Super Mario Bros. X Forums

CC11 was the best contest in the forums before this year's Choccycon happened. Maybe it's my nostalgia, but I feel a special charm in CC11 that most contests couldn't replicate. I replayed every level besides The Enemy's Castle and Sanctuary Fortress 2 recently. Honestly? It's aged notably better than expected. There's an issue that most contests have where only a handful of levels stand out. Usually, it's around 5~15 levels, but I found myself enjoying a quarter of them. ToBX was also extremely fun. It felt like a TRUE end of an era unlike let's say, CC12 being the hurricane of drama. There are still a few notable levels in the upper tiers that sting compared to today's standards. But also... Plenty of levels I'd recommend playing.

There are three other CCs I would have picked, but there are plenty of reasons why I'm hesitant about them. The biggest one being what was the norm for the "best" levels. Most of the levels there haven't aged well because of this

Edit: Why did I get the same post twice?

One thing worth mentioning is that there's multiple versions of the Princess Cliche, and only one of them has the really terrible boss fight.
So different opinion could arise from people playing different version.

Also, while boss quality is indeed subjective, if everyone cheesing it rather than doing it legitimately then it's not a good sign.
Especially considering that this is suppose to be someone's first SMBX episode.

If the Princess Cliche is to stay, at least bring back the billy gun for the final boss (that was removed for some unknown reason).
It's a simple edit and would prevent so many future rage quits.

Absolutely seconding this, the Princess Cliche final boss in its current state is capable of deterring not only beginners

TDK wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 24, 2022 3:09 pm

If the Princess Cliche is to stay, at least bring back the billy gun for the final boss (that was removed for some unknown reason).
It's a simple edit and would prevent so many future rage quits.

Not to mention that the billy gun will be much cooler as a final showdown.

The forums are generally inactive nowadays(not sure about the discord server) which makes me believe that the game will die out within the next year or two. The main reason is that, despite how great smbx2 is, we haven't gotten any significant episode releases in recent memory(practically since the last 2k1x dropped).

TheNewGuy wrote: ↑

Sun Jan 01, 2023 12:51 pm

The forums are generally inactive nowadays(not sure about the discord server) which makes me believe that the game will die out within the next year or two. The main reason is that, despite how great smbx2 is, we haven't gotten any significant episode releases in recent memory(practically since the last 2k1x dropped).

I thought the same thing in 2015. And 2018. And yet here we are in the year of our Lord 2023 with a heavy handful of projects to be excited for.

TLtimelord wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 02, 2023 1:19 am

I thought the same thing in 2015. And 2018. And yet here we are in the year of our Lord 2023 with a heavy handful of projects to be excited for.

The thing is, there were always A LOT of promising projects, but they never got finished. When you have a game like this, and essentially not enough levels to play through - you get bored of waiting, and then you leave/forget about it. At least that's what I did.

How do you define significant?

I'm also curious what significant means here. Out of curiousity I took a stroll through the episodes forum, to see what stood out to me in recent years and what I think might qualify under the definition of "a polished gameplay experience" (there might well be more! These are just the ones I'm familiar with).
viewtopic.php?t=27556 Gardens of Purity*
viewtopic.php?t=27541 Deeper
viewtopic.php?t=27751 Zlaker's Level Collection*
viewtopic.php?t=28169 Delightful Enhanced
viewtopic.php?t=26739 A2XT Gaiden*
https://talkhaus.raocow.com/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=20409 A2XT Gaiden 2*

And if we include contest episodes since Subzero Heroes' release, we got...
viewtopic.php?f=107&t=26596 Mystery Contest 2020*
viewtopic.php?t=27129 The Crrrypt (Vanilla 2021)*
https://talkhaus.raocow.com/viewtopic.p ... 8&start=50 MAGLX3*

* I contributed to these to varying degrees, in case "made in part by Enjl" is the mark of a significant episode. In which case, wow, rude to the great designers out there.
I do also heavily recommend the 2021 Chocolate Contest level pack. Everyone brought their A-Game to that contest and I would count it as a significant release going off "polished gameplay experience", even as just a batch of user-contributed levels without a hub or episode. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sOZ4d_ ... 6K8PP/view

Perhaps my post was worded incorrectly. Still, there were only a dozen of high production value releases in the past few years, which isn't a lot of content one could play through - meaning that the only choice is to lurk and await potential releases, which don't come frequently at all. The forums can be declared "dead" as there are only a handful of members still making posts here regularly. smbx in general isn't doing that great on youtube per se, compared to, let's say, four years ago when beta 3 released. One could argue that it has to do with several popular youtubers leaving the community, but I think that people are slowly moving on from the game. I could be wrong though, but as always, only time will tell.

