New Stream Archive!... Oh God. It's The True Arena. God Save Us All.

new stream archive!... oh god. it's the true arena. god save us all.

new pre-stream archive! in which i talk about my confidence going into this attempt at the True Arena…

dev commentary time – and yes, these get commentary too! secret coins didn't exist at all in the original plan for Retrush, even after i added the remixes. they were only added this year, as one last bit of "scope creep" during the final push to finish Retrush… probably around February? so two or three months tops before its release in April.

at the time i was thinking about the red coin remixes and what the scope and purpose of 100%ing the mappack would be. i did the math in my head, and if there's 16 levels with 8 red coins, that means there's 96 red coins total, right? what if there were 4 more coins hidden in previous levels to bring the total up to 100? that'd be an easy way to count what 100% means!

…well, no, my math was WAY off. 16 levels × 8 red coins = 128 total red coins, not 96. even so, the idea of adding four secret coins stuck around, as it matches up with hiding one per world. that would add some last minute replayability!

but do i need last minute replayability? you may remember back to previous commentaries where i discussed the consequences of adding remixes and a fourth world to the scope of the mappack… notably that they're a big reason Retrush took nine years to release. why would i let myself add even more to it?? what if adding secret coins made it take even longer???

the reason i allowed myself to do this was as follows:

i'm not making any new levels or even changing their layouts. i'm just adding secret challenges, which is more of a technical thing.

i'm only doing four secret challenges. i'm not doubling the amount of content or whatever.

it's a well-formed vision. i know exactly where i want to hide them, and exactly what the reward should be.

so i allowed it, and got to work on adding the secret coins. i decided that it should be an open progression; the game doesn't tell you where to find the "mural room" with the secret coin hints until the credits roll after the final remix, but there are several ways to find it early (like clearing the last remix first). if you do find it early, the murals aren't revealed until you clear all of that world's remixes. all of this uses systems that i was already leveraging to track cleared remixes, so it had minimal technical cost.

if you get here early, the mural is obscured.

my choices for the challenges themselves were twofold: one, they should all require portals. two, they should be challenge runs that a clever player might think of on their own. i didn't always accomplish the latter, but the former is how we arrive at the first secret coin challenge: clear Nectarine Nocturne without using the pre-placed portals.

it was really hard to word the hint in a way that people would understand intuitively, without knowing what a "pre-placed portal" is. i'm still not quite sure i hit the mark.

this challenge was mostly inspired by a realization i had while finishing the level layout: you could portal around almost all of the pre-placed portals, except one – the pipe jump. at the time, i was not adding secret coins, but i did open up the top with a flashing neon light to let players go over it for potential speedrunning purposes. who knows, maybe someone would find out that going over the top is somehow faster than using the portals! i have no idea if it's faster or not, i was just… leaving the door open, so to speak.

before the secret coins existed, the dot on top of the wall was supposed to be a hint that you could go over it.

of course, once i added the secret coins, i made the challenge require going over. but the fact that this route wasn't initially designed for a secret challenge… means it's accidentally the toughest part!

the pipe on the ceiling was added near the end of development.

on our first playtest, my partner @harmonyfriends didn't realize you could just scale the wall using portals. why would that be possible? you can't do that in Portal! so i added an extra pipe for players to be able to infinite freefall and then fly over the wall, which is a much more momentum-based solution reminiscent of actual Portal puzzles… though it's pretty hard to land somewhere safe when you come back down!

but this is also the only part of the level where you have to skip two pre-placed portals, and the time is incredibly tight. first you have to figure out a way over the wall, then you have to do it in a timely enough manner to get past the second part! it's a lot to do with just 40 Mario seconds on the clock (16 real seconds), and i really wish i had bumped it up to 50 for release.

what it looks like to scale the wall... as well as the rest of the section.

for the most part, the rest of the challenge is SUPER fun and well-balanced! but it might be the hardest challenge of them all just for this one section, and that makes it extra annoying that this is the first secret coin. not a great impression!! oh well, if i ever make a 2.0 release i can easily bump up the time here.

one last thing i want to mention is how this challenge works under the hood; Mari0 has an event-based scripting system that i used to track challenges, but there's no way to tell if the player has entered a portal using this system. instead, every single portal has a region trigger inside of it… which was really hard to balance. where does it count as entering the portal? what if you put your own portal on the back side of a pre-placed one? the whole solution is really brittle… and i'm always afraid that someone is gonna get all the way to the end and not see the secret coin.

note the tiny orange rectangle in the middle-left of the pipe.

the good news is, everyone i've watched has succeeded! even when i was afraid the system would fail on me. that probably means it's fine, right?

Secret Coin 1 (Nectarine Nocturne) | Retrush

You thought we were done? Guess again – I hid one last secret after the credits roll! The first mural asks us to clear this stage without using its pre-placed portals… a daunting task!

returning with an absolute BANGER of a post

Featuring levels set all over the globe, Super Mario Odyssey was originally going to be named Super Mario World until Miyamoti realized he already named something that.

i need life to slow down a bit so i'm postponing sunday stream again. sorry y'all! we'll return to kirby next week. and i'll get friday's VOD posted very soon as backup

A bunch of smaller updates to the blog...

the work never stops when you launch a website! ever since the re-launch of skysometric.co, i've found all sorts of edge cases and missing pieces to add to the site's styling. most of them are minor updates and polish, but here's a few pieces of design language that i'm especially proud of...

"Follow This Blog On Tumblr," Front And Center

it's not obvious enough at a glance that this site is entirely built on and powered by Tumblr, so i've added a big "follow this blog on Tumblr" button to the front page that makes it as clear as possible. plus it pulls double duty as self promotion~

on the right is what it looks like when it's highlighted. it uses the same basic styling as the post tags, but with an outline on hover.

