Dev Commentary Time! Yes, Even The Credits Get Dev Commentary.

dev commentary time! yes, even the credits get dev commentary.

purposefully crusty, as all memes should be.

gotta be honest, i put off making the credits cutscene until the very end – not because i didn't know who all would be in the credits, but because i thought it would be challenging to time everything to the song. the original plan was to make all the credits fly in from the side on the beat, but the main credits list was too long for that, so i made it a standard credits roll instead. this greatly reduced the complexity, making it so that i could, you know, actually finish the credits in a timely manner. so it wasn't so bad!

something i learned from making this is that juggling three credits lists as live, updated documents – one of which is a pre-baked image, like this credits roll – is kind of tedious and should be avoided at all costs. i was still adding stuff at the end of development, after all! but next time i do this i think i won't bake the image until everything else is finished and the credits are finalized, and just use a placeholder instead if i need to block out the credits in advance.

internally, the entire credits roll is one single, giant "custom enemy."

the credits level itself is a plain old grassy plain, mostly to make it easy to lay out the cutscene and make sure the credits themselves took up the maximum possible real estate on screen. one potential idea i had early on was that Mario would walk back through little snippets of all the levels, but Mari0's cutscene system is too brittle for that – if Mario got stuck anywhere, he'd stop walking entirely and the camera would keep going without him! instead, this idea got repurposed for the warp zone.

speaking of the warp zone, i never did get to talk about that, did i? and there's not much else to say about the credits, they kind of speak for themselves. so let's hijack this post and talk about the making of the warp zone!

seriously i haven't thought about this meme in ages, i don't know why it came up for this post specifically.

the very earliest iteration of the warp zone, back when Retrush was just 12 levels, was a grid of horizontal pipes with some text and extra platforms. this was simply meant to be an easy way of accessing the levels after you beat the game, with no frills or extra features. the pipes were color coded using the pipes from the original level, which was a neat touch!

each world is sorted by column; worlds 2 and 3 are off to the right.

once the remixes rolled around, the idea for accessing them was that you could press a switch to push the pipe back into the wall, and then going in would take you to the remix. pipes in Mari0 are based on position, so changing where the pipe is can change where it takes you!

static images, because there's no animation for this. it would've used the same tech as the pipes at the end of each remix.

once i added an extra world, this warp zone was too small to accommodate all 16 levels, so it needed a refresh. i was envisioning a credits level around this point too, so i knew i wanted to represent the levels with little organic snippets instead of just pipes! but i procrastinated hard on updating it, since some of the levels weren't done – so the new warp zone wasn't actually started until this year.

you know how i've written a few times now that i had to redo some level or another from scratch and i was super intimidated by it, but when i actually sat down to do it i did the whole thing in a single evening? i thought this was going to be another quick refresh like that… and it ended up taking me a week straight of working on nothing but the warp zone.

first i had to lay out the main levels in each world, showcasing as much of their level design as possible in a way that flows from one to the next. this was challenging enough and probably took me two days to finish all four worlds, but i was super proud of it when i was done!

did you notice that the warp zone wraps around the edges so you can get around more quickly?

then i had to find a way to do the same for the remixes without it feeling stale. i decided that the remixes should be the same layout in reverse – and bear in mind, there's no "flip horizontally" button in the level editor. i did all this by hand, again, for all four worlds of the remixes!

sadly i couldn't time the two gifs to be in perfect sync. it's pretty close, at least.

next up was some technical work to make the pipes function. warping to a level is super simple, but having the level take you back is not natively supported by the engine; i had to add special handling for every single level that takes you back to the pipe you came in from. for the main levels, that also meant ensuring that clearing the level in a normal playthrough takes you to the next level, but clearing the level from the warp zone takes you back to the warp zone. it was no small feat!

following that, i wanted to make the warp zone for Marshmallow Mash-Up and Wasabi Wrap-Up extra special, so i made several dozen animated tiles that glitch out as you walk by, for that special touch. i did not have to do this whatsoever and it took a few more late nights than i would've preferred in order to make all the tiles, but i love how it turned out and i wouldn't have it any other way!

the tiles get a little messed up if you move around in the same place too much, but that just adds to the glitch aesthetic.

finally, i wanted to add some extras and notices to the warp zone, so i added an Options section above the lobby with a toggle for disabling checkpoints and a way to watch the credits again (which only shows up if you've already seen the credits, of course). altogether this was mostly a lot of technical polish, but it's an important part of what makes the warp zone special!

i still wish Mari0 had some kind of autosave...

and indeed, there's one important thing the warp zone and the credits have in common – that being the joy that blossomed in my heart when i finally finished them and started walking around the warp zone, or started playing through to the credits for playtesting. both times, i said out loud:

"Oh my God, this is like a real video game. Retrush is a real video game! Retrush is real!! I can't believe this is actually real and not just some random ideas floating around in my head!!!"

in other words, the warp zone and the credits are both the bow on the whole Retrush package, elevating the entire level pack beyond just a collection of levels into something truly special. so of course they get dev commentary – i'm as proud of them as i am of everything else!

Credits | Retrush

That's all, folks! Here's a list of everyone who helped make this mappack possible – it's surprisingly long! I guess that's what happens when you use so much custom music...

new pre-stream archive – in which i discuss some favorite OCRemix albums, sort through my intimidation of playing the True Arena, and detail the return of Now U Know Gaming!

the winning attempt and the final fight are both timestamped for your convenience~

if nothing else, the final fight is worth watching on its own. i might even have to do a highlights video just for it...

new stream archive, in which i conquer the True Arena… but not before the game calls my bluff.

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!

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...