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How has your experience with SMW hacking changed over the years?

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Some of us have been hacking Super Mario World for quite a few years now. How would you say your experience and feelings about hacking the game have changed over time? What initially drew you to hacking the game, and if you still do, what maintains your interest?

For me, I was initially drawn to hacking SMW after playing all the core early Mario platformers. After that, I became very interested in imagining my own Mario levels. I was very happy to discover Lunar Magic, as it finally gave me the chance to edit my favorite Mario game at the time.

When I started out, I didn't take level design very seriously. I just threw together hacks, released them and assumed people would play and enjoy them. In my early days, I'd release hacks very often. My original six hacks, the SMW+ series, were released over a course of two years.

As time went by, I started to take design more seriously. I was interested in pursuing game design for a living, so I wanted to take a more professional approach. Around that time, I stopped hacking SMW and focused more on Yoshi's Island. Once I found this site and saw how many more new resources there were for hacking SMW, that reignited my interest.

Nowadays, I consider SMW hacking an enjoyable hobby rather than a means to something bigger and better. I did work at a mobile gaming publisher in quality assurance for several years and I definitely think playing SMW hacks has given me a more critical eye and stronger attention to detail. My career has since shifted in a different direction, and I've become cool with SMW hacking becoming a thing I do on the side. I've realized now that game development is a very strenuous thing that requires talent from many different people. I'm happy to just keep game designing a leisurely thing. I think more than anything I feel satisfied completing a project and looking back at everything I created.
I, like many other people, starting taking level design and aesthetics more seriously as years went by. I started off by basically spamming floating munchers everywhere, then started to up my game once I saw all the great stuff some people have created. I always enjoyed SMW hacking even though I usually spend a really long amount of time on my projects. I didn't even have to be working on a full hack; I sometimes take enjoyment out of simply messing around in Lunar Magic. Although making quality hacks isn't a simple task, SMW hacking is something non-professional you can do without having very much if not no knowledge of programming, which makes it an appealing hobby for a lot of people who are interested in game design but don't want to take the time to learn about game mechanics and/or pursue game creation as a career, which is something I don't want to do myself because I'd always pressured to finish stuff.
I think worldpeace was a major catalyst in my decision to start hacking. I was obesessively obsessed with his Cool or Cruel levels, which I would watch over and over. After making a crap ton of my own levels, I found myself consciously relying on inspiration from other hacks a lot less. For a while I prioritized difficulty, entertainment, and convoluted design over fun factor. I think that’s the major reason I didn’t really want to do anything with MMD2 after finishing the last level, and why I decided to scrap ‘Labyrinth of Agony.’ Even I needed a guide for my own level, and it wasn’t that much fun for me, the creator. I was conflicted about wanting to release it but not having the motivation to playtest enough to even want to release a beta, hence the C3 thread “MMD2 alpha/beta.” Since then I vowed to never make any more hacks of that scale and difficulty to get views on YouTube, and that mentality has allowed me to have more fun with ROM hacking.
Since about summer 2013 it's been kind of a motivation and inspiration (or lack of) roller coaster. I would begin to feel unprecedented motivational lows in between moments of inspiration. These past several months were kind of an ongoing battle between “I’ve had enough hacking” versus “this gimmick sounds fun and creative.” The latter seems to be winning right now. It is easier now because of having abandoned my preference for designing long, convoluted, glitch-abusing stages in favor of shorter, funner, more linear and gimmicky stages. I no longer feel compelled to make stages last at least 6 to 8 minutes for a tool-assisted playthru. If I do make any that long, chances are it will be a 1 level hack.
Despite being tired of SMW hacking in general as of late, I still use LM because of the familiarity and user-friendliness, and a few untapped ideas I couldn’t let go of. I still retain that mentality that I don’t want to have my online reputation solely based on a legally debatable hobby, hence wanting to expand my YT channel. Even tho I don’t want to admit it, there’s no denying that the majority of new subscribers on my channel are here for my Mario/gaming vids. Still, that’s not gonna stop me from uploading what I want to show first and foremost, even if it isn't specifically Mario stuff. There just happens to be a lot of overlap. Compared to 2006, (I watched hack videos but never made/played them) I am a lot less easily impressed. Hacking since 2010 seems like slightly more than enough. I can't imagine doing it for 10 years :O

tl;dr I was first inspired by worldpeace’s Kaizo levels and he was a strong influence to get me into hacking in the first place, and after a while now now the only things that keep me going are the need to “finish what I started” and thinking of gimmicks and level ideas that sound awesome and out of the norm.
Legacy custom music
A site with a non-useless dislike button
SMW hacking channel

I think I originally just started SMW Hacking because SMW was one of my all-time favorite games and I randomly came across a few hacks I liked (including Brutal Mario and Super Demo World).