TheNewGuy wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 02, 2023 12:41 pm

Perhaps my post was worded incorrectly. Still, there were only a dozen of high production value releases in the past few years, which isn't a lot of content one could play through - meaning that the only choice is to lurk and await potential releases, which don't come frequently at all. The forums can be declared "dead" as there are only a handful of members still making posts here regularly. smbx in general isn't doing that great on youtube per se, compared to, let's say, four years ago when beta 3 released. One could argue that it has to do with several popular youtubers leaving the community, but I think that people are slowly moving on from the game. I could be wrong though, but as always, only time will tell.

SMBX has always been a relatively "niche" engine/game, it never really was super popular aside from very few youtube videos that mentioned it, the community sure has slowed down on the forums but that's kinda because the new ""forums"" became Discord (for better or for worse).
The SMBX community is way more active there-- really, every community is on Discord.

Completing an episode is also not an easy task, especially now that the tech is so advanced and people want to make the most out of it, you want quantity or quality?

TheNewGuy wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 02, 2023 12:41 pm

Perhaps my post was worded incorrectly. Still, there were only a dozen of high production value releases in the past few years, which isn't a lot of content one could play through - meaning that the only choice is to lurk and await potential releases, which don't come frequently at all. The forums can be declared "dead" as there are only a handful of members still making posts here regularly. smbx in general isn't doing that great on youtube per se, compared to, let's say, four years ago when beta 3 released. One could argue that it has to do with several popular youtubers leaving the community, but I think that people are slowly moving on from the game. I could be wrong though, but as always, only time will tell.

Do you realize how hard it is to make just one smbx episode? It takes a long while man. And considering things like creative burnout, it is genuinely a stressful thing to do for some people. So you can't just expect masterpiece episodes every single time.

You made a great point there; of course quality always comes first, but the lack of playable content is also a statement about the activity of this community itself. Not sure about the discord server, since I haven't visited either that or the forums in ages, although it certainly feels empty here. Even though it was always a small community, it feels like it hit an all-time low, since plenty of notable members are either inactive or they've left the community for good.
Make sure to take this with a grain of salt though, since I've been inactive for the past two years and I'm saying this based on my personal experiences so far.

I do have to agree that the community has been on a slow decline for a while, even taking discord to account.

TheNewGuy wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 02, 2023 12:41 pm

Still, there were only a dozen of high production value releases in the past few years

Pretty bold attempt at a goalpost shift from "there were none" to "there were ONLY a dozen".
How many do you remember there being in the 2 and a half years leading up to Subzero Heroes? In the 2 and a half years before that? I think until you go as far back as 2014, you will generally end up with a similar number, so what that indicates is less a decline and more a constant.

On the topic of how hard it is to make episodes, here is my controversial opinion:
It's really not. It's deceptively easy. Our toolkit is vast and our editor is intuitive. And the proof I have are the episodes of yore; classics collection and all. The classics were made in a comparatively short dev cycle on an editor that didn't have copypaste, object editing, undo or multi-select, and a lot of them are still fun to play, I think. People's standards are just so high, but they have always been, and so those merely putting down things in the editor as their creativity directs always had a leg up over those who tried to stick to a formula and make something impressive by using lua or wanting to have custom bosses or trying to make every level a contest winner.
If you're disappointed with the output of playable content, spend a few weekends hammering together a 10 level episode. Unsatisfied with the amount? Add another weekend and 2 more levels. Be the change you want to see.

And if you're disappointed with a lack of activity on the forums or discord, be more active there! If this is a problem that you think about, it won't be fixed by pointing fingers at it.

TheNewGuy wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 02, 2023 12:41 pm

Perhaps my post was worded incorrectly. Still, there were only a dozen of high production value releases in the past few years, which isn't a lot of content one could play through - meaning that the only choice is to lurk and await potential releases,

I'm going to be brutally honest and tell you right now that that "only a dozen in the last couple years" is still about as many as there was from 2012 to 2020, and I AM factoring the tower of biased series into this. There were NOT that many episodes that spawned community buzz at the time.

And even then, I could list probably a dozen right now that are worth paying attention to.

TheNewGuy wrote: You made a great point there; of course quality always comes first, but the lack of playable content is also a statement about the activity of this community itself. Not sure about the discord server, since I haven't visited either that or the forums in ages, although it certainly feels empty here. Even though it was always a small community, it feels like it hit an all-time low, since plenty of notable members are either inactive or they've left the community for good.
Make sure to take this with a grain of salt though, since I've been inactive for the past two years and I'm saying this based on my personal experiences so far.

