Housekeeping
Alright, so it has been
two months since I last updated you on anything about this game. That was around the same time C3 was a thing. There's a good reason for that... two actually.
The first is the obvious: School and work getting in the way. Not much to say there.
The second is a little more deeper, but the jist of it is that I've lost my direction in the project.
I was originally so pumped about going back to the roots of SMW hacking and what not, trying to go for a vibe similar to the original SMW, but in doing so, it hampered my abilities and ideas on what I should and shouldn't do. You could kind of see that with some of my levels, especially Net Neutrality, I was trying to go for ideas that were either too complex for SMW or they would require some patches and stuff. While my intent was not to go for that, I easily became bored, and when you become bored of a project, you tend not to work on it for awhile. Even when I came back in December and said I was pumped about the project, that was only for a short time. It didn't help that I went through a major phase of depression after my father came down with COVID-19 and it severely affected his health.
So after my desperate attempt to advertise the thing at the Winter C3 and getting barely any attention (in my opinion) while looking like a jackass, I continued my hiatus on the project. I seriously don't want to quit this one, because my goal is to make a full hack of some sort. Now that things have sort of slowed down with me just waiting on my data collection for my final study and what not, I can grasp a new direction on where I want to go for this project... and I think I have it.
A New Direction
So my idea is this:
There will be eight levels. Yes. Eight levels.
Now you might be asking, "Eight levels? That's incredibly short." Well, there's a reason for that.
I was sort of inspired by that AVGN Adventures game in how its level design was laid out. You know, you have the incredibly tedious but well-thought-out level design that is meant to test your patience, then you have a tedious boss at the end of the level. While I don't want to go into Kaizo territory, I've been toying around with the idea of the game just being difficult from the start, because I've found that I have not been that great at progression-based difficulty. It's not that I can't do it, but when you want to make a hack that's 60 levels long, you focus more on the difficulty than the gameplay. With the hack being based on eight levels, I can properly focus on both the difficulty and gameplay to have that proper balance. Plus, with the harder hacks being more appealing to fans of SMW, I thought the change would be necessary.
The game would be laid out as follows:
There is a single map with all eight levels. In the middle is Bowser's Castle, which can only be accessed by beating the other seven fortresses led by each of the Koopa Kids. I'll need to figure out how to do all that with patches, presuming there's already a way to do that.
Each level would have a gimmick related to the personality of the Koopaling it is led by. For example, Wendy Koopa's level would be based on lava, as she is considered to have a quick temper, where as Ludwig would be based around magic and ghosts, given the fact he has a magic wand and having sort of a mad scientist persona. Now, I know that's all stretching a bit, but I feel going in this direction for the levels would make them each memorable and fun to play. Plus it would make the game seem to have more personality than just being a bland stack of SMW-inspired levels.
So that's sort of the basic idea I'm going for at the moment. I think it would help boost the creativity in me and make the experience altogether much more fun. Tell me what you think. My apologies to those who were a fan of the old concept, but in my opinion, if you aren't having fun making the game, then people aren't going to have fun either. Thanks!
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