Returning With An Absolute BANGER Of A Post

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.

having that pikmin meme song stuck in my head all week has been driving me crazy... but this morning it helped me wake up from a nightmare where a mad scientist was trying to jab me with a needle of dubious contents???

you've heard of McDonald's Hamburger, now get ready for McDonald's Hangover! new Adult McDrinks bar coming in 2024

🎵 pikmin 3 deluxe and hey pikmin,

the mad scientist's face contorts in irritation.

🎶 pikmin temptation and pikmin sin,

the dream begins to fade to black...

🎵 pikmin on your ipad it's called pikmin bloom,

i can feel my pillow again...!

🎶 brand new crossover with pikmin and doom!

i check the clock. it's freaking 6am

having that pikmin meme song stuck in my head all week has been driving me crazy... but this morning it helped me wake up from a nightmare where a mad scientist was trying to jab me with a needle of dubious contents???

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!

i thought i used to hate wings. like, the food. they're messy and hard to eat and they hit on so many little autistic pain points that i have with food. i used to dread getting them with my family, and as an adult i never went out of my way to get them.

but i finally let myself try them again tonight... and it turns out they're pretty good! but that's because i got to try them on my terms.

i got boneless wings.

"now sky!" you might say. "those aren't really wings. they're basically chicken nuggets."

Yeah, I Know. i heard that every time we got wings as a family – and that's exactly why i never got to try them. i always got the regular wings instead... and i hated it!

i've always struggled with eating meat with bones in it. when i have to pick at my food in order to eat it, my stomach begins to shut off and say that i'm not actually hungry... so i only get through half of it before i can't eat any more. plus the fact that they're already messy means that all that picking makes my hands greasy and i don't like how it feels when my hands are a mess and—

"why don't you just Eat Them," my dad would say. how do i answer that? i am trying to eat them. it is not good for my autism. (i did not have the words for this as a child.)

this isn't even the only food i have this struggle with – i live in the south where crawfish boils are a crowd pleaser, and as much as i love the taste, i can't eat enough of them before my body shuts off. it takes me too long to peel each one to reach the meat on the inside!

so why didn't i just get boneless wings, if i have this problem with so many foods? i still don't fully know. but the echoes i hear from my memories tell me that it's because they're "just chicken nuggets," and if we're gonna get wings, we should get wings.

so the one thing that would've helped my autism was simply shamed out of my life.

...to my dad's credit, he did use that mindset to get me to try a lot of things that were outside my comfort zone as a kid. him telling me "you don't go to a chinese restaurant to get chicken nuggets" is one of my formative memories, and choosing the cashew chicken that day is a big part of why i love chinese food as an adult!

but i didn't choose to go to that chinese restaurant. and i didn't choose to get wings back then either. i might have handled it a lot better if i had chosen it on my own terms. and what better proof do i have than tonight, when i finally chose to try boneless wings, despite the shame it was associated with?

i could have shared their joy for wings as a kid if i had simply had that chance... but at least i can enjoy them now.