Super Mario Bros. X Forums

TheNewGuy wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 03, 2023 8:07 am

Unironically Mario vs the Moon Base holds up IMO. Replayed it last year.
I know there are standards. I'm saying many people set them too high. There's plenty to appreciate in lower-scope projects, and I know plenty of players who wish for simpler stuff specifically.

As for the reason some episodes don't get much traction...
You might notice that the projects that get attention don't exactly correlate to fidelity. Else you would have heard of Gardens of Purity, A2XT Gaiden 2, etc, and maybe wouldn't have heard of some others. They correlate more with the amount of marketing done.
I made a lot of videos hyping up Subzero Heroes and sharing them around places, even outside this community. So people heard of it, saw footage of it, gave it a shot. I believe any project can get attention if more people made videos of them like Reintendo does and Eclipsed used to (bonus points if it's one of the creators, but I understand video recording and editing are hurdles of their own). There just needs to be appropriate marketing. Highlight the strengths, even overplay them, and it will resonate with people, and there will also surely be others that consider it trash, which is part of how it goes.

Of course there is some element of the inherent biases of the crowd in what gains traction and what doesn't, but like I said, the crowd is about as multi-faceted as you can imagine, and the more hardcore players are always in the minority, outnumbered by the lurkers. So I think you are blowing the increase in quality standard out of proportion, or projecting your own increase in quality standard unto others.
Here too I heavily recommend Chococon 2021, which had the highest average score ever thanks to not only creativity in visuals and gameplay, but also in humour in short but memorable stages like "We all ignore the pit" and "The Brothers Mario".

I think we're just about reaching the end of the topic so I wanna move forward a bit: Are you looking forward to participating in this year's level contests? We got some good stuff planned and are always happy about more participants. :p

E: Sorry Darkonius I pushed your post off the page

Darkonius Mavakar wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 03, 2023 8:50 am

"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.

(I think the new features like lua are less a raise of the bar of "acceptable quality" and more a raise of the skill ceiling)

You made a lot of good points there. The thing is, there are like 10-15 people who have already established themselves as great level designers. If they were to make a project right now, I'm sure it would be quite popular inside the community. If I make an episode, it would probably end up on page 25 of the forums or something, since I know I cannot match the level design of some people, yourself included. The Eclipsed thing further proves my point, since I saw a lot of episodes that never got any attention which had genuinely creative ideas and decent level design.
Yeah I guess that should wrap it up since I'm not really in the mood for pointless arguments anymore. I've left the community 2 years ago and I'm not really going to stay here much longer. It was a nice thought-provoking discussion regardless ; )

Added in 4 minutes 52 seconds:
@Darkonius
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?

listen, I really liked Delightful for example. When I see that Darkonius is making a new project, but also some random nobody is making a project too - I'll always check out yours first since you've already established yourself as a great level designer inside of the community. I ignored those episodes since I've genuinely never heard of them, but not because 'insignificant people' made them, it's because I was absent for a very long time.

I disagree, new members can still make really interesting projects, for example Sednaiur, or that other Luigi episode that looks super impressive (viewtopic.php?p=390867#p387730) , and prior to those projects being posted, they literally had never posted ever before. (hell, the person of the luigi episode has literally only 9 posts.)

There's no established fanbase for a user, ya gotta do it yourself man, i feel like at this point you're sorta climbing on mirrors to be honest.

Darkonius Mavakar wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 03, 2023 10:15 am

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".

funny how you said that aesthetics don't matter as much as gameplay but you just sent me a project which you said is "super impressive", based only on screenshots.
I'm not disagreeing with you here, I'm just saying that there are plenty of episodes made by unknown authors which never got the attention they deserved. I don't think it has much to do with marketing like enjl said, since this is a pretty small community. I'm just saying that there's a large contingent of people here who see these episodes and do not even consider playing them. Like you said, maybe they don't have time to play through all of them, but that mindset really disencourages episode creators. I think it's pointless to keep arguing about this topic, let's just move on.

You guys managed to scare off yet another user.

TDK wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 05, 2023 3:44 pm

You guys managed to scare off yet another user.

Who?

TDK wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 05, 2023 3:44 pm

You guys managed to scare off yet another user.

I think if their only recent posts are them constantly shifting the goalposts on how this community is dead and our standards are, no actually, extremely high, and that if you're not making a cinematic behemoth with more lines of code than there are blocks in 2014 mechdragon contest levels then why bother making content, then... good?

Everything SMBX-related I've released since 1.3 was no longer the main build has been met with disdain, particularly towards using the PGE-editor (which for Mac users is one of the only viable options). We used to have a good level judge team in this community but it seems to be a concept of a bygone era now.

I have a theory that users stopped commenting on projects because there's only so much you can say about something that's upcoming, or exists, outside of a full essay/review. And with vague rules about constructive criticism and discouraging short statements such as 'this looks really neat!', users eventually just sort of gave up attempting to give any sort of praise - a contributing factor to the SMBX community becoming what it is now.

Everyone uses the pge editor, and it plays no role in PLAYING an episode, so I'm surprised to hear that.

I disagree with the second paragraph on the grounds that all progress on levels and episodes has long moved to discord, rather than died out.