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Posts by Sadistic Designer

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Mine, but make sure that you have plenty of the 'skill' you asked for as it is hard. So far 1 playtester broke the hack (whaaat? Somebody finished?? Yes I failed to avoid a very easy glitch where you grab an item from below without landing on the rope above.) He is also the only one ever to finish. If you have enough skill (I assume you do as you beat almost all hacks on the list) feel free to try and good luck!

Edit: My post ended halfway through a sentence...
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
Originally posted by NTI Productions
I presents the Kaizo hack of my friend, Pudim de Baunilha:

Random's Retarded Quest

The Kaizo use GFX of the hack Vip and Wall Mix 4, but my friend not found the email of Vipper to ask permission to use this GFX, so I ask if anyone has his mail (Vipper), send me a PM to I have send to the Pudim de Baunilha. thanks since already. ^^


I'm currently playing it and I've gotta say the levels are really good! So far I have only 2 comment, of which one is a very major error in the ROM:
1) (minor) In "Move Faster Pokey" you can force the player to keep the green sheel all the way to the end by placing the Blue Pow in a block rather than just laying it on the ground. I kept the shell and was pretty disappointed that it served no purpose
2) SOME LEVELS ARE REALLY REPETITIVE! Your level ideas are nice but 10 screens of spinjumping off of thwomps and stationary magic just isn't fun! Also 4 Pokey spinjump areas are not fun to go through, make that 1 only! Anybody can spinjump, it's just plain annoying.

Since I haven't finished the hack yet I do not have a full review in store for you, but this is my first impression. Also I removed the lock from your ROM just because I can, it's never a good idea to lock a ROM.

Edit: Fortress Number #1 seems to be impossible, I assume the grey cement blocks on screen 06 (with the blue map16 looks) need to be something else. Also some of your levels can be broken, so far I managed to skip areas in Spider Mario!!! and Fortress Number #1.
And about Spider Mario!!!, the death blocks on screen 05 have something odd about them. The very edge pixel doesn't kill you. I cheated and landed on that pixel quite often, you might want to fix this. Unless it was intended of course.

I've looked at some other levels in LM only to find more repetitivety, don't do this. Your ideas are really good, the first two levels really were a delight to play. But e.g. Castle Number #1 looks like hell, every screen from 0D to 1F is precision jumping! That's 16 screens(!!!!!!) of precision jumps! There is some variation in the jump but 2 screens will suffice to test the players' jumping skills really...

Edit2: I've changed your ROM a little so it is possible, at the point where I gor stuck I had a Blue Pow, Silver Pow, Shell and 2 mushrooms so I could basically pass any obstacle of only 1 tile with. I started on the next level but I quit and gave up on your hack because of the sheer repetition you used. I'd like to ask you if you playtested through everything, and not just one series of obstacles to check if it's possible but did you playtest through everything in the hack before you submitted it?

Don't get me wrong, the ideas are quite good. Your levels are just too long, try cutting away about 70% (Whoa?!?! That much?!?!? Yes. That much. You don't need 4 pokey jumps, 1 will suffice. You don't need 16 screens of precision jumps, 3 is the very maximum. You don't need 7 jumps where you need to build a bridge while landing dead center in between chompers, 1 is enough.) Actually, try cutting away 80% rather than 70%. Your ideas are of great quality but you used them too often, as well as directly in a row.

If you need help on deciding what to cut out I can help you with that, I'd like to play this hack after you made some changes.

Also: the ghost house. It has some good points and makes a quality ghost house but at places where you use map16 to confuse the player you defenitely need to give some clues. It's Kaizo and it's a ghost house but you could do something like place a coin or use a message block.

Message blocks: try to read through those yourself. You're insulting players as well as making some typing mistakes.

Despite all this the hack is still quite good, but you're defenitely going to have to make some changes. Looking forward to the end result!

