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[gammaprimesmw]

SUPER MARIO WORLD: BOWSER'S KAIZO CONSPIRACY - PART 2

Here's what's behind that door. Right now, these shelves look pretty barren, with the exception of one Transformer figure standing next to Mario. In reality, I wouldn't let a chubby Italian plumber walk across my Transformer shelves, but this is a video game. Those shelves can become more populated as you play this hack though. That's because the Transformers are a new collectible item in the game. There are 16 of them hidden throughout, with 2 per World. This took quite a bit of ASM work, and help from a long-time friend on SMWC, to implement. I was tempted to give up and scrap this, but my Transformer obsession just wouldn't let me. If I learn more ASM, maybe there'll be a boss fight in the future against something that transforms. Time will tell!

The collected figures on the shelves are interactive. Pressing UP in front of one will bring up a bio screen like this. I already have nearly half of these done.

1-3 Earthy Caverns

This is your typical World 1 underground level, so it's not too tough. Getting the Yellow Switch beforehand actually makes it even easier. This is one of the first levels where you can find a Transformer. I won't say where though. Don't wanna spoil it. Levels with hidden Transformers will be marked on the Overworld by an Autobot Symbol like the one on the Transformer room door and in the HUD. Yeah, there's a counter in the HUD for these things. Some ASM hacks I applied to the end-of-level sequences pretty much nuked the Bonus Stars, so I decided to repurpose that counter. It was a fairly simple ASM hack.

1-4 Goom-Bounce Garden

This level introduces those wall springboards, or Pea Bouncers, first seen in Vanilla Dome 4 in the original game. They're supplemented by block versions to avoid slowdown from too many sprites on screen at once. The block versions allow for even more flexibility than just having more bouncy surfaces for Goombas to bounce on. There's a variant that only sprites, like the Goombas, can bounce on. For Mario, they just act like a normal ledge.

1-F Giga-Goomba's Fort

Of course a fortress owned by a giant Goomba is gonna be full of Goombas.

1-5 Donut Walk Away

Here's the first proper athletic level of the game.

1-C Iggy's Castle

It's a little like the original first castle. It has Iggy as the boss and centers around those climbing fences.

That's it for World 1.

[gammaprimesmw]

Return to SMWCentral

After having my hack run into a standstill due to a lack of necessary resources, I decided to just go ahead and return to SMWCentral. I figured that I shouldn't just leave a community with which I have so much history just because one friend had a bad experience in DMs with one user there. I haven't yet been attacked for being a white straight cisgender Mormon. Heck, there are still people there who appreciate my hacking style. Maybe they stand out a little more amidst the endless sea of Kaizo hacks. BTW, I still say Kaizo is for Decepticons.

Of course, more progress has been made on Super Mario Bros: Vanilla Islands. World 4 is now complete, meaning that the hack as a whole is roughly 50% done.

World 4-2 6ft. Underground

An unholy purple glow has reanimated the corpses buried in this underground crypt. Maybe it's Dark Energon? Well, that did inspire the glow effect.

World 4-3 When the Lights Go Out

This stage was at a standstill for several days due to one of my original plans for the overall gimmick. The screen brightness effect in this level is linked to the P-Switch, which "turns the lights on," when pressed. The lights fade out as the Switch's timer ticks down, and the room becomes dark again when the P wears off. When the lights go out, something should happen, right? Well, things do happen. Previously inaccessible areas become accessible, allowing the player to progress through the level. I used a similar, but less refined version of this gimmick in Big Boo's Pyramid from Kola Kingdom Quest. I wanted to expand on it for this level though. I wanted the "lights going out" to not only effect the environment, but the enemies as well. Originally, I wanted to have some enemies change into others based on the status of the Switch. Unfortunately, there were no available sprites that allowed for such a thing. The closest thing available was a conditional sprite spawner, which could be set to use P-Switch status to determine what to spawn. That wasn't good enough though. Once it did its work and spawned the designated sprite, that sprite was left to its own devices. After losing patience with my request, I started thinking about Phanto. I'm far from an expert in 65c816 Assembly, but I did get far enough in learning to learn about conditional branching. Maybe I could edit the Phanto to simply check the P-Switch status instead of whether or not Mario was holding a key. After my initial attempts crashed the game, I studied the code a bit more thoroughly and discovered that an entire subroutine could be axed and replaced with only two lines of code to perform the required check. It was an experiment that paid off. I now had a Phanto that chased Mario It when the P-Switch was inactive. In other words, when the lights go out, Phanto gives chase. It's kinda reminiscent of those ghosts from Sandopolis Act 2 in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, but this level isn't nearly as annoying as that one.

Originally, the flashlight effect seen in the last screenshot was going to be my gimmick for the previous level. That changed when I went looking through SMWC's UberASM database and found the Fading Lights effect I ended up using. The flashlight effect was just too fitting for the World theme to just waste though, so I used it here. I also did another small tweak to the Dry Bones. I applied an ASM hackt

Originally, the flashlight effect seen in the last screenshot was going to be my gimmick for the previous level. That changed when I went looking through SMWC's UberASM database and found the Fading Lights effect I ended up using. The flashlight effect was just too fitting for the World theme to just waste though, so I used it here. I also did another small tweak to the Dry Bones. I applied an ASM hack that allowed their palettes to be modified with a tool called Tweaker. This, along with some color remapping in the graphics themselves, allowed me to give the two different types of Dry Bones different shoe colors. The ones who throw bones have green shoes, while the ones who stay on ledges have red ones.

Yep, I submitted a demo on SMWCentral.net. It's still awaiting moderation at the time of this writing. It might stay in the queue for a while considering how many other hacks are there.