I see that several of you have been in the mood for marking the season with the winter theme.
Stop me if you've heard this one: I've been working on my most traditional, linear, puzzle-free platforming level to date—yes, I know I say this every time, and that every time players get stuck on the
one vestigial puzzle element anyway—and it's mostly complete, but it may be some time before it's ready to publish and I might work on some other ideas first. I don't know why I'm to drawn to pursuing technical concepts that, however simple they look on the surface, are absolute hell to debug.
This time around I'm designing some new trickery with Chain Chomps, and the pseudorandom element to how they extend from the stumps is driving me up the wall. It's not only difficult to force them to behave reliably, but it's even harder to test. The setups I'm playing with act a little differently depending on how quickly the player scrolls the screen, so I've had to test every segment at different scrolling speeds (and to account for the player deciding to backtrack at any given column that affects the spawn timings), and sometimes I don't pick up an unfixed bug until dozens of attempts later, while I'm busy working on a different part of the stage.
Secretly, I think that solving these problems and stubbornly refusing to compromise with janky edge-case behaviour is what keeps me hooked on the game. Time just disappears when I test and fix, test and fix. It taps into the same space as management/engineering games like Factorio as there is always just one more block I want to tweak, or a huge stretch of repetition where I'm not making any progress but just letting the game run, in order to point me to the next thing that needs to be done.
On a personal note, I think SMM2 is imminently due to surpass BotW as the game with the highest playtime on my Switch. Rounded to the nearest five hours, they're currently tied, but when I sort them on the full software grid, SMM2 is still in second. It's certain to claim the throne by the end of the week. This is a huge landmark for me, and one that I didn't think could happen on this platform when BotW took over my life in 2017 (though FE3H should pass it too by the time I'm truly done with it).
You don't want to know the number. Really, you don't.
The Daylight Midnight Express
K76-9K7-0NG
Hop aboard the buzzy beetle train and travel all day and night to reach the goal. Watch out for the sun and moon!
I recently got back into SMM2 seriously after a few weeks off, and I saw that I had missed all of your levels, so I ran through the whole set just now. I enjoyed a lot of these; you're quite generous about safety nets and points of failure that allow the player to retry on the spot, which is a blind spot for a lot of makers, especially early on. Buzzy trains are right there in the Story Mode, but in both of your takes on the concept, you had a well-spaced approach to dropping an inventive variety of obstacles on the route, and it was all very readable and fair. The sun/moon concept in The Daylight Midnight Express is excellent: I've seen many "don't touch the moon" levels but almost none that use it in parallel to the sun as a slight bump in difficulty (i.e. try this again, but with no margin of error). But I have to admit I cheesed the second half (which I guess is thematically appropriate to a moon): I hit the moon late enough that I decided to dash forward to see what lay ahead, and managed to damage-boost all the way to the end.
Just something to think about and pick up through testing. For the most part, I think it's fine that you have spikes as the track surface, as opposed to a true instant-kill like poison or lava—if you make a blunder, it's fun to scramble to get back on the train—but you have to be aware that SMM players will always, always exploit the path of least resistance and take advantage of invincibility frames.
Since you tend to build quite wide and spaciously (you're not the only one who's heard this from me, and it's all right if that's just your style), my main recommendation is to think about camera movement. Apart from some of the Thwomps in your very first level (which, to be fair, was your very first level), visibility is generally fine; but there were spots here or there where I felt like I was falling towards surfaces that were a few tiles out of view, for example, or where it took a moment to understand what you were signalling with coins. I think many players default to reading coins as "it's safe to go here" unless the surrounding context makes it clear that they are meant to say "it's a timing-sensitive risk to go here".
Interestingly, I've played close to a thousand levels in this game and I think your Fishnado Mountain is the first time I can remember seeing NSMBU night desert. Unless I'm forgetting something obvious, I could swear I hadn't seen this theme before—though NSMBU might actually be underrated in SMM2, either because it already came with the reputation for ugly beginner garbage in SMM1 or because 3DW is now a far more appealing home for levels built for a dynamic platforming move set.
