What was the golden age of SMBX, in your opinion?

[Kumatora]

I've never really been that much of a part of SMBX's community, so I'd like to ask you: what do you think was the peak of SMBX and its community?
(And if you'd like to, you could even tell me the entire history of SMBX's community)

[Nadav]

2014, most of the best episodes are from this year like tower of biassed 7 and Luigi's Fight for the Moushroom Kingdom

[Saltlord]

The present is SMBX's peak, given how much more is possible with the engine compared to a couple of years ago.

[SBells27]

Probably 2016 - 2018 for me, which was the start of the game's renaissance thanks to 2.0 and even 38A. I feel like nowadays SMBX requires more focus on community features like doing essential and needed changes to the website, or trying on hosting other tournaments though, the engines are fantastic, but I do feel like they get too much focus.

[Cedur]

The present is SMBX's peak, given how much more is possible with the engine compared to a couple of years ago.

Not in terms of community activity though!

[Sonya Sanchez]

Dunno I feel like the community is pretty active on the Discord Server as people share a lot of stuff with each other there.

[Cedur]

They share stuff but it takes so much longer to make (because, standards). Not that this is a bad thing but it still leads to fewer levels and episodes

and the amount of forum posting has gone lower than until like 2017/18

[ShadowStarX]

I believe that there is no single peak, but multiple.
The forums peaked around 2014-2015, Community Contests had a participant count of 70-80. But regarding level quality, I think the past 2 years are a major improvement thanks to both the sheer amount of features in Beta 4 and different design techniques being used.

[ElTipsta]

I'd probs say around 2013-2016 due to many of SMBX's best episodes releasing around that time as well as the feeling of connectivity between the community. Nothing will ever top the Tower of Bias series for me.. Some of the best SMBX levels ever made and in-jokes were part of that series in some way.

Additionally, many memorable, popular community users were active then but not anymore (ie. Valtteri). That's understandable though, life just goes on and many people have grown up and move onto other things.

Nowadays though, SMBX and it's editor has evolved significantly hence a new golden age is coming. So many new possibilities exist that weren't there five years ago and the editor is a lot more accessible and easier to use. I think I could make a full episode with it where I couldn't five years ago (aside from the ET's Tower of Tips level compliation hub episode i made and had forgotten about).

[krakin]

This might sound biased, but I think somewhere around 2016, users I've seen have come and gone, and some even reappear frequently from that time up to now, I actually didn't procrastinate and played a bunch of other user's levels and episodes before my pc took a shit

[Sux]

2012-2014 back then we had contests almost every 3 months and a amount of nice episodes. But I prefer the SMBX now, it offers much more options for our creativy, but I miss how the community was previously

[Wohlstand]

2012-2014 back then we had contests almost every 3 months and a amount of nice episodes. But I prefer the SMBX now, it offers much more options for our creativy, but I miss how the community was previously

By the fact, I found the article at Habr that explains "We need limitations" and it had to show some examples like on how the "Jawels" film was in process and they had a lot of troubles with a robotic shark, so, they tried to not show it in the camera, and the idea of the film caused a big success for it, etc. Especially on how limitations making us be more tricky and hacky to produce something wonderful. For example, the old hardware didn't have so many resources as modern. etc.etc.

[Superiorstar]

I'd say the community peaked during 2015-2017, ever since then I felt like it started declining super fast due to lack of popularity and generally many of us older users leaving for usually much more important things.

[Cedur]

We had the golden drama ages, now we have the "small, but nice" ages

[Yoshi021]

right now

[Sonya Sanchez]

I'd say the community peaked during 2015-2017, ever since then I felt like it started declining super fast due to lack of popularity and generally many of us older users leaving for usually much more important things.

?

I don’t think Smbx is less popular now, there’s a bunch of projects in the works and people still make videos of the Game. I suggest looking into the discord server cause that’s where the most activity is happening.

[Dragonmaster146]

2013-2014 in my opinion

[Julia Pseudo]

It's now I think, community activity may not be at an all-time high but there are more tools available than ever. This is at worst a silver age or something.

[Cedur]

Can't complain about Discord activity but still wish for people being more talkative on the forum

[BroccoliRampage]

This is the opinion of someone who's only been active for about a year and a half, so take this with a grain of salt...

Without a basis of comparison, I am pleased by the activity I see and the helpfulness on the Discord. Esp as a newcomer, there are times I might've given up early on without knowing I had a place to turn to and get help fairly easily.

Negatives: we're really all just on our own little islands. There are far more level & episode projects being worked on out there than the forums suggest, everyone has got their own grand ideas just stopping by the "showcase" channel makes it easy to see that there are countless creations being made with SMBX. This is a good and bad thing: good because it means a lot of interest in the engine, bad because most of what's going on is invisible. I'm seeing people recreate amazing NPCs from the legacy games, and most of it's not mentioned here in the forum, as well as incredible ideas in game mechanics. It also has the effect of discouraging new users, who can feel somewhat unimportant and limited, that might tinker with a level for a few weeks without ever really getting to learn & discover SMBX's great possibilities by contributing to something larger.

What you want is to give people the freedom to be insular if they wish, but also opportunities for greater involvement and increased visibility for collaborations and full episodes, and so I have these humble suggestions for these resources to be available outside of the Discord environment:

1) A more dedicated area to showcase well designed, completed Episodes, similar to the featured episodes page on the forum. However, the episode creators could take more control, giving more detailed descriptions, teasers, and so on. It would be separate from the episodes & projects forums as it would be curated, featuring a full workup of say 10 episodes, and to get space on it your project would need to be complete, over a certain size (say, 20+ levels) and receive an average 70/100 score provided by peer reviewers.

2) A similar dedicated area to "Major Projects" again curating episodes that have gotten to a certain stage of completion, say 5-10 levels, consistent progress for 6 months, deemed an avg score of at least 60/100, and offer a cohesive vision such as a level plan or storyline. Once again, this would help projects with real developmental progress stand out from the message boards, where without clicking on each and every one its hard to gauge which ones to keep and eye on and which simply go dormant.

3) Progress has been made in Discord to create episode and level development channels, but they suffer from the same issue lack of visibility. This forum, and these dedicated showcases, can help drive traffic towards the individual Discord channels, and also catch the attention of web wanderers who aren't going to be anywhere near the SMBX discord to see what all's happening.

4) Use these showcases to encourage collaboration, I see SO much creativity and it's all largely cofined to our own little corners of development. We can each use resources such as Youtube, and Facebook pages, Twitter etc to heighten projects' visibility. The showcase areas can help people better decide if they'd like to collaborate on anything from custom gfx to programming. Also, we might want to post "starter projects" in the WIP showcase, base episode plans or simple story ideas that people can rally around. I'm keen to suggest a third "showcase" for these, call them Episode Workshops perhaps that include base worldmaps, custom gfx and boss packs, that designers can start with and customize while working together.

The "forum" portion of this website still lives, but it has diminished greatly, and it should exist as a resource to support a larger and more visible presence, that is, the idea of more detailed and accessible Showcase areas, and these in turn be more strongly tied to other social media channels such as a dedicated SMBX Youtube page, bringing casual passerby back here to see a curation of the BEST of what's currently being made. In this capacity of a larger, more visible presence (advertisement if you will) the forum activity will rebound as it becomes an activity hub once again.