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Extra Mario World - Now with OW!

Hellooooo everyone! Miss us? We sure missed you!

For the uninitiated, this is a very ambitious collab hack being made by me (programmer), PercentN (BG artist), Eminus (sprite artist), and Ruberjig (composer). We usually work together to design levels. The scope of this project is a whole new game with multiple playable characters, co-op multiplayer, unique enemies and bosses, unique and fitting graphics, an original soundtrack, and a new original story; basically everything I think a collab can be.

So. What have we been up to lately, considering it's been almost a year since our last update? We've been working on the hack a lot, though most of that has been stuff that's not very exciting to show off. We've mostly been fine-tuning stuff, improving GFX, fixing bugs, making new songs, making a new playable character and converting the whole hack to a modified SA-1 engine. It's been a ton of work that's absolutely necessary for the hack without actually providing much content to show.

Now, that's most of what's happened since last time, but not all. We do have a fair slice of new stuff we want to show off this C3, that was just the explanation for why we took so long to come around!




Player Character Spotlight: Leeway the Golden Rex
- Great aerial mobility and fast sword attacks
- Can climb walls and ceilings
- Can't jump very high
- Usually performs movement in short bursts via dashing
- Original character do not steal



Didn't know where else to put these screenies so I put them here




Evernight Temple
>>Gameplay Video<<


Crossroad Plains
This is the first level of Realm 2, and it's pretty fun.


Melody's Mountain
>>Gameplay Video<<





Enemy Spotlight: Adept Shaman
>>Gameplay Video<<

This is the most dangerous enemy yet. Channeling powers from the Dark Lord, these caped casters are able to fly through the air and weave frighteningly powerful spells. If you run into one of these, you'd better be careful; lest you find yourself cornered and staring down the mask of your doom.




That's it for now. It will be some time before we release a demo, but considering the scope of the hack we'll probably put out a few before the hack is done. Considering we've made so many new assets since last time, we're probably not gonna slow down for a while. This time you can actually expect us to update kinda frequently. Peace out swaggers!

allow shy guy emojis in post footers you cowards!
Great to see more of this!

Everything looks great so far. Evernight Temple is interesting, but it's a bit weird how the magic rexes can shoot their projectiles while slightly off screen, which makes it possible to run into them blindly. No complaints on Melody's Mountain other than the Volcano Lotus already mentioned, and Crossroad Plains seems good from what I can see. Keep it up!
I had no idea anything like this was even in the works, this looks nothing short of amazing!
Both characters could probably do with a bit more involved sound design, but their capabilities and movement seems really unique and fun!

Nice work all around, like honestly this might be the most impressive thing since I first saw what-a-blast lol
Your layout has been removed.
@Aeon
Thanks! I honestly never thought of the offscreen casting but maybe I should consider tinkering with it a bit.

@Leod
Well, I guess that's why we should update more often. Definitely expect better sound effects to be on their way, it's something I've wanted to get into for a while. Thanks for the encouragement!

allow shy guy emojis in post footers you cowards!
Looks really awesome! I really wish it didn't use SA-1 though. It would have been nice to play it on the actual hardware.
Layout by Erik557
Hi.
Excellent work guys! The sprites, asm, and graphics are absolutely incredible. I watched the gameplay vid for Melody's Mountain, and I have some issues with the level design. The main issue is that the design itself isn't all that interesting, but I'm gonna assume the design itself is still in the beta phase? From that level alone, I believe that something more interesting and well designed than "climb this vine and dodge this guy" can be made. Especially with the ASM and graphical skills available. Honestly, a totally athletic mountain level that uses ramps and line guided platforms in the style of this would be far better.

Regardless, excellent work on everything else :D I'm looking forward to more progress!
Great screens and vids! I did miss hearing from this hack, but I'm happy it's still in the works.
Good luck with it you two! Looking forward its future relase!
Awesome to see more progress on this.

I like the new character with the Rex. It'll make playing the levels feel quite different than in other hacks due to how your handling each characters abilities.

The videos of the levels look great to. Looking forward to seeing more.
Cool, glad to see this project is still alive.
#smw{:TUP:}
From a technical standpoint, this hack really looks quite impressive already. It looks similar to the kind of hack I wanted to create at some point with a protagonist wielding a sword.

From a gameplay standpoint, though, I'm not 100% sold yet. Of course I haven't play it myself yet, but I do think that some things can be felt even just from looking at the trailers. Mainly, the trailers give the impression that the controls weren't that smooth. I'm not a huge fan of the protagonist's walking speed. I'm assuming that you removed running from the game. If that's the case, you should make his walking speed as fast as running was in vanilla SMW (or, well, at least a good bit faster from how it is right now). From watching the trailers, it really looks as though the game had a very tanky feel to it, and games like that can easily hurt your thumb, at least that's my experience. Of course I'd have to try the game to know this for sure, but a tanky feeling is definitely the impression I'm getting from the trailer, and in my opinion, that's probably a downgrade from the smooth controls of SMW.

A second thing that bothers me a bit, though this is really just a minor thing: I'm not a huge fan of the sound effect you get when you hit an enemy with your sword. To make proper attacks most satisfying, this sound effect should really sound beefy and have an impact to it. Basically, look at A Link to the Past, Secret of Mana or Terranigma for three random examples of games with great hit sound effects. That being said, I'm of course aware of SMW's limitations, and I don't even know how to create new sound effects for SMW, so just consider this a "nice-to-have".

