Sonikku's C3 Stuff - Winter 2025 Edition

It's a somewhat-inconsistent tradition of mine to release at least 1 thing during C3. Not something I always do, but something I like to do here and there. Now, people on the Discord probably have seen me show this off constantly over the last week or two.
In short, I used Captain Southbird's SMB3 Disassembly to port over Bowser's SMB3 iteration. But rather than a direct port, I've decided to rewrite portions, add features, and so on. As a result, I've ended up with a fairly customizable boss. At its bare-basic, it acts more or less the same as SMB3's vanilla version. By editing the included settings file, you can change numerous parameters of the boss. I lost track, but there's around 100 different defines and tables you can adjust to your liking.

As an example, here's a video of the Bowser fight with a few tweaked settings alongside an enabled "desperation" mode:

If I can be honest, a major factor to me wanting to do this was because I wanted to have access to a custom SMB3 Bowser sprite that wasn't Carol's version. Plus, that sprite isn't public, though it seems like everyone and their mother has it downloaded (and I'm very proud to say -- and smugly too -- that I'm one of the few people who actually *asked* Carol for permission to use it, and received it).
For anybody that wishes to get it before I inevitably forget I ever made it:
[DOWNLOAD]

As well, while you're here, check out Ladiesman217's C3 thread. He's using a modified version of this boss, with an adjusted tilemap that makes use of the prototype SMW Bowser sprites. He was instrumental in providing his feedback and testing with this sprite. It'd probably be a lot less interesting without his insight.


This is less important, and honestly very minor compared to the Bowser sprite, but I also made a Level Ender "door" sprite that is intended to be used alongside it. This sprite is intended to detect when all sprites have been defeated (with settings to ignore certain sprites).
When the sprite is triggered, it can be setup to show a static 16x32 sprite door. You can also set it up to trigger an ExAnimation Custom Trigger if you'd prefer to handle the visuals yourself.

For this sprite, you can get it here:
[DOWNLOAD]
It's a bit more lacking in polish compared to Bowser, but it should suffice for now.

It's actually a quirk of how the boss destroys tiles that I decided would make for an interesting spin on the boss. Early on in the design of the boss, it pretty much only allowed you to destroy the tiles outright, replacing them with air blocks. I was fine with that until I decided that I wanted to implement "hard mode" settings, with one of them being his multi-jump. I found that you'd be able to end the fight way faster than you could in SMB3.
At that point, I thought of making a system that iterates Map16 tiles from one to another, instead of just outright deleting them always.
So in this example, the boss will "destroy" tile 300, turning it into 301. Then, another entry in the list makes tile 301 become 302, and then another entry for 302 to turn into 025.
You can define how many times the boss will "iterate" through this list depending on a few circumstances. For instance, if the boss is configured to jump multiple times you can make it so he'll only break blocks in 1 iteration on the last one of a series. If you were to iterate 2 times, it'd go from tile 300 to 302 right away, and 302 to 025.

In my opinion, if someone wanted to make a more engaging version of the vanilla boss, it'd probably be best to make the top two layers the most "fragile" of a series of blocks, and then make Bowser enter his desperation phase once he hits the bottom set, where those are fully intact and take 3 hits.
That way he'd break through the first two layers fairly effortlessly, but once he hits the bottom layer he begins moving a lot more erratically. Still breaking the top two layers in one hit, but the bottom layer is a bit more sturdy to extend the length of the fight.