end it's up to the users themselves.
(I know this thread is old but I'm hoping the creator will somehow still see this) - I've played up till Cryophobia (with savestates to check the RTA-viability of the hack) and I'd say this level is probably where the hack stops being doable without using savestates, due to the lack of checkpoints between the 3 rooms and the extremely heavy rng factor in room 2 and 3.
This hack has so many cool ideas though. It seems to be designed like a Kaizo: Light hack, intended for RTA play, but surely some sections were tested with savestates only. If you ever decide to do a remake, I'd love to help testing.
If we're talking about hacks in particular, all hack submissions to SMWCentral are backed up at smwc.world, from 13 Jan 2019 onward, so you should be able to download rejected hacks there. For older hacks, I recommend checking smwdb.me.
Great write-up, Doc. I tend to wishfully think that the 2021 kaizo boom wasn't primarily because of the pandemic, but I'm probably wrong. Thanks so much to all the 2021 hack creators for providing us with countless hours of entertainment! Can't wait to see what the future brings.
The reason why I tend to play kaizo hacks a lot more than standard hacks has less to do with difficulty and more with how cleverly the level design is thought out in terms of obstacle placements. Many standard hacks take the sandbox approach of having lengthy sections full of enemies placed in seemingly random positions. I have a preference for games where individual elements generally make sense within an environment and are there for a reason, whether it be logic puzzle games or execution-heavy kaizo hacks.

Similarly, when it comes to the pure level design I've always preferred the Donkey Kong Country series over vanilla SMW *dodges eggs and tomatoes*. SMW has a very rich engine with a ton of different types of sprites, blocks, interactions, hidden mechanics, etc. A good bit of the fun that's to be had with vanilla SMW is about discovering all of this, kind of like exploring an open-world environment or figuring out all the inner mechanics of a stats/upgrade system in an RPG. It's about 'what can I do?' rather than 'what am I supposed to do?'. Kaizo hacks and some standard hacks (many levels in JUMP Team hacks for example) just tend to take the 'what am I supposed to do?' approach. That's by no means a definition of kaizo design, there's a lot more to that, but it is the number one reason I prefer kaizo over most standard hacks.