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Forced deaths

Why should not there be any "forced" deaths, when the player has over 30 lives?
Well, it makes the hack "unfair." You get through that entire section, just to realize that you've fallen into a trap, and you're forced to die.
I meant early in the level.
Still, it's pretty bad to include forced deaths. It makes people avoid your hack. Some people want good level design.
You can do whatever you want in your own hack. Only realize that there are certain criteria for determining what is considered a "good hack" when it comes to which hacks are hosted by SMW Central.
Let's not even go into why the player should be expected to have over 30 lives.
It is more unfair since most of the time the player can't see it coming. Now if you did something like "don't go down this pipe", the player goes down the pipe, and force death...then it would be ok because you warned them.

So it depends on the situation, don't force deaths when the player can't see it coming.
Working on something!


Better than the cape!

The pipe thing is purely academic, as in practice that would still be annoying. There are ways to force death fairly if the player does something stupid... but if they have to use trial-and-error luck to simply beat the level instead of skill, then you really need to rethink the forced death.
This thread really isn't too old to bump

as long as we're talking about forced deaths, what exactly is a "forced death"? Just any situation where the player literally can't live, like a pipe killing you for going down it or something?
A forced death is just what it sounds like. Say you go down a pipe and it leads you into a pit with lava. You die. There was no way to know about this in advance, and no way to avoid it once you went in. That's the most popular example, but there are other ways to make forced deaths. You could also have a long ceiling of spikes, and partway through turn on layer 2 smash so the ceiling fell. Basically anytime there is no warning or means of escape, no way for an experienced player to avoid the death, then it is forced.

And never ever ever ever have forced deaths. No exceptions.

Yes I know there are "exceptions," but every exception involves either a way to predict a forced death or a way to avoid it, which means it isn't a forced death. Still, never do it - and avoid using a death trap even with warnings.