Edit3: I decided to give this hack another chance and I've beaten some levels with horrible repetition of simple jumps and the likes. Currently I'm stuck at another impossible level where it just once again proves that the creator did not playtest his hack. The level I'm talking about is Hell's Cave.
In this level you need to access the secret exit to continue, somewhere in the level an offscreen keyhole is hidden (mostly below view) and at some point in the hack a key is hidden. Getting to the normal exit will only send you back on the overworld, this has been abused for the past 6 levels.
Luckily I am a bastard so I opened the ROM in LM and found the keyholes. This worked fine for the past few levels, but then we get to Hell's Cave. Here Sprite buoyancy is enabled at the cost of the number of sprites per screen. Also the sprite memory range is not suitable for the level.
BUT the creator still filled lots of screens with sprites, causing several to not appear. Unfortunately for the player the sprites that do not appear are the keyhole and the spring required to get to the normal exit. This bug would obviously have been noted if you playtest the level, so we can conclude that the creator didn't bother to test his level. That along with the fact that the creator thinks that offscreen keyholes make a good hack and the fact that this level contains tons of precision landings in between chompers which I'm not in the mood for to do all over again are going to get me to abandon this hack for now.

That concludes this hack for now, it is a fun hack with too much repetition, hundreds of precision jumps, loads of shelljumps (thank god I can do those without slowdown), some keyjumps (I wish to thank the creator of this hack, thanks to this hack I can now keyjump without needing slowdown) and endless boring obstacles. No playtesting was involved in making this hack.
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
Well, I'm not familiar with the new method but I encountered your two problems too and solved them.

For me the entrance direction you chose for the tile was the cause for the first problem, try inverting it like FYE said. That solved the first problem for me. I also encountered problems if I placed 2 exit tiles directly next to each other but this doesn't seem to be the case in your hack.

After the second problem occurred I looked in LM and found that the exit tile settings had reset themselves for some reason. This was solved by re-entering ALL exit tile settings, just resetting those used did nothing...

I hope this works, if your file fails but everything is fine in LM I wouldn't have a clue

Edit: corrected my grammar...
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
Here's some advice for all lazy people working with colours and YY-CHR (which includes most people who read this I guess)
Before I made any graphics I just took a 16x16 block in YY-CHR and added areas of all different colours available. Then I inserted this useless block in my level once for each block palette and looked at the the results in LM.
Unless you go and change the Palettes using the blue star you are limited to using only colours on one of your created blocks. So just pick a block of which the colours fit the best with your custom block you have created and link every ingame-colour to the corresponding colour in YY-CHR.
You should now know exactly what colour in YY-CHR will give you in your level, so you can easily colour your block

Note: this is only a noob trick, you can use far more than just the block colours for colouring blocks using ASM I believe. But for an easy way to colour a custom block this is likely to work. Also a lot of people will have come up with this already, this message is only written for those who have not.
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
Yes, and here's a solution. Any hidden path that reveals itself as well as hidden levels will reveal themselve on the submap you are on as you activate the event. As far as I know this can be solved but I don't know how (there might be a patch?). You can also just make the level visible as well as the path from the very start of the hack, this should also solve the problem
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
That won't work because the blocks have to be unaffected by a silver pow.
Also they have to be instant-kill rather than just hurt mario.
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
As long as the difficulty isnt too low, I hate easy levels. Send it to me and I'll break your puzzle!
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
For my hack I need to create some custom animated tiles and so far I have created those using the "Extended Animated Tile GFX" button and editing file GFX33.bin with YY-CHR, but I'm starting to get worried about the limited size of that file. Can I use ExGFX so I have a seperate file with custom tiles for each level? Or is there any way other than ASM to avoid me having not enough space?
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
I'm going to reply statement by statement:

Originally posted by Fujiwara no Mokou
Actually, this hack WAS playtested, not by one, but by three, including me.

That's still not a lot of people, and for me to discover such easily solvable errors such as the buoyancy or sprite memory setting being off shows that more playtesting was needed...
The hack is still full of MAJOR errors, despite it having been playtested.

Originally posted by Fujiwara no Mokou
I played through pretty much all the levels, except the last one, which is currently being made. All levels were made to be beaten (atleast most of them) without slowdown. Also, most (if not all) of the levels that can be broken, are pretty much intended, that includes the spider mario level, which is like the most broken level ever.

