Project Planning & Deadlines

TRACKING SPREADSHEET

New final deadline for ALL levels is June 1st. At that point I will just take what I have and those will be the levels. If something is close to done I will take it upon myself to finish those levels, otherwise there will be some just left out, oh well.

Music & icons - there can be a later deadline for those, but I haven't seen very much interest in those, so not very confident. I won't wait too long on em.

This is the level deadline, sorry if it seemed confusing. (just changed title to be clearer) No I will not just release it that day, lol. There is still a TON I will have to do just to cook up the ROM, not to mention finishing/polishing/playtesting levels, also I would like to hack one more boss perhaps.

I've asked about music and icons both but no one seems to be interested. I'd love for it all but just being realistic and I refuse to delay this another 2 years.

I have to test my level, and then I will send you an IPS patch. It's probably perfect yet, but I worked really hard on it so I hope you're not too overcritical on what I have so far or will you give me some feedback on what I could do better? Also, I wanted to add some music to it if there's time, but I'm not good at drawing icons. Also, I have The Potted Ghost as the boss so I hope that is okay.

Nice, because forcing weekly updates was not enough to push people into finishing their levels, there was something to do!

I mean, you guys are taking for TOO LONG to finish your levels, its been one year and half(?) since we started this collab. My level didn't take that long, though the improvements did take a whole year because of lack of interest in other people on playtesting my level(Cramps-man was the only one, all credit goes to him)

I personally don't see a good future when SMWCI meets the deadline: I bet all, if not most of the unfinished levels will remain as is, unfinished. And this mean Raiden will be the one finishing your levels, is this what you want?

If worse comes to worst we could always go the SMW2+2 route of having five worlds with 45 or 50 levels instead of 54. I feel like interest in the project has been running low because the amount of users on this site who are really interested in Yoshi's Island isn't very high, and most of the active designers for this hack so far have been incredibly busy people.

Also, seeing as 5-3 is nearly done, I might consider cranking out something for 6-3 as long as something very specific can be done using Level ASM. What hours is Raiden normally on #yoshi?

I am trying my best to have something good, but I haven't gotten any feedback on my level yet. I sent Raidenthequick the first IPS patch, and I'm getting ready to send him a second one. However, he was not really specific on what I should do to fix my first IPS patch so I wasn't sure if he wanted me to fix the glitches or if he wanted me to start over. I hope my level isn't just ignored b/c I'm trying to work really hard on it. He said not to worry about if the middle rings work when I test my level, but I am not sure if my level is too short for 2-8. I think it's about the same length as the level in the original if that helps. I'm not sure if he wanted me to play Kamek's Revenge and make it difficult, but I only played 2-4, and that level was long.

Not sure what your intent is in quoting Skewer, Lespna, especially when his post isn't targeted towards a specific individual.



It's generally difficult to provide feedback based purely on sreenshots and nothing playable. Posting a public patch would be useful.


Raiden isn't particularly responsive in general. He's an incredibly busy person.


I'd say don't worry about it. At this point we're probably in need of some shorter stages to round things out, provided yours makes the cut (as it's seeming more and more likely that we'll need to cut a world).

Also, I'll argue that 2-4 is an incredibly poor basis for stage length in general. I feel like that stage could afford to be cut down to about 2/3 of its current length to be made more enjoyable.

Deadline is today, peeps! Please get your levels in, lest they be forever forgotten.

Since there are so many free / abandoned, we will definitely have to do some rearranging. Oh well, better than 2 year delay.

PROJECT UPDATE:

Since I'm a nice person, I'm giving Lui37 a little bit more time, cause his level looks freakin' sweet and I'd rather not just be a dick and cut him off. Besides, I have tons to do as it is with playtesting / polish.

Other than that, this project has moved into an ASSESSMENT phase. As I stated before, I will be taking a look at all the unfinished levels to see if any are worth finishing off, like I did with 5-4 already.

I am employing ZeNewDragon to help me, since he has been so active on this project. Anyone else please feel to free hop in, this is a community collaboration.

Here's a list of unfinished levels to investigate and assess:

GalactaKnight's 6-3 level looks very close to done, and goddamn sexy, I should not have marked it dead so quickly. I didn't know what I was doing back then though. Great candidate to finish and insert IMO.
ZeNewDragon, your 4-5 looked pretty interesting, I am not sure how far you were on it though. I'll leave that up to you, just let me know if you wanna take another stab at it.
Dr. Tapeworm's 5-6, he said it was about 80% done. I bet this is a good candidate as it seemed like a unique fun level.
I believe imamelia almost got done with his 4-6, this just needs a look to see how to close it out.

