I've been intermittently catching up here while wrapping up Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair—funny how the Ninji Speedruns are doing their job of ensuring I log in regularly and get trapped in this game as always—but before I comment on anything here, I want to make a quick recommendation.
There's this Japanese maker I follow (4GS-0SW-9JF) who some of you might have seen if you pay attention to the leaderboards, as he's sitting at about 20k points and #40 on the all-time chart—so not quite on the level of our local superstars
Nocturnowl and
GokouD under the current formula, but close. I've played all of his levels, and with most of them, the schtick is that they have a built-in difficulty selection, like a hard/EX mode that is visibly placed right beside the goal as a route you can just try for the heck of it. This means that the clear rates on these levels are totally misleading, in that the main route will be much easier while most of the deaths that tank the clear rate are behind the optional hard-mode gate.
Well, for his latest course, simply entitled Difficulty Choice (BRG-Q6Q-BBG), he takes this a step further: this level has
three overlapping difficulties with different layers of obstacles, safety nets, and checkpoint placements that all share the same layout from start to finish, now that you can use on/off switches to control one layer (as before) and the new P-blocks to control a second layer. It's very well implemented, and the hardest mode is still fairly traditional, requiring nothing more technical than standard SMW spin jumps. Very clever ending, too.
I spent a bit of time today clearing all three routes just to study how it was put together, and I recommend that others do the same if they want to see a good example of a level that feels very standard to play through, but is powered by some well-placed spawn-block trickery. I've seen a lot of levels from this community that involve routes with two overlapping states, but hadn't really looked into three-state designs using P-blocks, so I think this will interest many of you. It's conceptually easy to understand once you look at it, even without editor access—just very well executed.
