Dev Commentary Time! Tilapia Trench Is Practically The Poster Child Of Remixes, To The Point That I Revealed

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~

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!

new stream archive! in which we get lost in both sidequests AND main quests, eventually finding our way to the wind element! spent a lot of time with my head in the clouds, ehehe~

dev commentary time! this remix was made early enough that the foreground tiles i mentioned in the main level, Saltine Sewer, were a core part of the remix as well. when i made the decision to cut them, i had to consider the implications in both levels; this kind of back-and-forth between designing the main level and the remix was pretty common!

the most important change is that the Buzzy Beetles hanging from the ceiling would spawn in behind the walls and crawl out into the open, as though they were hiding just out of view. this was a cool effect, but ultimately, axing the foreground tiles completely was more important than a cool effect in one level. so the beetle spawns were replaced with a canned animation, and i called it a day.

looks like i also changed the palette of the beetles; the black is slightly more readable on the gray walls, but the blue is significantly more readable over the dark background.

the red "graffiti" tiles that replaced the foreground tiles are of extra importance here, because the arrows point to the same locations where stars were in the main level – except the bricks are harder to see. did you notice that, in every remix, stars are always in the same locations as their main level counterpart?

the blocks are less obvious than before, but possibly more helpful.

the other big change is that the platforms and gel were in much more frustrating locations in the original version. like, what even is this nonsense? the new version is much more straightforwardly designed while still requiring the player to think about what they're doing.

between this and the old version of Marshmallow Mash-Up, i seem to have really enjoyed getting experimental with the platforms for some reason.

surprisingly, that's... all there is to go over this time! this is another one that i more or less got right when i designed it in old versions of Mari0, which should come as a surprise after everything i described in the previous dev commentary.

you might think that the remixes would have less commentary overall, considering most of the layout work went into the main levels... but i actually have a LOT to say about the rest of the remixes. these are more than just "hard mode" palette swaps, they have as much development history as anything else!

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! in true adhd fashion, Vinegar Void is one of the first levels that i finished for Retrush. originally titled Venison Void, it was a major casualty of weird version regressions, where updating to later versions of Mari0 required huge structural reworks.

the level features lots of purple gel, which flips Mario's gravity until he touches the ground. early versions took this to the extreme, with walls and pipes covered in purple gel from top to bottom – turning simple structures into logistics and navigational puzzles!

unfortunately, later versions of Mari0 made purple gel on walls almost entirely un-viable, so i had to pivot to ceiling gel / upside-down only. surprisingly there wasn't *too* much wall gel, but i did have to substantially rework several sections of the level over this.

the only remaining wall gel is in this tiny little U-turn, which is a small enough section that it doesn't fall apart and minimizes the chance of players running into issues.

before i show the other major section reworked for wall gel, let me mention another factor of the regression: old versions of Mari0 also let *enemies* climb all over wall gel, whereas enemies in new versions don't interact with any type of gel.

that's fine, because i didn't have any *normal* enemies climbing on purple gel...

one of Vinegar Void's many unique mechanics are these upside-down enemies with reversed gravity. this is a native feature of the enemies that has nothing to do with purple gel.

these "gravigoombas" (etc) were made by setting the gravity of the enemy to a negative number, tricking the game into reversing its gravity.

now, take a moment before scrolling, and guess what happens if you put THAT on purple gel.

—

—

—

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You Get This.

so returning to the purple gel on walls, this middle section had pipes slathered in the stuff. and the only enemy in the whole section, was a single gravigoomba... bouncing all over the insides of the passages.

absolutely absurd nonsense. i hate it so much. i love it so much.

the section that replaces it is frankly less interesting, but taps a little of that original "navigation puzzle" intent with the gravity gel to get the player to think on their feet. not half bad for only being limited to two directions!

honestly, though, the level as a whole is probably better off after the conversion; limiting my options made me seriously consider how much purple gel i was using across the board, and limit it to the best interactions i could muster rather than just slathering it everywhere.

the last major change to the level is the vanishing tiles; the old versions used to blink in and out, which was hard to look at after a while. the new versions palette fade, which was an inspired choice, and fits the space theme quite nicely~

outside of this list, the vast majority of the level is the same as it was originally, which is super impressive for being one of the first levels completed. i feel like i balanced it really well, all things considered! a great penultimate challenge leading into the grand finale.

Vinegar Void (4-3) | Retrush

A true test of talent, this orbital station features gel that flips your gravity, giant laser cannons, and line after line of vanishing blocks. Altogether, it's an *incredibly* satisfying and impressive-looking run!

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!