Dev Commentary Time! Earl-Grey Electricity Was Originally Going To Be Named Espresso Electricity Until

dev commentary time! Earl-Grey Electricity was originally going to be named Espresso Electricity until I realized that the "Espresso" name works better for the train remix. plus, Earl-Grey Electrici-Tea is a much punnier name~

like many of the original 12 levels, this one was originally going to be a lot meaner, but in this case some of it approaches damn near sadism – it was one of the last few levels, after all, and i wanted to really test the player. too hard.

for starters, the original level didn't have any indication of where the portals were; they were pretty much all in the same spots in the original, but with no way to tell where to go. thank goodness one of my playtesters brought this up!

the level had spinies in some pretty mean configurations, either placed in transitions where you couldn't see, or literally leaping out of the maze to ambush the player. pretty gnarly! most of them were either replaced with goombas with updated timing, or just removed outright.

but worst of all? this section in the middle with the SLAM DUNK had no supporting platforms underneath. you were expected to jump on the edges of portals to get across, literally jumping across platforms that are a single pixel wide!!

this recontextualizes the SLAM DUNK text itself: it was to laugh at you for dropping in the middle and falling to your death. how rude!!!

even when i added platforms underneath to catch your fall… at first, they were falling platforms, which means you had to be quick. stand there for even a split second too long and the platform falls too far to jump out of the hoop. still recoverable, but still WAY too mean.

the cherry on top of this messy sundae is that the maze after the hoops was an overly complex disaster of engineering that i had to map out on paper to build. each portal goes somewhere completely random, and the obtuse solution is to JUMP out of one of the portals. why???

the straightforward replacement – which i'm really proud of for being just the right level of headscratcher – was actually made for the remix at first, and backported to the original level when i realized that, god, this is WAY better than that wacky maze.

to wrap things up i have two pieces of cut content – one is this sketch of a spring-focused level structure! i'm pretty sure i sketched this one day when i got stuck about halfway through the level, and then… i forgot about it by the time i resumed working on the level. lmao

the other is this ANCIENT gif from before the level bg was locked down… at the very beginning of the level with the split path, this bullet bill was intended to fly around in the unused grid cells. sadly it was removed because it was too easy for the bill to escape its loop!

Earl-Grey Electricity (4-2) | Retrush

This storm-driven power plant is a maze of portals and platforms aplenty, making the routes hard to follow and the shortcuts even harder to spot. Running this level takes a keen eye and solid execution!

dev commentary time! Tilapia Trench is practically the poster child of remixes, to the point that i revealed this remix first and crammed it in all the trailers that i could find room for. like, a desert level that turns into an ocean? hot DAMN that's sick!! i wish i remembered what inspired the idea initially... it might as well have come to me in a vision!

have i posted this gif enough yet? no? here it is again.

unlike the 12 levels in the original plan, this one was made with remixes in mind from the get-go. that means a lot of the base layout of the level was already designed to be "punched up" in the remix, like this vertical pit that forms the centerpiece of the level. in the original the challenge is to avoid falling back into the plant at the bottom; in the remix, the eel is designed to harass you no matter how far up you are.

also love how this section has a shortcut designed to test your knowledge of standing vs running jumps...

speaking of the eels, these are a fully custom sprite! i think this might be my first character animation ever, so i'm pretty proud of what i was able to accomplish here. especially considering i chose the whole "recolored SMB1 tiles" aesthetic to avoid making my own sprites in the first place...

CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP

i also found some really old iterations on the eels buried deep in my screenshots folder; this first attempt was designed to be one tile wide, just like the plants (16 pixels). these don't look scary at all, they're just adorable!

nibble nibble nibble

the final eel sprites are one and a half tiles wide (24 pixels) to make them bigger and more imposing, as well as give myself more room to add detail. for the most part, though, they carry the same style as the smaller version... i knew i was on to something, i just couldn't make it fit in 16 pixels!

but getting back to the level... designing the base layout around making it remix-able means that i pretty much knew what i wanted to do the moment i started working on the remix. i wanted to focus on enemy bounces and flying gracefully over the whole level, just like you're swimming – even though you can't swim in this one.

and since i made this back in older versions of Mari0, that means i was using the old red coins... which can't move. so to build the level around enemy bounces, a lot of red coins were just floating in the middle of the screen, out of reach of a regular jump. you needed to get a running jump to reach them, or even bounce off an enemy at the right time! and if you missed, you had just a few stressful seconds to come up with a backup plan, or double back and jump again.