Usernames

it turns out that tumblr applies a special css class when you @ someone in a post, so i've hooked into that to make them look fancier than just regular links! this way it's easier to find and follow my friends 💖

In This House We Love And Appreciate Our Friends

Light Theme Improvements

both of the screenshots above use the light theme, which has been punched up pretty significantly since launch – i might actually like it more than the dark theme now...???

you can switch themes with the toggle on the left menu. eventually i'd like to make it automatically choose the theme based on your system preference, like the links page currently is...

Asks

a lot of the styling on my site is simply built on top of the default Tumblr blog theme styling, which it uses as a fallback for anything that i haven't added my own touches to. this was the case with asks, which i only did a minimal amount of work at launch to make sure they followed the right color scheme – otherwise, they looked exactly like asks do on the default Tumblr theme.

now that i'm actually getting asks, though, i decided to punch them up and make them look more like something that fits my page!

i still can't believe the CSS standard lets you control the radius on each individual corner of a box, but doesn't let you add an outline to text. what even are their priorities over there?

i still have some more work to do – like making sure this supports asks with media – but it's a good start! and i'm especially proud of some of the technical work that went into this behind the scenes, especially with making reblogs of asks look nice...

Polls & Source Links

one of the best looking features i added in the 1.0 version of the site was making the "Read More" a large banner link at the bottom of each post. when it came time to add support for polls, the same styling was a natural fit!

in both of these dark theme examples, the banner link is highlighted. when not highlighted, it blends into the border along the sides of each post.

but there's one other, less obvious place that it's useful for: Tumblr's "content source" link, which allows you to cite a source for your post. these content sources are automatically applied to audio posts linked from other sites... like the old music posts i used to link from soundcloud! this was also a natural fit for the "read more" styling, and a great way to support my very oldest posts and keep them looking fresh ✨

funny how i was promoting my partner's work, YEARS before we were even partners. some things never change!

Updated Icons

the custom icon system is one of my favorite features of the site, especially because of how easy it's been to add and update icons over time. one day i'll go over these icons in greater detail – i actually have a whole post series about my the making of my graphic design style in the pipeline, but like most things, it's only halfway done...

for now, though, i've added new icons for some of my favorite game series, like a triforce for zelda! and i've updated some icons that were incomplete or placeholders, like this "favorites" ribbon. the old icon is okay... but the new sparkling heart is much more representative of me!

the old one has been relegated to "achievements," which is a tag i don't use nearly often enough.

i've also got a new "videos" icon, instead of the placeholder YouTube logo – and the new icon might be one of my best icons yet??

there's even a second version of the icon for gaming-related videos, like stream archives.

Tags And Styling

over the years my tagging system has changed quite substantially, in accordance with the changing algorithms of Tumblr itself. and over the years, the actual posts themselves have changed formats... sometimes breaking the formatting on my old posts!!

so i went back through my archives and manually verified EVERY SINGLE POST to make sure it had relevant tags and correct styling. that's 10 years of archives! and memories! and dinosaurs. oh LORD some of those old posts are dinosaurs.

on a quick tangent, i'm approaching 700 posts rather rapidly! and i'm approaching a MUCH more important milestone very soon...

More To Come

those username links look so nice that i'd love to extend them to other places on the site, like asks and reblogs! some of my oldest posts still don't look great and i'd like to add more features to them! some visually similar elements like tags and username links don't actually function the same under the hood! there's still a LOT more work to do, and tumblr's feature-set hasn't gotten any smaller.

but there's two specific features on my list that i haven't gotten to, from way back during the concept phase: dynamic search, and related posts.

Dynamic Search

for the dynamic search, i'd like to make it so that typing in the search box (see the right menu) would update the list of tags in the menu to match what you've typed! that way you can search for more specific posts and tags than is currently possible. maybe the default tag list could even show random tags to encourage more discovery...

unfortunately that kind of searching requires me to use a little more javascript than i'd like, but i'm determined to make it work somehow! it's not hard to pull the list of tags from the API, i just need some free time and energy to hook that into the actual tag list. hopefully one day!

Related Posts

the default Tumblr theme has a section under each post that shows related posts with similar tags. by default it loads The Whole Post for each of the 10 related posts it pulls up, and the end result... doesn't look great, tbh!

on the Tumblr app, the related posts section shows little snippets of each post in a grid. this has a much better look and feel, and it's something i'd like to make work on my blog theme.

this shows up to 9 posts, depending on which posts match the tags of the main post.

the obvious idea is, of course, to make these look like hexagons. but that makes the content of the snippets way too small! i'll have to experiment with a few different methods and see how it looks in practice.

this is a lot more concept and styling work than the dynamic search, but i'd say they're about equal overall in terms of total effort. both of these would be major additions to the site! hopefully this all provides a little peek into where i'm going with all this ✨

The Site Redesign Is Working

my ultimate goal when i redesigned the site was very simple: i wanted to make a blog that i would make me want to post more than i had in the few years before it launched. and so far, that's actually working – i've posted more this year than i have in any of the other 10 years i've had this blog!

at present, a lot of those posts are stream archives... but the needle is slowly shifting, with a lot of written content and series in the pipeline. knowing they'll look all pretty on the site is a big part of what powers me to write them 💖

that means that all of this work has been worth it. the four years i spent trying to get this site redesign off the ground paid off against all odds; the extra work i put in to polish the little things make me want to use those extra little features; and the motivation it gives me makes me want to finally write and set myself free of the creative slump i was in for several years.

so thank you all for sticking around... cause i've barely gotten started~