If you have not been here hardly at all then gonna be brutally honest again, you don't really get to throw around barometers on comparing older eras to the current one and claiming this era is particularly dead. You just don't know what you're saying.

Enjl wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 02, 2023 7:09 pm

Be the change you want to see.

And if you're disappointed with a lack of activity on the forums or discord, be more active there! If this is a problem that you think about, it won't be fixed by pointing fingers at it.

Listen, one person isn't going to singlehandedly bring back the activity to what it was before. In my honest opinion, smbx peaked with subzero heroes.
Remember how in the earlier days - Star Expedition and Mario Classic set the standards? Sure, they're still playable, but the level design standard nowadays makes them completely obsolete. Subzero Heroes was absolutely magnificent to play through, and I believe that it really maximized lua's capabilities at that time. Now, SH set the standard which is incredibly hard to match, let alone beat. Why would anyone prefer vanilla over that badass lua stuff? The thing is, that kind of magic could only be produced by a handful of people that are familiar with lua, and I don't think that many people are encouraged to learn it. Sure, making an episode is easy, but making a popular episode which matches THAT standard? I don't think it's achievable by 'mere mortals'.
Again, I'm not blaming anyone, it's just 'my controversial smbx opinion', and I guess I succeeded since everyone is coming at me with pitchforks.

TheNewGuy wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 03, 2023 5:42 am

Listen, one person isn't going to singlehandedly bring back the activity to what it was before.

Of course not, but if everyone who comes along and makes the statements you made here recently stuck around, the community would double in size already.

TheNewGuy wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 03, 2023 5:42 am

Now, SH set the standard which is incredibly hard to match

Please do not view it as a standard. It's a work of madness by a deranged no-lifer over the course of 3 and a half years, as you allude to a bit later on. It should always be an outlier.
Not to mention Gardens of Purity, which outdoes SH in aesthetics, and a2xt gaiden 2 which outdoes it in lua showoffery and chococon 2021 which outdoes it in level design at times and

TheNewGuy wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 03, 2023 5:42 am

Why would anyone prefer vanilla over that badass lua stuff?

That no-lifer's next episode project is largely vanilla, and so far they prefer it over SH. It's all about the designer's fun. Nobody should care about the player, I think, because there'll always be people that like or hate it no matter the style. (Exception: If your level or episode is specifically designed for one specific person)

I don't think episode design should be competitive. We're all here because level designing is fun. Making something to appeal to an arbitrary standard is self-destructive and leads to a worse product. Sure everyone who only consumes episodes is gonna come along with their own biases, but those are about as multi-faceted as can be, so they're just noise.

Enjl wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 03, 2023 6:28 am

Of course not, but if everyone who comes along and makes the statements you made here recently stuck around, the community would double in size already.

This but unironically, since this topic generated 15 replies within a day./s

Enjl wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 03, 2023 6:28 am

That no-lifer's next episode project is largely vanilla, and so far they prefer it over SH. It's all about the designer's fun. Nobody should care about the player, I think, because there'll always be people that like or hate it no matter the style. (Exception: If your level or episode is specifically designed for one specific person)

1.3 vanilla and smbx2 vanilla are very different things. I agree, there shouldn't be a competition, however, you cannot say that certain standards don't exist. Remember when smbx first came out, one of the first episodes was Mario vs the moon base. At that time, it was completely revolutionary and set the so called 'standard' for future episodes. Now, if you play that episode, it's really not that special or fun to play since you have many many better options - it's because the quality of level design as well as the standard nowadays increased, and it can only get higher. If someone releases a 1.3 vanilla episode right now, with already seen gimmicks - it wouldn't gain any attention at all. I believe that competition as a whole isn't a healthy mindset, but you can't deny that the 'standard' is much higher nowadays. There are hundreds of episodes on the forums that never got ANY attention, what's the reason behind that?

"There are hundreds of episodes on the forums that never got ANY attention, what's the reason behind that?"

Not everyone has time to play Literally Every Single Thing That Gets Released, also i find it funny that you mention episodes not getting attention, yet when Enjl listed you a bunch of recent episodes that came out you promptly ignore them, what's the reason behind that?

Not to mention, hello, i barely use lunalua, when i make levels i still specifically make as if i was working with 1.3 tech, and i still manage to get relatively high scores in contests and the like.
What i am saying is it doesn't matter what's the """standard""" or what tools you're using, it's what you do with them, you just kinda gotta focus on making a good level, doesn't even have to be extremely amazing or "WOW THIS LEVEL HAS 3D GRAPHICS".
Sure, Lua raised the bar, but only virtually, you don't HAVE to use lua or the wacky 2.0 stuff to make something worth someone's time.
YOU have to make it worth someone's time with how you hone your craft.