Hi!
I've been working on a homebrew SNES port of the Game Boy title Mario Land in the style of New Super Mario Bros.
It's a port aimed at casual players featuring four player simultaneous multiplayer action.
I love creating SNES games in my free time, Mario Land was my first Mario game and I really enjoy the cooperative multiplayer aspect of the NSMB series, so while the combination might appear strange at first, it came to me very naturally.

Version 1.0 from back in 2019 lacked polish and despite initially wanting to let it be, I could not resist trying to improve the game since then.
Lately, I've been getting some expert assistance on improving the soundtrack by a couple of community members including Nikku4211, who also frequents this forum.

Another constant struggle has been making the gameplay feel less wrong.
This is the area where I was hoping to get some input and constructive criticism from you experienced players on here.




Thank you in advance!

Oh, hey, is this a homebrew?
At first I thought it was an SMW hack distributed as a ROM (which wouldn't be allowed on the site), but then I checked and it seems to actually be a homebrew ROM, which is perfectly.

I have to say, this is very impressive to pull off on the SNES. It really does look a lot like the real NSMB, just with a lower resolution.

I've played it for only a very short time (have to get to work now), but aside from generally being impressed, I have to say that the gameplay currently still feels a bit off. I can't quite put my finger on the details, but I think it has to do with Mario's jump arc... or, well, rather, with Marios NOT jump arc. Because his jump should make an arc, but currently it makes more of a spike. Basically, he decelerates too quickly once at the height of his jump. He should only start do decelerate slowly. That currently makes him a bit unintuitive to control. He also felt quite a bit fast, but that might become less of a problem with a better jump arc in place.

One thing I'd also consider would be to add a palette swap for the flower. I know it's not the same as a fire flower, but I would still make it visually distinct so that you can immediately tell whether you currently have one just by looking at Mario. Not sure what this should ideally look like, but I think there's multiple possibilities. You could just take Mario's fire flower palette, anyways (because honestly, who even minds), or you could go for a greyscale-inspired palette (kinda like what Super Mario Maker 2 does). Or who knows, you could even come up with an entirely new palette or even a new costume. Though I guess the latter would be tricky, considering that you're using the NSMB 3D models as base for your sprites.

Have not actually checked out a lot of the music yet (had my volume down), but if I don't forget about it, I'll give it another play later today.

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Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!

Thank you very much, that is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping to get, this gives me something to work with.
I've heard criticism concerning the jump arc before, but apparently haven't remedied the problem properly.
I'll try to fix that.




That's a good suggestion.
Regarding palettes, I'm a bit limited:
The SNES has 8 sprite palettes, 4 are already used for the different players in multiplayer mode (there's a Mario, a Luigi, a Wario and a Waluigi palette applied to the same Mario sprite tile animations) and these are also shared by other objects such as platforms, powerups etc and enemies additionally have their own palettes, of course.

As you mentioned, another solution would be to go for distinct sprite tile animations/costume for Superball mode. Super Mario Land 2 had the feather cap. I'll have to think of something...

And yes, this is a homebrew, I'll clarify the description in the original post.

Thank you again!

Here's another update with slightly tweaked jumping physics and a couple of bugfixes for good measure.

Oh, so you're the one who made the homebrew New Super Mario Land.

Another thing to say about the jump: When Mario is in the air while going at the max horizontal speed, he doesn't seem to stop going forward at all even if I stop pressing the directional key. While the horizontal speed shouldn't change as quickly as in the ground, I still think it should be pretty flexible depending on what you press while in the air.

Thanks for your feedback!
It has taken me some time, but in part based on your feedback and feedback received via PM, I've rewritten the physics to more closely mimick SMW. Combined with additional animation for Mario, my hope is that this results in a more fun gameplay experience.