New Stream Archive, In Which We Forge The Phantom Sword And Take On The Big Bad Bellum! And He Uses Every

new stream archive, in which we forge the Phantom Sword and take on the big bad Bellum! and he uses every dirty trick in the book...

dev commentary time! what you see here was actually the backup plan for secret coin #2. my original idea for the challenge was to clear Pineapple Pipeline without swimming in the waterfalls, by using portals to get around them and climb up the level!

unfortunately this idea required too many changes to the level, and would've been WAY too hard for players to solve. even once i added extra bridges and footholds, most of the portal tricks were too technical for casual players, so the whole idea had to be scrapped. besides, these challenges aren't supposed to require this much reworking – i'm trying not to overscope myself here!

the backup plan then was to clear a level without collecting any coins, and Watermelon Walls was the best candidate for this. it's quite an arbitrary challenge and doesn't have the intuition factor i was aiming for, but hey, i get to reuse a ton of scripting from the first secret coin!

speaking of the first secret coin, you may remember that i had to put those finnicky region triggers inside of every single pre-placed portal. this one was not nearly so involved, as i was already tracking when coins are collected – i could just hook into that.

i haven't mentioned this in the developer commentary yet, but Retrush adds extra time to the clock when you pick up coins! each coin adds one extra second to the clock – remember this is Mario seconds, which are like 0.4 real seconds, so it's really more of a small boost. but it can be a lifesaver for the tougher levels!

watch the timer and the coin counters as Mario picks up coins.

the way this works is that it watches the coin counter for any collected coins; if you have at least one coin, the game's event scripting will remove it and add one second to the clock instead. since it looks funny always having zero coins, the game instead has a second coin counter on the side of the screen using the collectibles system… which is kind of a hack, but hey, it works!

all i had to do for this challenge, then, was check if the event was fired to see if you've collected any coins. if it does, the challenge is failed and the secret coin despawns. simple as that.

way easier than placing region triggers inside of every single portal... wait, that sounds familiar.

i think my favorite part of this challenge is that i didn't alter the coin positions at ALL to make this work. most of these are even the same coin positions as they were nine years ago when i first made the level! it's kind of amazing how naturally the challenge works here, so i'm really happy with this choice.

this troll of a staircase at the beginning is possibly my favorite part of the challenge~

one last thing i want to talk about! both secret coins 1 and 2 have special handling for checkpoints. first off i had to add handling for dying and restarting from a checkpoint, which was only a small technical nightmare. but i decided to go the distance and also add handling for if you fail the challenge and restart from the previous checkpoint by dying on purpose – which was a MUCH larger feat.

this was accomplished by making the tracking variable, aptly named GoForASecret, a two-step failsafe. when you start the level from the beginning, the variable is set to 2, which starts the challenge. if you fail the challenge by collecting a coin, the variable is set to 1. at this point one of two things could happen:

if you reach the next checkpoint then the variable is set to 0, fully cancelling the secret challenge.

if you die while the variable is set to 1, it gets reset to 2 when you reload from the checkpoint, thus continuing the challenge.

it's a surprisingly robust system for how simple it is to write out! with this system in place, grabbing a coin by accident and dying before the next checkpoint will keep the challenge going, despite the fact that you grabbed a coin on the previous attempt.

so even though i wanted to keep these secret challenges from ballooning into too much extra work, i was still able to polish them up and make them fair challenges ✨

Secret Coin 2 (Watermelon Walls) | Retrush

The second secret mural asks us to complete this stage without collecting any coins. The only trouble is… This stage is full of coins that are easy to jump into by accident!

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.

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???

new stream archive, in which we save Hot Topic from certain destruction at the hands of the food court! uh, sorry, the food cult.

new pre-stream archive! an extra long one... in which my friends make me cry big happy tears 💖😭💖