the first and second coins, respectively. they're too far up to grab from the ground.

this was... fine, when i wasn't designing the remixes for casual players to complete. but when i switched gears, i wanted to make it more fair for players seeing the level for the first time, while preserving the speedrun flow that i had already built the layout around.

that's when it hit me – i'm using a new red coin object, and i can do whatever i want. so i made them slowly drop into the ocean from the top of the screen!

left is the first coin, right is the second; top is the fast way, bottom is taking it slow.

it took a little work to line up the gravity so that speedruns collect them in the same places, but the result plays AMAZINGLY well and i'm really happy with how it satisfies both types of players. skilled players can grab them in style; casual players can wait for them to drop to the sea floor. it's way more forgiving and way more dynamic!

not discussed: these old cannons used to fire bullet bills underwater. they were changed to fire more cheep cheeps in the final... to feed the eels, of course.

in the old version, some red coins were already on the sea floor to begin with, caught in little corners that were admittedly a pain to get into. the new dynamic red coins allowed me to rethink those as well, giving skilled players a chance to nab them with a jump before they land in the corners. that makes running the level even more fun!

pretty slick jump, if i do say so myself.

all in all, between the main level and the remix, i think Dijon Dunes and Tilapia Trench are among the most polished levels in all of Retrush. i really pushed my limits here – inspired themes, custom sprites, a fantastic dual-purpose layout, and then elevating the remix with dynamic red coins... definitely one of my biggest level design accomplishments 💖

Tilapia Trench (A-3) | Retrush

The fish might be swimming in this sandy reef... but you still have normal gravity! Some well-timed enemy bounces will help you catch Red Coins dropping in from the top of the level, making for a fun, dynamic run~

Mango Mantle (A-2) | Retrush

Located deep beneath a castle, this twisty passage features platforms and gel that try to slow your descent enough to bleed the timer dry. Don't let it get to your head, or the enemies will get a bite of you instead!

dev commentary time! as we start going through the remixes it's important to keep in mind how much of a technical marvel these have always been, both in old and new versions of the engine... in ways that frequently made it a headache to work with them.

current versions of the red coins are a fully custom object – collecting one does all of the work behind the scenes to adjust the timer, spawn the flashing time indicator, and count both how many and which ones have been collected. they can be collected in all the ways a regular coin can – such as being bumped from below – and they can also be "precollected" when restarting from a checkpoint. there's even dynamic red coins set up to fly around or fall in from the top of the screen!

new "single-object" red coin on the left, old hacky nonsense on the right.

suffice to say, all of that was practically impossible in old versions of Mari0. the old red coins were a much different beast; they were in fact regular coin tiles with a custom graphic and a region trigger attached to several stage entities that would adjust the timer and track collection. there was no way to make the coins move from their spot, and no way to "precollect" them from checkpoints – meaning no checkpoints in remixes AT ALL.

worse still, those old red coins were very challenging just to add to the level in the first place. let's say i placed one already and i wanted to move it later; there's no way to just "move" the coin and the entities attached, so i'd have to delete it completely and replace each component in the new location.

on top of that, the size of the coin's hitbox is less than one tile, and the region trigger couldn't be made that small in the editor... so when i was ready to "lock in" the red coins, i would open the level in a text editor and manually adjust the size of the region triggers. yes, really. (pictured on the right is how i got "bumping" the coins below the bricks to work – the region trigger extends below the brick!)

the little orange squares over the top of the red coin show the size of the region trigger. it's tiny.

anyway, you get the point by now. the old red coins were inflexible – hard to place, hard to replace, and hard to find good places for. but i was ambitious enough that i did all that work anyway... i finished HALF of the remixes in the old version! and Applesauce Autumn is probably the best of those early attempts, because it has the least changes of them all.

most of what i did to patch up this level (besides smooth out the enemies a bit) was add things that i wanted to do in the original but couldn't, like… pre-placed Koopa shells. can you believe something that simple was impossible in older versions of Mari0???

also pictured is a star that was removed due to being too hard to reach.

adding red coin bits was also a pretty major change – those weren't possible in old versions either. the old red coin location was just floating over these bricks, just out of reach for anything but a running jump. really mean for being the first remix!