This post probably comes of more negative than it's meant. Just think about it like this: The fact that I write such a long post in the first place shows that I'm very interested in this hack, and actually quite optimistically so. I do see a lot of potential here, and if you do some finetuning and work on a couple of things, this could be one of the most interesting and unique SMW hacks in a long, long time. Certainly hope you will stay motivated and keep working on this! #smw{:TUP:}

EDIT:
Oh yeah, everything in this post of course goes for only the Rex character. Stupid me only watched trailer 1 and 3 and skipped trailer 2, so I wasn't even aware there were two characters. #smw{-_-2}
The Koopa certainly looks was smoother to play.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
@RPG Hacker
Thanks for the feedback man :)
It's interesting how you would say that, because I honestly think Leeway (the Rex) is the easiest to control. If one has played Mega Man X/Zero/ZX or Shovel Knight Plague of Shadows, that person would probably be familiar with the instant acceleration and retardation. He really is my favorite character to play, but the upside of having many playable characters is of course that you don't have to like all of them.

allow shy guy emojis in post footers you cowards!
Guess I'm on the same boat as leod with this hack, as I've never actually heard about this thing until now! Everything in it just looks so unique and different from what I'm used to when it comes to hacks, and I'm super excited about that aspect already. Sound effects have already been mentioned by others, but other than that I can't really think of any other issues I see with this so far. Looking forward to seeing Extra Mario World progress!
Originally posted by Von Fahrenheit
If one has played Mega Man X/Zero/ZX or Shovel Knight Plague of Shadows, that person would probably be familiar with the instant acceleration and retardation.


Interestingly enough, I have actually played all of those, though at least from the trailer the controls still seem "weird" to me. I have two theories on why that is:
-It may be the lack of animations. All of the above games have at least slightly more detailed animations and (probably) more transitions between animations, giving everything a smoother feel and making it feel less abrupt when you start and stop. This hack, right now, does seem to use "few" animations, and it transitions between them rather abruptly. I think that may be the main reason for why it doesn't seem that smooth. The most obvious place for this is when jumping, especially while looking at the cape. It transitions immediately from "cape rising" to "cape falling" many times. As far as I remember, vanilla SMW actually had some tweening between those states.
-Another possible reason may be that while I have played the games mentioned above, I have also played SMW, so while seeing an SMW-styled game, my brain might feel like something was out-of-place when seeing physics that don't feel like SMW. I do consider the theory with the animations more likely than this, though.

But yeah, as mentioned in my last post: these are just impressions from viewing the trailers. I'd have to actually try it myself to know whether the controls feel any different from how they look in the trailers.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
Edit: Didn't know I could still post on threads after C3 is over. Welp. Anyways.


Quick GFX update!



Made a temporary OW. Not at all the final draft but it's something to show you guys.

Next stuff you'll find im Realm 2!




Grassy mountain thingy! Haven't made the level yet but it is planned on being put into the gfx rotation in Realm 2. Woo.



Spooky hotel? Normal hotel? Can you even call this a hotel?
I don't know. But we got some cool, exciting stuff in store for you guys, so don't take your eyes off of us just yet ;)
This is sick. I love you stuff you made. Good job!
Originally posted by GbreezeSunset
I watched the gameplay vid for Melody's Mountain, and I have some issues with the level design. The main issue is that the design itself isn't all that interesting, but I'm gonna assume the design itself is still in the beta phase? From that level alone, I believe that something more interesting and well designed than "climb this vine and dodge this guy" can be made. Especially with the ASM and graphical skills available. Honestly, a totally athletic mountain level that uses ramps and line guided platforms in the style of this would be far better.

Yes, that level's design is definitely still in the beta phase. Although I don't see the "climb this vine and dodge this guy" as a bad element, I may have overused it, which can become boring to some people, even if used only in this level. I originally considered using various platform sprites, but the non-mario characters still had some issues when interacting with them. And since I really wanted to get that level done for C3, I had to go without that and I may have rushed some parts. I'll definitely take what you said into consideration when revising the level, that example you showed inspires me a lot. Thanks!

Originally posted by RPG Hacker
Originally posted by Von Fahrenheit
If one has played Mega Man X/Zero/ZX or Shovel Knight Plague of Shadows, that person would probably be familiar with the instant acceleration and retardation.


Interestingly enough, I have actually played all of those, though at least from the trailer the controls still seem "weird" to me. I have two theories on why that is:
-It may be the lack of animations. All of the above games have at least slightly more detailed animations and (probably) more transitions between animations, giving everything a smoother feel and making it feel less abrupt when you start and stop. This hack, right now, does seem to use "few" animations, and it transitions between them rather abruptly. I think that may be the main reason for why it doesn't seem that smooth. The most obvious place for this is when jumping, especially while looking at the cape. It transitions immediately from "cape rising" to "cape falling" many times. As far as I remember, vanilla SMW actually had some tweening between those states.

I think this could be the reason. Even though this character has over 60 individual frames, that's just because of all the stuff he can do (climb walls, ceilings, and use his sword in different situations). As you may have seen in the vids, there are some transitions between some animations, like for crouching and the different slashes, but I should've gone further and should've done transitions between rising/falling as you said, as well as dashing and perhaps others. The character does play in an abrupt manner and is very reactive to the inputs made by the player, but that's not a reason for him to look choppy. It's something I've noticed when looking at Mega Man X or Zero's spritesheets for inspiration. I guess I just bypassed some of that stuff, seeing how little transitions Mario has between his animations. But since Mario moves in a much smoother way, that lack is less apparent than with Leeway (the character you were commenting on). I'm noticing this kinda leads towards your second "theory". I guess the two of them are related, in a way.
Thanks for the constructive criticism, by the way. We really appreciate it!
Yeah, you might want to do something about the artstyle. It's really weird how fluid the new stuff is compared to the rather choppy Mario and vanilla enemies.