Formerly named "Hello Super Mario World", Pineapple Island is my "Hello World" of Super Mario World mapping. I'm a SMW noob and have never made hack before. Tell me how I've done for my first time!
This hack replaces many of the game's levels with more difficult challenges. It doesn't make changes to the overworld. The new levels are more difficult than the original game, but they aren't quite Kaizo levels of cruelty or linearity. For an extra challenge, try to get all 5 Dragon Coins in every level!
Please be aware that it is possible to complete every level without bringing an item or yoshi or powerup from another level, though you are certainly allowed to bring them if you want to try things differently.
Here is a complete list of the levels that are replaced with hacked versions in the most recent download:
Yoshi's Island 1, 2, 3, and 4
Iggy's Castle
Donut Plains 1, 2, 3, and 4
Donut Ghost House
Donut Secret 1 and 2
Donut Secret House
Morton's Castle
Vanilla Dome 1, 2, 3 and 4
Vanilla Ghost House
Lemmy's Castle
Cheese Bridge Area
Soda Lake
Cookie Mountain
Ludwig's Castle
I updated the original post with a new version of the hack. This version replaces every level of Yoshi's Island with a more difficult challenge, not just Yoshi's Island 1.
I played this and it took me about a half hour to complete the first level, "Gruesome Green". I stopped playing after about ten minutes attempting to get through the opening of the second, unnamed level, though less due to frustration and more due to aching fingers.
I came here expecting something other than what I got - "kaizo light" made me think it would be tamer than typical Kaizo levels, which are not my cup of tea. But except for perhaps the very beginning of Gruesome Green I don't think that calling it "light" is accurate. I'm sure that someone who is more interested in Kaizo levels than me would appreciate this, but as for me personally it just tried my patience and was rarely enjoyable. I don't think that I will be coming back for the second level.
Here is a video of my numerous deaths. My apologies for the poor audio mix which is going to make it difficult to hear any of my commentary. (I seem to have had a mic malfunction.) Mainly it was just me complaining about the wriggler bit and thinking out loud about how to accomplish baby's first shell jump.
I enjoyed this hack! It wasn't especially challenging, and most times I died it was to carelessness or just my own stupidity. But it was fun to explore this little world. Thank you for sharing it!
I recorded a video of my playthrough, which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KZZhzj14a0
First of all, thank you so much for testing my levels and providing feedback!
I find it very hard to classify my own levels when it comes to difficulty, which is one of the reasons I need someone to test them. Your feedback really helped. The second level is definitely harder than the first but I was scared to label it 'kaizo'. I have a much better feel for how hard the levels actually are now that I've seen you play it, so again many thanks for that. I've updated the title of this thread accordingly.
How do you feel about the music and the esthetics? Did the levels feel jank to you at any point?
Not a problem!
For almost the entire hack, when I failed I felt that it was due to my very real lack of knowledge and skill. Even though Kaizo hacks aren't my thing I was at least invested enough to keep trying until I got it, and I could see myself improving, and it kept me from becoming frustrated. But to me, the wiggler jump just felt jank. The audio mixup ate my complaining about how janky it felt to control the jump off of it, but there was a lot of complaining about that part. The shell jump part took me longer to get right, but I never felt as annoyed or impatient there as I did with the wiggler.
I thought the music and graphics were fine. My personal taste leans more vanilla, and other than that I don't have that much of an opinion really. The music was fine and the graphics weren't distracting or difficult to read. I did like the little messages spattered around the levels.
I can see that others agree that "kaizo light" is accurate so perhaps disregard my disputing that before since I have so little experience with Kaizo levels and probably don't know what I'm talking about.
Thank you very much for playing, MajorMuff! I'll keep your feedback in mind. It was great to see you discover intended and unintended solutions to my levels, which are certainly meant to play like puzzles where it's up to you to figure out a way through. I'm looking forward to seeing more gameplay, and in the meantime perhaps I will have to see how I can do on your other levels too.
Speaking of Pineapple Island becoming a full hack, perhaps even a "Pineapple World": I just recently finished making a second bunch of levels, adding new hacked levels for all of Donut Plains except for some of the secret levels. Check the original post for a download link to the newest version!
You should be able to safely maintain your progress from the older version of the hack by creating a save state in the overworld, then loading that same save state using the new hacked rom.
