For once, I'm designing a level top-down instead of bottom-up. I didn't have a grand aesthetic idea to shape my design for this level, and it feels both strange and easy to design without those constraints. Mostly I'm exploring everything I can do with these custom winged rope sprites in this first section. Ropes already have interesting properties for obstacles- you can force the player to go to certain parts of the rope, ropes are re-usable so you can jump up and off of them all the time, ropes force normal jump (without frame-perfect jump inputs to maintain spin jump).
But additionally in the custom version, I can explore how the movement of these winged ones interact without the clunkiness of laying down line tiles- it makes for a very clean design. I can easily have ropes cycling for the player to react to, multiple ropes at once with different paths, I can very precisely control where they are to prevent spawn inconsistency (thanks to the green fast pipes as well), etc.
That being said, this is just the first section. In later sections, I have sketched out obstacles where
I also am of course encountering design obstacles as well- just in the section, sometimes mario goes offscreen, which can be problematic. This mechanic is lending itself to faster-paced platforming (at least this section did), which can be less blind-play friendly. Additionally, I may want to consider that designing around ropes can lead to player frustration due to their normal lack of reliance on the Up button on their controller, and try to be more lenient about up input precision. And finally, my usual worries when designing a level- how is my balance of economy of means? Am I using so few other sprites that it will feel boring? Do I need to vary the contours of jumps more? Is it too much jumping off of ropes over spikes- should I have other reasons to not be allowed to just ride the rope? (Such is in the ropes level of Storks and Apes and Crocodiles, where climbing koopas served as something to jump over on the conveyor ropes).
Also, side note- does anyone know how to fix the way the background stutters when the player loads in? It is due to using parallax from the Effects tool, but I'm not sure if there's a way to prevent it.
But additionally in the custom version, I can explore how the movement of these winged ones interact without the clunkiness of laying down line tiles- it makes for a very clean design. I can easily have ropes cycling for the player to react to, multiple ropes at once with different paths, I can very precisely control where they are to prevent spawn inconsistency (thanks to the green fast pipes as well), etc.
That being said, this is just the first section. In later sections, I have sketched out obstacles where
Whether or not the ropes move depends on the on/off switch state, and then later they move or freeze based upon the player pressing L/R.
I also am of course encountering design obstacles as well- just in the section, sometimes mario goes offscreen, which can be problematic. This mechanic is lending itself to faster-paced platforming (at least this section did), which can be less blind-play friendly. Additionally, I may want to consider that designing around ropes can lead to player frustration due to their normal lack of reliance on the Up button on their controller, and try to be more lenient about up input precision. And finally, my usual worries when designing a level- how is my balance of economy of means? Am I using so few other sprites that it will feel boring? Do I need to vary the contours of jumps more? Is it too much jumping off of ropes over spikes- should I have other reasons to not be allowed to just ride the rope? (Such is in the ropes level of Storks and Apes and Crocodiles, where climbing koopas served as something to jump over on the conveyor ropes).
Also, side note- does anyone know how to fix the way the background stutters when the player loads in? It is due to using parallax from the Effects tool, but I'm not sure if there's a way to prevent it.
