The Fallen Star ~ Screenshots, Trailer and Demo

an absolutely stunning hack graphically, with a solid level design and with a good difficulty curve, is everything I could want.

AHHHHH a graphics style that is rarely seen because it gets shit on all the time for who knows why. I love this thing already. I've gotta play this. Am I the only one who has always really liked icegoom's redrawn smw graphics???

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Had some time to play a hack yesterday, so I tried this one out since it's a short demo. I took some (disorganized) notes while playing.

First off, great demo! Like most SMW hack demos, it consists of the easy, early-game stuff, but I still enjoyed what you have in here. Early-game level design is tricky, because you have to make something easy, but still interesting. I think this hack does a perfectly fine job of it.

My first impression is that this hack looks really good. I can tell you've put work into keeping the SMW Redrawn style cohesive. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well YI graphics fit with the Redrawn style too. My favorite small visual details: The midpoint looks like a mini version of the end-of-level flagpole. The sparkles from obtaining the Star Coins are ✨cool!✨ The little 16x16 flying Shy Guys are good. Parallax scrolling is a great touch. I also like the graphics for the pipes. The pipe's black outlines are colored where the light hits the pipe, and it produces a really nice shine effect.

I really like that the little intro cutscene has its text "typed" out instead of having it appear all at once. Is that the VWF Dialogue patch? VWF Cutscene Tool? b4vwf patch with a special font loaded?

The overworld looks really nice! It's densely packed with detail without feeling cluttered.

I wish I had a Star Coin counter on the HUD. I noticed that Star Coins seem to be saved as soon as the player collects them, but I ended up losing track if I had 3 collected, 4 collected, or whatever. To be fair, there's not really a good sprite Yoshi Coin counter resource to use. The "best" solution is probably a modified NSMBWii Sprite Status Bar, but it may or may not fit into your plans, since it requires a good amount of SP1/SP2 GFX space.

I noticed a trend where each level has its own specific platform sprite at the center of its design. One level with Boost Platforms, another one with Number Platforms, another with Bubble Platforms, etc. I think that's neat!

The floating Cheep Cheeps in World 1-Fortress are weird, and I found it sort of hard to anticipate when they'll fall back down. I don't think they're bad, but weird.

I had 3 deaths: One in World 1-Fortress from getting hit by a Flying Seahorse, then a floating Cheep Cheep. The second death in 1-4 by misjudging what the smiling blocks would do. I didn't think they would disappear on me!! The third death also on 1-4 from not anticipating the "don't scroll downwards" generator in the vertical room.

If I'm being honest, the "don't scroll downwards" generator felt unnecessary in the short vertical section of 1-4. I think it could be removed without taking too much away from the level design. The vertical section also felt kind of short compared to the rest of the level.

I was interested to see that level 1-A already had a flying Cheep Cheep generator and a Poison Mushroom. Makes me wonder what this hack is going to look like when it gets more difficult!

World 1-4 Prudent Ascent had its secrets much more well hidden than all the other levels. I don't think I got all of its Star Coins.

My favorite level is probably the World 1-Fortress. A good early-game level without being a pushover in difficulty, and collecting the Star Coins makes it more of a satisfying challenge.

Minor nitpick: In World 1-3 Underground Passage, I would prefer to have a Buzzy Beetle or Koopa on the first screen, since it can be used as a throwing weapon against the Boomerang Bro. There are a few other moments in the same level where the player gets chances to use shells against Hammer/Boomerang Bros. While the level itself is not hard, throwing shells is a fun and engaging way to lower the difficulty of early-game Bro encounters if the player wants to go for it.

Wow, this post is kind of a wall of text. Good luck with future development of this hack!

I'm unsure about adding more than one checkpoint to the first fortress for now, but as I plan to make later fortresses and castles about as long, it might be a good pattern to set already.




I wanted to have a counter for them in the overworld, but I wasn't able to request something like that in time because I had a pending ASM request that was more important for the hack at the time. I'm definitely looking for a workaround to have the counter in levels though.



It's the Layer 3 VRAM Text System from this thread. It's wonderful stuff!



I'll look into these. I'm especially in agreement with the suggestion for 1-3, which I hadn't thought about before.

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Again, thank you all for playing the hack, and for the very constructive feedback! I'm really happy to read how much you all had to say about it despite the demo being so short.

I've submitted an update to disable Start+Select, which for some reason caused the normal exit of "Underground Passage" to be triggered if you got the secret one before, which is weird because I hadn't made the edit that allows this behavior. I'll look for a fix so that I don't have to keep it disabled in future versions, but for now that got to do it.

Still speaking of "Underground Passage", I applied the suggestion by UTF for the start of that level since it was a minor but welcome change. Other changes in level design I'll leave for future versions of the hack.