http://bin.smwcentral.net/u/35485/Tangle%2Brace.bps
(Level was made overwriting Yoshi's Island 2)
I've always been a fan of the skytree-esque levels ever since Kaizo 3 way back in 2015, i've always found them to be dynamic, fast paced and a breath of fresh air to stale SMW level design. The concept itself of clearing pathways for vines comes from a small section way back in vanilla SMW's special world, on the first section of Gnarly, yet it's seldom seen in SMW romhacks and even less so on non-kaizo hacks, my goal with this was to create a skytree-esque level that would be accessible to players of all skill ranges while still being fun to even the most experienced of SMW players.
Skytrees themselves have a few traps when it comes to creating levels with that theme that aspiring creators need to pay attention to. Namely how easily they create situations where the player will get softlocked. I managed to avert this by not creating overly long sections and giving a high amount of reset doors for the player on pretty much every possible softlocking occasion.
During the making of this level i've looked to follow the overall philosophy detailed on thegamedesignforum about SMW which i feel increases it's vanilla factor by looking to stay true to SMW roots when it comes to design while also following some of the innovations of the SMWcommunity, and a big thing that sets this level apart from it's Kaizo relatives is the far lower penalty to the player, with the much smaller amount of hazards as well as reset doors, unlike the Kaizo variants which heavily penalize mistakes through a large number of hazards and require very high precision from the player, which makes them not accessible to beginners and intermediate players.
Making this level has been an interesting learning experience for me, while i had dabbled with Lunar Magic before, i can say this is the first level i made that i can feel proud of and i hope all of you enjoy playing it as much as i did making it.
Special thanks to my friends Yugianbushido and Linkdeadx2 for their help with playtesting my level and for all their support and advice.