Now this is kinda ironic. Originally, what drew me to SMW Hacking and what made me keep doing it for a few years were the limitations. I kinda liked working with limited resources and being forced to work around the limitations and always kinda put off actual game development as the "easy and lazy route" where "everything is much easier and less exciting".

The ironic part about this is that this view has shifted into the exact opposite over the years. Where back then I really loved those limitations and thought they were what made hacking so fun, they today are the exact reason I stopped SMW Hacking in the first place. At some point I just started to realise that I was "wasting my time" with SMW Hacking. Where in SMW Hacking you sometimes have to spend days to weeks to even get simple features to work, in modern programming languages and engines you can usually get the same feature done in just a few hours.

Another, probably even more important, reason for me to stop SMW Hacking was that I was trying to pursue Game Programming as a career and that there was just no way that SMW Hacking was gonna get me there. Yeah, try applying for a position as a Game Programmer with, at best, some advanced SNES ASM skills and some experience with the RPG Maker. Good luck with that! I just had to get into the flow of game development and the only way to do that was by doing it (lol, hilarious setence). Even then, when I started programming my first games in "modern" programming languages, I didn't even realize how far I was technically lagging behind modern programming. The first game I programmed (and finished) was "Amazing Tetris", written in Free Pascal, and it used no object orientation at all. In fact, that was one of the reasons I almost didn't make it to Games Academy. When I had applied there, the only thing I knew about object orientation was the term itself. Basically, after my application and my interview at Games Academy I had to take a fast-as-shit crash cours in objet orientation and C#, which ultimately allowed me to study there, anyways. And even then I still barely knew anything about modern Game Programming.

Boy, where am I even getting with this? I kinda got side-tracked. Probably shouldn't have put half my biography in here.

In any case, SMW Hacking is still kinda important to me. I still sometimes get the sudden desire to start working on a new hack of some kind, which I never do, because the limitations still keep me off. But I still love seeing what other people get done and I still feel attached to the community, which is probably the main reason I still sometimes get the desire to start hacking again. And in some way or another, I still want to be part of the community, which is why I still often post in the forums not related to SMW Hacking (such as Non-Hacking Game Creation and Gaming), but this being an SMW Hacking community of course means that this doesn't help much. In some way, you could say I'm a shadow of the past, lurking around here and there without actually participating.

But yeah, I do still enjoy seeing good SMW hacks and always come here for C3, even though I rarely end up finding the time to actually play any of the hacks.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
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How would you say your experience and feelings about hacking the game have changed over time?

I've been SMW hacking since about 2009. However, no matter how many decent hacks I played back then, I wasn't able to absorb their professionalism and translate that into my own hack.

It started as a *guess what, guess what?* compilation of blatant edited levels and some original ones that only I, the author, could possibly be interested in playing such monstrosities.

It was only by 2010 to 2011 that I started lurking more in the site and figuring out aspects that make a good hack. My professionalism got a major boost after I joined in 2012 and started a WIP thread by early 2013 iirc. By C3 2013 I had already evolved so much, that my project was well received even though it took me just some months to polish it. This makes me believe that feedback is essential for my own growth. Well, not only feedback, but the action of showing your stuff in public makes you feel obliged to do your best.

About the feelings, I must admit I've lost some focus and taste on making levels in favor of developping other skills, like GFX, paletting, music and overall mood setting. However, I do like to enter level design contests, and these help me improving my level design skills quite a bit. Despite not making that many levels anymore, I still have a fresh interest in SMW hacking in general, and my natural persistence won't allow me to rest until I've released my planned hacks.

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What initially drew you to hacking the game, and if you still do, what maintains your interest?

SMW mindblowed my childhood with its responsive controls and physics, sense of exploration and mystery, and overall atmosphere. It's always been my favorite 2D Mario game and, together with Sonic CD's brilliant level design, both inspired me to think of my own levels so when I would finally find the tools needed to do so, I could give it a try. When I found out about BM and then LM and this site, I felt like I had finally found what I was looking for.

What maintains my interest, along with my persistence, is the community and friends I made here. They give me support, and I have a good audience for my stuff. What else could I wish for? :D
User: Hinalyte / ID: 1553 ~ loading kotori.css
When I started hacking SMW, all I do is just copy levels from the other Mario games (mainly the games from SMAS). When I actually started designing my own levels, I don't really know what kind of direction I was taking. I just do levels without much thought.

When I started my hack that I showcased last C3 2013 (namely Super Mario Bros. 3 - The Secret Place), I wanted to make something that's enjoyable. However, when I started getting more positive feedbacks, I wanted to make something enjoyable to others, and fun to replay, not just "enjoyable". I guess my tastes have changed.

