6-9 screens per sublevel sounds very reasonable to me, though 7 may be a better minimum than 6. I'll let you decide what the limit will be though.

Here are my votes (not necessarily in order, but it would make sense in terms of Mario game tradition):

- "Blocky": Similar to what Shiny said, this tileset is iconic and it's usually what people think of when they think of SMB3.
- Desert: I'm a fan of this tileset, plus there hasn't been a desert environment so far, so I vote for this one as well.
- Water: I agree with Shiny here too. With the screen limit, it shouldn't be too intrusive to those who aren't very fond of underwater levels either.
- Ice: Because ice is nice, and like the previous two examples, ice hasn't been represented in this project so far.

I didn't except water to be voted up, but w/e.

We could go with Blocky -> Desert -> Water, representing world 1,2 and 3. The final room could be an airship, but autoscrolling would make things really hard (if we go for this I'd rather use normal autoscroll). We could also end with a castle and use Boom Boom as a boss.

btw, I implemented the blocky tileset:



I want to use and many SMB3 graphics (for enemies and blocks) as I can for this, so it will take some time to implement.

After giving it some thought, I'm giving my vote to the castle as the final sublevel even though it means having yet another castle. I like the idea of ending it with an airship, as it's a new environment for the hack and again, an iconic component of Super Mario Bros. 3, but with the autoscrolling and each of us making one screen at a time, it would be hard to design and sync up the screens with the constantly moving camera in mind and I could see a lot of revising just to get the difficulty to a reasonable level.

Ending it with a fortress would spare us that kind of headache, and it would still feel climatic enough in my opinion.

I really think the airship/tank as the ending of the level would be awesome, mostly because I'm curious as how we (the screens creators) are going to pull this off.
I'm gonna make a hard part boi

--------------------
~Ultrabi

One day I'll make a layout...

In the end, I decided to go against the airship and for the castle. About the forest, I think it's better if that gets its own level, it's not really a major theme in SMB3

A small status update: right now the Blocky tileset is fully implemented, the desert is mostly done and the castle is partially done.

I already added the graphics for koopas and piranha plants, but I haven't inserted any custom sprites yet. I just checked what we have in the sprites section and in spritetool and these are some sprites we could use:

Blocky:
*Classic Goomba
*Venus fire traps
*Nipper Plant

Desert:
*Fire Snake
*Venus fire traps
*Chain Chomp

Underwater
*Blooper and Mother Blooper
*Lava Lotus

Castle
*Hot Foot
*Roto Disk
*Stretch

We also have the Hammer Bros already inserted, but since we already have a level based around those, I'm not sure about using them.

Of course I'm not planning to insert all these sprites since it would be a lot for four 6-9 screen rooms, but let me know which ones you'd like to see the most (or if there's a SMB3 enemy I didn't list you'd like to see) so I can build the ExGFX file based on those.

Edit: I believe, we can use these sprites.


I believe, we can use Piledriver Micro Goombas with the Chain Chomp as an alternative to fire enemies. The Angry Sun, on the other hand, might be a bit problematic since some people forget (or don't bother) what Screens actually means and build a screen without the Angry Sun in mind.

I don't whether Big Bertha is actually usable for SMW so it might be problematic too. And please no to Jelectros. Some people have a tendency to create muncher spam (and Jelectros are nothing but underwater munchers). Considering how some screen are, it's better to prevent it in level than having a tight spike swimming.

We also could make it so that the question mark blocks are closer to SMB3 i.e. they turn into non-p-switch affected used blocks (I have the blocks ready, albeit not submitted since I wait for the GPS update) and similar to that, use proper brick blocks (i.e. these from the custom bounce block patch*). This might cause some difficulty but considering that people crammed into screens whatever they wanted and not cared about the border, it wouldn't make a that big difference.
I can give you the necessary files soon™ if you want them.

*We need the patch anyway, so that bounce blocks can use a more liberal Map16 tile change. Else, the feature is unusable.

This also means, GPS has to be updated to the latest version to use the new bounce block routine.

I didn't know those were in the sprite section, yeah, we totally need to use them.

Big Bertha and the Angry Sun are not in the sprites section, so we can't use those.

Jelectros could be easy to implement, but as MFG said, they can become problematic, I'll think about those. Regular SMB3 munchers will be usable though.


I'm not sure if P-switches will be used, so I'll only insert these if we need them. Send me everything anyway so I can have them just in case.

Just because sprites aren't in the sections, it doesn't mean they haven't been created. While I don't know whether Big Bertha had been created, Sonikku has released the Angry Sun at the 2012 C3. It may have been taked down because public folders became disabled but it exists (in fact, I still have got his pack at my computer).

Does it work with PIXI? I tried inserting sprites from that pack before follwing all the instructions with PIXI and it didn't work.

Either way, I don't think it's a good idea to use the Angry Sun, it will just make the level harder than it needs to be. And I don't want to force anyone to build their screen arround it either.

The ON/OFF Caste already uses Switch Palace tiles. Although if you mean an actual switch palace with a switch at the end I don't think it'd help much, we already opened 9 levels and none of them use switch palace blocks.