I'd suggest changing the level ever so slightly to make it seem like breaking it was intended, that way the levels seem a lot better without much effort from the creator. How to do this differs per level though.
The difficulty is quite good if you exclude the repetition in that evaluation, I didn't need slowdown but still needed quite a lot of time (around 5 hours in total)

Originally posted by Fujiwara no Mokou
Some levels are repetitive, yes, I can agree with that

THEY ARE TOO REPETITIVE! Don't make me write out a list, because I will make one if you're not convinced that it is TOO repetitive. It really must change.

Originally posted by Fujiwara no Mokou
but most of them are quite fun to play (Well, there's one that's my worst nightmare, If you look on LM, you'll know what I'm saying).

I agree partially, some levels are really fun to play. But if you need to search for keyholes without looking in LM, or if you decide to go for the normal exit and after beating the level you are only send back that is not fun.
The level ideas are of great quality, there's no denying that. But the mean tricks, cheap moves, sloppy looks and repetion really put these ideas down.
I wouldn't know which level is your worst nightmare, Castle Number #2 and Pit Of Tricks would be my best guesses.

Originally posted by Fujiwara no Mokou
Random's Retarded Quest is Pudim de Baunilha's first hack, by the way, so gotta give some credit there.Castles were made to be longer and harder than normal levels, obviously.

The castles aren't harder, just longer. But e.g. landing dead center in between two chompers, shall we go through the hack and count the number of times that is used? Those levels (especially the long ones) become extreeemely boring.


Originally posted by Fujiwara no Mokou
'Em levels where designed to be hard and at the same time have good level design, the further you go, the harder it gets, without losing it's quite good level design. Also, the puzzles, they make me cry, seriously.

Well, I think I have complained enough about the repetition now. Let me say it one more time: the hack is repetitive.
Other than that the difficulty curves were quite good, as well as the level design. I still like the first few levels best though. But in my opinion this hack was released too early, a lot more playtesting and bugfixing can make this hack so much better. It'll be shorter, but better.

Originally posted by Fujiwara no Mokou
Yeah, about 'em message blocks, Pudim de Baunilha does not speak english, but I'm pretty sure he's going to fix them.

Good =)

Originally posted by Fujiwara no Mokou
The ROM was locked because he wanted to keep some levels blind, or else they would lose their purpose, (e.g.: Pit of Tricks and Red Switch Palace thingie), as they were made to be 'illusory'.

There's a difference between 'illusory' and making a blue solid block look like a ground tile while the level is on medium auto-scroll and you need to pick it up to proceed. Same goes for offscreen keyholes.
In general locking your hack is not a good idea, you should not have a reason to. If people need to look in LM to beat your levels you have hidden object too far out of sight, where's the fun for the player in searching for hours for something that is hidden below view? I'm not checking every offscreen tile just in case there might be a keyhole! I'm not letting go and pressing X on every ground tile just in case it might be a blue solid block! That's insane and above all unfair.

Kaizo is not about being unfair, it's about being hard. Anybody can make a hard level by making a ton of stuff invisible, try making a hard level with everything in plain sight and undisguised. Pudim de Baunilha did quite good but got unfair at the end of the hack, it really is anticlimactic to find out that you can beat some of the final levels by falling offscreen at the right spot...


One more thing: the overworld paths glitched. This happens quite often if something goes wrong while creating a patch, so perhaps just making a new patch will solve the problem.


Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
Originally posted by ninja boy
Exanimation is level specific meaning each level has it's own ExAnimation just like ExGFX. just remember ExAnimation is first inserted as an ExGFX file.


I assumed something like this would be possible, could you explain to me how to insert ExAnimation or can I find the answer in the tutorials section? My first search there had no results

Edit: I found a tutorial that answers most of my questions, this thread can be closed.
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
Originally posted by mariofan1000
No reason to lock the hack? What about puzzle solutions? (I'm not talking about MAP16 crap)

I'm thinking of expanding the rom to make it impossible to RLM it.

Ha.