Though, nowadays, I don't hack as much as often. It's now just a hobby that I'll only do when I feel like it, and no longer a chore where I'm forced to work with it everyday and setting a deadline to finish it. What keeps my interest in hacking is because of the ideas, and my friends who I want to show my work with.
After coming to the site I picked up ASM pretty quickly. I've been developing my programming skills over the years and it's been my main interest when it comes to ROM-hacking. When I first learned it I just wanted to make cool gimmicks and push the SNES to its limits, since very few people know how to do that. Recently I've been trying to figure out how you make good palettes; people who are good at this seem to just have this never-failing color-sense.

I suppose these days I care more about level design and user experience than pushing gimmicks as far as possible. I've been thinking a lot of ideal level length and linearity vs complexity and how much exploration should be necessary. I've always loved collectathons, so obviously I want more collectibles, too. I also think more of the future of ROM-hacking and have come to value improvements to the SMW engine over less flexible things like custom sprites.

allow shy guy emojis in post footers you cowards!
Well, I was drawn to hacking SMW by Proton Jon's Kaizo Mario videos, and then more drawn to it by actually playing the 3 Kaizo Mario hacks (by T. Takemoto) that exist at the moment. I don't really know how my experience with SMW hacking has changed over the years, but I know now and am very familiar with the vanilla Map16 object pages that I use in lunar magic, and very familiar with how the physics in SMW work, and now my level design tends to be quite entertaining at least to myself. (who it was designed for except the latest things I've done)

I think I'm slightly false in my views upon this, so note that none of this was written with confidence :P

anyhow blahblahblah text dump tl:dr: things that aren't important were said, you don't need to read it so whatever
It's been seven years straight that I hack SMW, and when I made my first account here back in 2008, I blatantly edited the original levels by outright spamming random objects and calling it a day, feeling proud of what I made when I wasn't supposed to be. I was unable to get myself familiarized with the concept of a "decent" hack at the time, and when I did eventually, I went towards basing my hacks out of others' and showing them off here.

It was only in 2010 onwards that people like worldpeace drew me to start taking some sort of direction as to what hack I feel more comfortable building without any specific inspiration, and I didn't knew at the time if any of my Kaizo hacks would gather more interest than they have since the dedicated subforum didn't have much activity. As of lately, I've been feeling less motivated to follow the "the longer levels the better" phylosophy and more to set whatever length I wish them to be, and as years went by, I whip up levels when I feel the need to and when my motivation for it increases. After all, it's a hobby you do once in a while.

Regarding what do I feel, I'm a bit tired of SMW hacking so consecutively, but at the same time, my mind tells me to do more and it just overwhelms me to an extent. These days, I care more about brainstorming unique levels with well executed gimmicks than trying to push everything as far as possible. What maintains my interest in hacking is the fact that I have as many friends that support me and give feedback, positive or negative, to help improve my projects.
Windowless ride, feeling alive
Are you alive or just breathing?
I've always wanted to make my own snes games and so that's why I'm here. I can say for sure that I've learned so much since I first started and its all thanks to the very helpful people here in the help threads.
I first hacked SMW in 2009. I was unaware of this community's existence and I didn't actually play a hack until 2011 (my first being SDW:TLC and then TSRPR) so the quality was very mediocre. Without any real external influence on my hacking, my early goals were basically just to reimagine the original game. I had to overcome a weird design handicap in that I felt anything asethetically different or very different in terms of level design from the original game was just wrong. Stuff like Mushroom tiles with skinny stalks rather than the wide stalks of the original SMW, or having Torpedo Teds/Koopas above/under water. Of course, this quirk of mine also meant I never made levels with floating munchers or massive cutoff and I never spammed levels with cement blocks. After playing a few hacks and watching some LPs, my design became more experimental. I also gained the ability to hack at my leisure when I got my laptop. Modding SMW was a little more difficult when there was only one family computer between five kids (my dad also had a laptop we were never allowed to use.)


The main thing is that back in 2009 or 2010, I actually had hope.

I guess aside from becoming more jaded, I don't think it's changed all that much, though I pay at least somewhat more attention to level design and don't generally mix vanilla stuff with external resources (except for global sprites and objects).

I got interested in SMW hacking...well, I'd been drawing my own Mario levels on paper for quite a while before ever discovering Lunar Magic. I didn't find out that there was actually an editor for Super Mario World until around September 2008, when somebody on GameSpot (yes, SMW Central actually isn't the first Internet community that I've been a part of, though it is the second and by far the most important) mentioned Lunar Magic when I asked if such a thing existed. I found a playthrough of Super Demo World on YouTube, and the rest is history. Ironically, my first question on SMWC was actually related to YI hacking. I guess was keeps me going is mainly just the fact that I still haven't submitted a hack to the database, especially the main one that I wanted to make (Plum's Worlds of Chaos, which I had the idea for back in 2009).

I actually would like to get into console homebrewing or even making PC games eventually, but it's not likely to happen, particularly the latter, because of lack of resources. I'm a lousy graphical artist, and I don't really have any software that would allow me to make music for PC games. And anyway, it doesn't take priority over some of my other hobbies, such as writing.