Today I played through the second level (the unnamed one) and have uploaded the video. No big audio issue this time, so commentary should be more audible in this video. It's still not as clear as I normally aspire to, though. Even despite damping the game audio to a tiny proportion of normal, to where the game sound effects are about as quiet as they can be to still be easy to make out, the in-level music still dominates and sometimes drowns out the commentary. Perhaps the volume of the music tracks could be reduced a bit, especially this one?
About 75% of the video runtime is spent on the concluding bit of koopa jumps... I suppose that I am nothing if not patient and persistent. I don't have any complaints about the level itself. The koopas took me forever to figure out, but not because it felt janky or bad. All of this level felt pretty fair, except for the troll saws at the goal which I am still salty about but can still appreciate the artfulness of.
Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v43OHHyXJBQ
I noticed in the other topic related to SDFW that there might be other levels completed? If you post more levels or send them to me, I'd be willing to take a look and record some more gameplay, especially if we can keep on trading playtests.
Hi, I'm quite new to SMW hacking. I'd like to replace the red berry tile with a different, custom tile.
Here's the one I mean:
I exported graphics using Lunar Magic and found the file that seems to contain the berry, GFX17.bin.
It seems like it would be fairly straightforward to change the graphics for any of those nearby tiles that aren't animated, but the berry and the other animated tile graphics represented in the same bin file look a bit different - the berry colors are weird and I can't even tell what's going on with the flip block or the ON/OFF block. Also, there's only the one chunk of image data, and all the other frames aren't here. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong file?
The last (koopa) jump requires some regrabs that can be a bit hard to learn but are definitely not as hard as some jumps I've seen in kaizo hacks.
Yeah, it wasn't that it was all that bad, but that it took something like 25 minutes to learn Mario's jump physics well enough to have any chance of making it from the second to the last flying koopa in that last little gauntlet. I watch plenty of Kaizo levels from streamers, enough to get the basic idea, but I haven't played these kinds of hacks myself and so I have plenty of learning to do about the particulars if I'm going to make it through.
It took me time to understand that registering a jump input while bouncing off any of the koopas was death from the muncher ceiling, there being no small number of frames to hold jump that would result in a short enough jump to go up but not die, yet not holding down the jump button to fall more slowly while moving from one koopa to the next meant I might fall onto the bottom munchers between the first flying koopa to the second depending on momentum, and would certainly fall between the second and the last koopa because the distance was too great to cover with horizontal momentum alone.
I don't think I did any regrabbing to get through it though? Is that a tech I don't know about, or a typo, or..?
Originally posted by MajorMuff
The troll grinders at the end of the level is just something I find hilarious and I'll probably keep those, even if I run into them myself from time to time.
Is it possible to be both amused and also very deeply salty? Because I think they're hilarious, too, but I am so very salty that the hilarity came at my own expense.
Originally posted by MajorMuff
I've played all my own levels without savestates so it was interesting seeing someone using them since it changes the run somewhat which could potentially break the level. (I don't feel like it did though, except maybe for the grinder at the midway.)
I feel a little bad save-scumming like this, but I know that if I didn't then it would take ten times as long to complete a level, and it's already taking me 40+ minutes to complete each one. I'm not sure that my patience would extend to needing a week of play sessions to complete one fairly short level, and I doubt that you'd enjoy or benefit from that much more either. So, save-scumming it is.
The midway grinder was 100% my own brain failing and nothing to do with a problem with the level, so I wouldn't worry about that.
Originally posted by MajorMuff
I do have more finished levels and I plan on releasing an 'official' demo fairly soon. It will include the full first world of the hack. I want to make sure all is working well before doing that though. May end up sending you a level or 2 in advance!
Now I'm trying to actually replace the graphics and finding that neither YY-CHR nor Graphics Editor seems to have any idea how to insert image data created in a more featured drawing program. The colors are wrong when I paste, and they aren't even always wrong in the same way. Am I stuck recreating the images using one of these programs' crappy drawing tools?
MajorMuff, thank you for playing! Thanks for sticking with it even when the castle got frustrating. I was able to see from your playthrough just how unobvious was the power-up that you knew must have been there, and how to make it a bit easier to find. You came so close to finding it! I also saw how it was confusing it was for you that there had been a P-switch door at the end of the first screen the first time you got there, and I'll have to do something to make that clearer to the player, too.