Anyone PLEASE feel free to play these IPS's, test them, see what's missing, how fun they are, and how much would be needed to finish off. All of these factors can go into whether we decide to keep it or not.

If anyone has a good idea about how to finish off a level, I'm all ears.

After this assessment, this is the outline of work remaining:

-Finishing levels that were assessed as worth finishing.
-Playtesting ALL levels for only SMALL polishes/fixes/palette/graphical updates.
-Finishing boss hacks that I feel like doing (like Sluggy, most likely just Sluggy).
-Finishing 6-8's Kamek cutscene.
-Deciding level orders.
-Reordering level #'s in the level data.
-Adjusting map screen to cut out a world or whatever needs done.
-Putting in all proper midring coordinates.
-Deciding level titles, and making an IPS for all of them.
-Doing other text changes such as Kamek cutscenes, hint boxes, intro cutscene, etc.
-Putting in level icons, if anyone draws them up.
-Putting in custom overworld graphics/paths, if anyone wants to help with that.
-Putting in custom music, if anyone makes it (I know there is some made already).
-Any other miscellaenous fun stuff like title screen graphics.
-Writing up a script to cook up the entire ROM off of clean ROM (from level extractions off of ROMs as well as graphics/music/text IPS's and ASM).

So yeah that's a lot! This is why I need help or else all of this will take a long time. ZeNewDragon, and anyone else, I would much appreciate your help in, heck, any of these besides the ASM stuff I'm responsible for. Especially the playtesting/polish part though, that's crucial.

As for NOW NOW, just the assessment, let's keep focused on one step at a time. Any feedback regarding any of those 4 levels listed above, "should we include it?" is the question I'm looking to answer. I value anyone's opinion.

Nah, that and 2-4 I know I'm putting in. Feel free to play em and give comments to ANYTHING, but they're definitely going.

I might be able to finish off 4-5, especially now that I have a more solid concept for it. I'll probably be keeping most of what I've created for the first sublevel and reworking the rest.

Also, Falconpunch gave me the go-ahead to fix the item memory issues in various levels of his, and I think I'm also going to go ahead and overhaul 1-1's aesthetics, so if I could get those levels PMed to me that would be dandy.

Also keep in mind that I'm finishing up school for the semester atm and I have exams in the next couple of weeks.

After some discussion, what do you guys think of this? Since we are missing 2 castles right now:

5 worlds
Designate 5 of our stages to "secret", which can take place of the Bonus tile.

That's 50 stages total, 10 per world. 48 currently are either done or definitely will be. That means if we just finish 2 more, we'll be good. Could just be as simple as imamelia's and either tapeworm or galacta's.

So yea what y'all think o' that? Works well cause missing 2 castles and rounds it out nicely, only 2 to finish is not so extreme.

Even if we don't meet 50 stages, we could potentially use the secret minigame menu for level space if we still have more than 45 levels.

Also, we could probably allow players to replay the intro stage via that menu as well. Do we have an intro stage created?

Okay, so I finally caught up and played all the levels. My analysis so far:

GalactaKnight got back to me with his latest 6-3: Pretty interesting level so far, 3 flower 13 reds so far, but missing a whole area (nothing done on that sublevel). Would need a decent amount of work to finish, unfortunately, but some great stuff going on.
Dr. Tapeworm's 5-6: Really really liked the first 2 sections. I might move the lava skis into an extra/secret and finish em off, maybe combine it with my impossible kaizo platform stage. Either way, this one is pretty much solid but just needs one more area (either keep the skis or finish it off another way).
imamelia's 4-6: I think this one needs a bit too much work compared to the others. I like it, it has some cool puzzles and more ice/snow would be nice in this hack, but I encountered some despawns and it just needs quite a bit added/polished, on top of not being done.

To be honest, I was hoping these were a little closer to done than they actually were. Each of them needs basically an entire area, if not more.

Let's crunch some numbers:

44 are marked "Done"
4 are definitely being finished (1 is Lui's and HE PROMISED, 3 are castles and they're all extremely close, just need final touchups and a boss hack I'm working on)
= 48 guaranteed.

After thinking about this more: At this point, 2 more doesn't seem tough to accomplish. xxxzzz1 showed interest in finishing his 4-5, and ZND you are finishing your 4-5 right? Plus I could always chip in my tough 6-S with the platform. I think these 3 original levels would take priority over finishing off unfinished levels, tbh. It's good to have them as a fallback for me in case no one else comes through, but I think the priority should be just waiting a little longer for original levels (by that I mean levels I don't just finish off, but original author). This seems like a better plan than me just trying to finish off all these levels, and I think it's worth waiting on just a couple more even though I already had the deadline, just to round out the 50.

OK, I finally got the new hog goin' and I have access to all my old files, hooray! I will resume work on this project.