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I'm working on a hack! Check it out here. Progress: 64/95 levels.
I always imagined as a kid how great it would be for there to be a smw editor and I randomly stumbled across some youtube video of a custom level (Sprite Peaks, I think?).
I think a reason why I may still like designing levels is because I never created a full-fledged hack and just made random levels. I'd like to make a full hack at some point.
What makes me stay with smw hacks? Because smw's platforming is one of the best. I still play hacks I never played and really enjoy a lot of them. The other reason might be a bit controversial, but it's also because it's all free.
I got more and more interested into ASM, from something as simple as a p-switch block to making something as complex such as making bomb blocks from the Kirby series. I also developed a special hp meter patch (requires uberasm for compatablity with other patches) that has customizable damages to every type of sprite (normal, custom, extended, and cluster), except blocks, but don't worry, I made a replica of a muncher and a custom damage block to alleviate this 1 hp damage. Before, I don't know what is scratch ram, now I do and found out how useful it is.
Give thanks to RPG hacker for working on Asar.
Originally posted by Golden Yoshi
Some of us have been hacking Super Mario World for quite a few years now. How would you say your experience and feelings about hacking the game have changed over time?

When I initially started, like everybody else, I just wanted to make levels and add in a taste of me to my work. Over the years though, my tastes in hacks (especially aesthetics) have grown more critical. I can't keep myself interested enough to play a vanilla hack anymore.


Originally posted by Golden Yoshi
What initially drew you to hacking the game, and if you still do, what maintains your interest?

Most possibly the worst way to introduce one's self to SMW Hacking, I was drawn to it by the original TSRP2; which featured a lot of custom stuff. This initially set into my head to make a good hack: Have custom graphics, have good music, and have a good story. I know these standards don't hold true for most people here, but they hold true for me because that was unfortunately my first impression on SMW Hacking.

The one thing that keep me interested in SMW Hacking is my powerful drive to finish the Devious Four Chronicles. I personally desire to see it finished, and if it isn't, I feel like there'll be a giant elephant sitting in the room with me for the rest of my life. People may complain about the story, but that will not deter my drive.
I have access to a lot of my older attempts at hacking, and going back, I see a lot of editing. What got me into trying it was just being able to fuck around with this game I loved so much, and maybe making a few levels for my own enjoyment.

But, I dunno, there's something really zen about doing this. So, I made a lot of levels, maybe about 40, in various hacks that I never finished. I lost one hack that had some of the best stuff, but I did later recover it, after I started my current one.

I've gotten a lot better at level design, I guess. I much better understand the concepts that make levels interesting and fun. I actually draw a lot of inspiration from Kid Chameleon, a really great and underrated platformer on the Genesis. That game had levels that were huge and complex, with lots of secrets and multiple paths. So, I'm making a hack that has a lot of large levels that are designed to be played multiple times.
GANYMEDE

Chapter Two: Land of No Shame
I've cared less and less about aesthetics. I tried to boost the appeal of my hack once by doing a visual overhaul, but that didn't do much, so it kinda soured me to the whole thing.

I'll still make things look nice, but solely so they convey the mood and impression I want, not for pretty pixels.
I started making SMW ROM Hacks since June 2014 and my levels had lots of cut-off and I didn't know about SMWCentral and the rules until 2 months later and then when I realize how bad it is, I scrapped the 2 hacks I made that are horrible and now today, I can edit overworld, adding ExGFX, Sprites, Blocks, Patches and even editing the graphic with YYCHR.

Although, I still don't know how to use ExAnimation#lm{exan}#lm{exang},Layer 3 ExGFX#lm{l3gfxby}and Overworld ExGFX yet.
100% Orange Juice Playthrough:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf1kPWkjcurtA3xPP3TybfqSiEn1AcX2A

VLDC9 Playthrough:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf1kPWkjcurtiP5de_-e6q0hSVrY37RB-.


Initially I was drawn into SMW hacking because it's freaking awesome to build levels which people can play. When this site first launched I had a different account and I put up two hacks which were a bit bizarre according to reviews. Taking those notes into consideration I reinvented myself with this account and tried to please people with easy levels and insane graphics (only put out one demo unfortunately).

Now that some time has passed I really only hack for my own enjoyment. Lately I've been having fun coding fancy HDMA and creative enemies (making levels feels stale to me lately).
Oh hey, Soul2Limbo is still alive. That's good.

Originally I just threw things together in Lunar Magic. Over the years I got more interested in game design and level design, so I got into discussions, I looked up videos, and I started working with games outside of hacks such as fangames and original projects. All in all, these experiences have really shaped the way I think about design, including designing ROM hacks.

I still, and always will, just completely wing designing levels, however. I hate planning out level designs. I find it too constrictive.
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