You made the shell section harder for yourself than it needed to be. If you had jumped from the spikes up onto the rightmost stone block beside the star block instead of onto the bigger, seemingly-but-not-really safer to the right then you wouldn't have had to scroll the camera and that one Kaizo block wouldn't have threatened you when you jumped up on top to grab the star.
I felt so bad for you every time you hit that same one Kaizo block near the exit of the first screen. That wasn't even meant to kill the player when I put it there, it was just meant to make grabbing the dragon coin there less straightforward. But I feel like I should leave it in, as a way to honor the memory of the dozen or so Marios who died there.
That water stage cheese was a bit too obvious and easy, though, I'm going to have to make it a bit harder to get down through there. Thank you for catching it!
If you check the original post with the download link, there is in fact a newer version with more levels after Iggy's Castle. I've also made a change that should make things a little easier without using save states, which is adding some 1-up blocks to Pineapple House/Yoshi's House. If you're running really low and feeling desperate, then you can go to that safe haven. Also, if you can find the secret exit in the Plains Ghost House, it leads to a small secret level with a lot more 1-ups in it up for grabs. However, I won't consider it cheating if you make save states in the overworld or right at a level's entrance or midpoint.
As the topic title says - I make music sometimes and I'd like to try out making my own music for the SMW hack I'm working on. Are there composing tools specially for SNES? Are there tools for converting other music formats like MUS or MIDI to BRR samples and SPC music, or other SNES formats? I'm finding plenty of tutorials for inserting music that others have made or converted, but I haven't yet found anything about making original music.
Today I updated the post with a newer version. This version of the hack includes new hacked levels for every non-secret location in Yoshi's Island, Donut Plains, and Vanilla Dome. Check it out!
I played this hack and uploaded a video of my playthrough:
It wasn't bad! But there are definitely some things that can use improvement, like the sprites in Fiery Fortress and some funky tile usage throughout. Especially in Koopa Crossing, whose flip blocks on top of bushes was the most surprising instance.
Muncher Mountain was great, definitely my favorite in the hack. The others were easy for my personal taste and never made me feel at all challenged. Fiery Fortress might have done, if not for all the switch blocks, but then some parts of it looked like they might not have really been possible without the switch blocks.
It was pretty fun, but it also felt horribly janky at parts. For me frustration from jank outweighed the enjoyment I was having otherwise. I fell through the ground without understanding why, had to make leaps onto platforms I couldn't really see, never quite figured out how the hell the waterfall platforming was supposed to work, and got really annoyed at the fireball frenzy at the end of the castle level.
Today I added a new version which additionally replaces every secret level in Donut Plains with a new hacked level. Check it out! Now all those secret exits in Donut Plains have a real purpose.
Please be aware that there is currently no exit from the Secret Ghost House that will allow you to reach the star. (There's only one exit, and it leads to the pipe and Donut Secret 2.) My tentative plan is to make the star world only accessible from the Bowser's Valley area in this hack. My intention is to one day replace every level on the overworld with a new hacked level and, as much as I love the star world in SMW, I feel like it only works when players don't know from the start what's there. I'd rather players saw more of my hard work on their way to Bowser than just a dozen or so levels because they went for what they already knew to be a major shortcut.
It looks to hard for me to play, but I'm really surprised at hacking skill has come so quickly!
You should give it a try! I'd appreciate your feedback.
This might be my first time hacking SMW, but it's not my first time making a ROM hack and it's far from my first time doing mapping or level design. My most recent project was Nanopineapple 2018, a 32-map megawad for classic Doom.
I played through the first level, which I thought was quite good. I almost reached the midpoint of the second level before I decided my poor hands and brain had enough for the day. I'll come back to the second level another time.
I think the first level was my favorite of the levels I've played so far. The difficulty felt more manageable somehow without being nearly easy. I think the second level is my least favorite. Those rex jumps are just really cruel.
I did find a sort of bug in the first level, though. If you reach the second yoshi without dying (or using save states like a cheap dingus) then the second yoshi comes out as a 1-up. In the video I mistakenly commented about the yoshi falling down onto the muncher ledge on the right but I remember now that if you jump soon enough to get onto the next ledge yoshi just stays put, and evidently doesn't despawn. I think it may not be possible to reach the goal from the start without dying once after reaching the midpoint.
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Formerly named "Hello Super Mario World", Pineapple Island is my "Hello World" of Super Mario World mapping. I'm a SMW noob and have never made hack before. Tell me how I've done for my first time!
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