Well, that's where my personal opinion comes in. If you make a puzzle I think you should spread out all the players' possibilities before him and still have him staring in amazement. The only difference between any ordinary puzzle and the puzzle as stated above is that you won't need to do some trial and error before you can start thinking about the puzzle, so actually it makes no difference. I just dislike trial and error in Kaizo Hacks.

From what I understand Random's Retarded Quest is locked to hide some of the map16 changes made, as well as (yeah, I know I've said this often now but it really is ridiculous) keyholes on the very lowest tile of LM. This is ridiculous.


I don't thing a puzzle will be spoiled if you grant the player access to LM, not if it's a good puzzle (but that basically is my definition of a good mario puzzle, that looking in LM won't help)

Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
Like I said a lot of levels can be broken, but a bit further on you are definitely going to need to look in LM to make any progress at all. I quit in the middle of Hell's Cave where sprite lag prevents the keyhole from apearing.
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
@fourplify: The "S" in "TAS" stands for speedrun, meaning you optimize the amount of frames required to beat a level. There are some commonly known glitches to speed up, but most importantly you cannot make mistakes or pick long paths. A good example would be climbing up, it's way faster to jump and regrab. So basically if you climb at all you haven't created a TAS but just used a tool.
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
Hmmm, how much experience do you have with TAS'es? I personally have none but it seems there are quite some points where the TAS could be improved.
I also wonder whether you used 1-1 swimmind and 6-5 running, I might be mistaken but you seem a bit slow. I'd suggest you look into glitches to speed up a bit more, as well as try to change some paths. Other than that it looks pretty nice!
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
Originally posted by NekohDot
Here is my version of "It's a trap" the only place where I lost speed was the swooper + chuck hallway.


It's amazing how easily levels can be broken by using one simple walljump :P

Nice TAS! The only questions I have is if it wouldn't be faster to jump rather than run at 0:10, as well as that you might have been able to cut like 2 frames at the first jump around 0:42 (you jump a bit too high, can't this be avoided?)

Great TAS!
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
Is it just me or can you beat the shown segment without moon boots too? If you take a blue solid block and spinjump off of the ball-and-chain you can activate the On/Off switch. You seem to be able to take the same path back up.
Edit: Seems like you don't even need to spinjump on the ball-and-chain as well as that you can take the noteblock for a path back up. I'm pretty sure this segment does not require those moon boots.

It's a nice idea but the high jump AND float make mario a bit overpowered, I'm afraid it's going to be hard to create original but hard challenges and you're levels will become repetitive.
No offense, but you made it really hard for yourself. Perhaps you can split the moon boots in 2 segments, the high jump and the float? That way you can make 3 types of levels; powerless; high jump/float required and both required. This way you can add more variety to your hack.
Nice Vid! The effect are a bit confusing, but this is a good thing. Vanilla-style objects look a bit awkward in this setting, perhaps you can change them? I like the fact that not all objects have this Flashman effect but I don't think vanilla really supports it.
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
From what I understand this is an update to 'Mario's Evil Level', entered in the Kaizo contest, and also linked to in this thread.
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
I believe it is possible, perhaps more slowdown?
In the TAS of this level this section was skipped by making a path in the turn blocks with a shell, I found it too hard as well and walljumped.

If you are going to try the jump try spinjumping into the wall at your left and attempting to move in a straight diagonal line past the munchers. Also let go of the jump button as you hit the spring. This got me quite close.

Also you might want to try to go to the left back up after reaching the spring (don't land), I don't know if this makes is harder, impossible or easier but at any rate it's something I haven't tried.
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
Originally posted by God Of Fruit
Well, I'll try make the jump for another 2 hours. If I can't do it, I'll have to try the turn block route.

Anyways, I'm starting a Kaizo hack. Does anyone know how to use ExGFX without screwing up the original graphics? If not, I'll add custom blocks and use a green ? block or something.


Just make sure you use ExGFX rather than GFX at every point and you will not have edited the origional graphics at all.
Of course you should fight fire with fire, you should fight everything with fire.

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Sadistic Designer - testing Pit without tools.
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