there also wasn't a koopa shell here originally. i like how the shell bounces around after it's kicked, meaning the floor here is never truly safe~

finally there's the two coins between the pipes, which had their times adjusted. in the new version, both give 20 time. in the old version, the first gives 30... and the second gives 10, which was purposefully not enough time to reach the next coin.

no old version needed, the difference is just numbers.

why did i do this? i wanted the player to puzzle out why the first one was giving way too much time and the second wasn't giving enough, with the eventual solution being to grab the one on the right first and double back for the one on the left. i wanted the player to discover this early on in the remixes... because i intended to pull a similar stunt in several remixes!!

suffice to say this did NOT survive into the final release. it's purposefully obtuse, it adds nothing to the level, and it's impossible to tell this is happening on your first time through because the coins aren't marked.

a recurring theme throughout these remixes is going to be how much more mean they used to be, because when i first made the remixes, i did not intend for anyone but the most hardcore challengers to tackle them. these weren't supposed to be for casual players; that's what the main levels were for. besides, it's not like i could add checkpoints or anything...

well, thank god i eventually could, because that got me to rethink practically all of the remixes.

Applesauce Autumn (A-1) | Retrush

Welcome back to familiar plains of bricks and pipes... with a seasonal shift! This first Red Coin Remix is crawling with Spinies, all lined up for a good old shell combo. Just watch where you kick those things!

dev commentary time! Kolache Keep was originally going to be called Ravioli Rampart – and stop me if you've heard this before, but this level was a LOT meaner under its original name. it needed lots of love to work into something that was fair to play!

the most obvious difference is that the animated tiles worked in completely unique ways – the original lava bridges would get hot over time and kill while they were flashing. compare the original opening section to the final, which are both teachable moments like Cinnamon Cavern!

(unrelated, you can also see in the gifs that the level featured spinies – the enemy choices were much meaner across the board, but they all got scaled back for the final.)

another major difference is that the old animated tiles were ONE cycle, whereas the new version uses two alternating cycles. in this middle section, for example, you were pretty much always forced to wait for the cycle at least once, even while speedrunning! much less forgiving…

changing the animated tiles to use an alternating cycle wasn't too hard – it uses the same timer as the single cycle, which means all the speedrun strats line up perfectly with the cycles from the old version. straightfoward to update and plays way better now!

one thing that was inadvertently made worse by the new animated tiles is this section with the locked door near the end. all of the old tiles were solid, meaning there was only one way through the room, to the switch, and back over to the door.

in the new version, the drop-through bridges add a new shortcut! …which people often think is the correct route on their first time through. oops! so i see a lot of people get confused about where to go here, even after i opened the room up and added coins to clarify the route.

either way, for the most part, the new animated tiles are a HUGE upgrade over the old ones for more than just the obvious – the old tiles were very touchy and killed the player over any little misstep. by comparison, the new tiles still kill the player… but only by falling in~

animated tiles aren't the only big change to the level – there were also some layout changes. like these, uh. what do i call those random floating tiles up there? i have no idea why i added them in the first place. so i gave them some context and added a bit of challenge to them!

there's also this setpiece, which was a stressful balancing act across a bunch of fire blasters. besides the way they were arranged to fire at the player on the lower steps, these were removed because i don't like making the player platform on one-tile-wide platforms over pits!

this was changed to tie into the level's gimmick more closely and rely more on good jump timing; the bridge alternates sides while a blaster fires over your head. still tense, but much safer, and way easier to speedrun!

honestly, the only remnants of how mean this level used to be are the fire blasters themselves, which fire quite fast and without proper warning! but even though i forgot to tone them back, there are so few of them left in the level that they don't ruin the experience.

so hopefully by now you have a good idea of how i go about polishing these levels! a lot of simple tweaks that feel big and make a big difference when the player actually gets to them… while preserving the flow of the original as much as possible~

Kolache Keep (3-4) | Retrush #Mari0

This classic castle features bridges that sink behind the lava on a timer, meaning less room to slip past the fire bars and other enemies. The cycles all line up for an impressive run, but the execution is extra tight!

Earl-Grey Electricity (4-2) | Retrush

This storm-driven power plant is a maze of portals and platforms aplenty, making the routes hard to follow and the shortcuts even harder to spot. Running this level takes a keen eye and solid execution!