If you are on discord you probably know I've been working on this hack for a while, might as well post a thread on smwc right?

The origin of this hack is kind of weird: I'm usually not the biggest vanilla fan, my shtick with kaizo up until this point was coding interesting ASM stuff and making a level with them.
The streamer Jikurein hosted a romhack contest in which you had to make three kaizo levels and an overworld using only vanilla assets. Jiku originally made the choice of prohibiting chocolate for the sake of accessibility, but it posed an interesting limit on me. Needless to say I had so much fun that I've decided to continue this creative excercise.

The levels in this hack are inspired my numerous VLDC entries over the years, some of the inspirations are more obvious than others. I've also been trying to make good looking tilesets using only the original assets (again, a la vldc).
My current objective is to make 10 levels for this hack, here is a playlist with all the completed, albeit untested, stages so far:

Link

UPDATE: Here's a beta (levels are untested)
boop
I would greatly appreciate testing and feedback

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I suck at ASM and AMK

My Youtube

KLDC 2021

OLDC 2021

This looks pretty cool. Every level seems very unique in both visuals and concept. I specially liked "Of springs and 10F"'s (whose name reminded me of my hack, "Of jumps and platforms", lol) and "Do they sink?", which featured a clever way of moving down underwater: the falling platforms, and I though it had a very good pacing even for a underwater level, but my favourite level was "layered nosense" for its originality, even if it was pretty short. I also liked "serial spinjumper"'s setups.

I have to say though that I'm not really a fan of "abusing" to the extreme the vanilla tiles to make new bg's and fg's; it's not because the aesthetics here were bad (on the contrary, in fact, except for some tiles that I though were a bit strange probably due to the restrictions), it's just a small preference of mine.

I very distinctly recall watching all but "layered platforms", and this hack is really creative all-around. I like how you're utilizing vanilla tricks to your own advantage.

In the underwater level, you can undermine the mushroom bit in the second room entirely by sneaking between the death blocks.

Watch out for any easy to catch grabbable sprites as well, because they are prone to be used for unintended shortcuts depending on how you design it.

This is very creative and I can see some of the VLDC inspirations.
1 questionable thing: In the first part around 0:30 -> If (whyever) one jumps down that pit by doing a spinjump instead of sliding, one is softlocked.
Otherwise it's really creative as said. I maybe spotted a few breakable parts, but I'd have to play myself to be sure.
I hope you keep working on this.

PS: I especially like your BGs aesthetically. There are quite unique ones.

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I've been randomly watching videos of the levels you already made, and the hack looks quite interesting. Also looks really fresh with the VLDC-y looking. Very promising so far.