Levels - Tumblr Posts
Secret Ending | Retrush
After clearing EVERYTHING in Retrush, we arrive at the end of the road… where I pour my heart out to the player. Whether you've unlocked this yourself or simply watched along, thank you for joining me on this journey 💖
(Note that the "perfect stars" you get for clearing the stages without dying are NOT REQUIRED to see this ending – you simply need to clear all 16 remixes and get all 4 secret coins, no matter how many deaths it takes.)
dev commentary returns! look, i was legally obligated to go for the rainbow road thing, okay? even calling it Raspberry Rainbow was a purposeful candy-themed callback to make it as sweet and indulgent as possible. not to mention the choice of music – Bulby has done 8-bit covers of pretty much every Rainbow Road out there, but i felt this one (from Mario Kart 8) was the best fit for a hyped up sugar rush space race!
since Vinegar Void was finished so early, Raspberry Rainbow was one of the first remixes i started on, mostly to nail down the custom palette for the blocks – the main level's alternating gray blocks gave me exactly six colors worth of room to fill out with a rainbow pattern. it was challenging to find a way to fit all six colors in order using NES limitations and still have it look good, but i think the results speak for themselves!
honestly? screenshots don't do it justice. it looks way better in motion.
just like with Vinegar Void, most of my initial ideas for this level involved gratuitous use of purple gel and gravity mechanics – and when i updated to newer versions of Mari0, i had to scrap most of those dreams. i did get to try a few wacky layouts though… like this gravity loop made of fading paths!
on a technical level, this loop is one of the wackiest things i've ever made. why does the purple gel float in the air like that?
just like with Sonic, the idea is that you'd jump in from the left and make your way around the loop to the top where the red coin is, then come out the right side. it looks cool and it sounds cool on paper, but it had way too many side effects – namely, that it's hard to get in and out of the loop, and it's hard to keep your balance once you're in the loop. so even if i could use as much purple gel as i wanted, this probably wouldn't have made it to the final anyway!
there's no loop like this in Vinegar Void, so adding a loop would've been a pretty radical reinvention of the layout… even though the point of the remixes is to keep the same layout. but the idea is that i'd pretend those fading paths were objects instead of tiles, with the intent to replace all of the existing fading paths with new ones for the remix. really this is just a lot of internal rules nonsense to justify the use of more ridiculous fading paths than the base level has.
but that didn't actually work out! it turns out the existing fading paths are really technical and hard to replace. besides, preserving as much of the base layout as possible helps the player know where they're going and what they're doing when they, you know, can't see the paths half the time. so i made only minor adjustments to some areas and left most of the fading paths untouched! (which is a lesson i wish i'd learned in time for Starfruit Scanlines…)
similar layouts, but one is fruit punch flavor.
speaking of minor adjustments, this level has one of my favorite examples of minor adjustments in the entire mappack! when i first asked @harmonyfriends to playtest the level for me, she got stuck at the section below, with the star shards / red coin bits – it was too hard to get through the fading paths. this wasn't a problem with the main level, just the remix… even though the section is nearly identical. the only difference is that you are required to get the red coin bits, whereas you're not required to get the star shards.
i watched my partner struggle a lot with this section, ultimately deciding to give up with the attempt... and i immediately knew how to fix it. i made just ONE minor adjustment – moving a single red coin bit from a lower step to a higher step. can you spot the difference?
i asked her to play it again… and she breezed through the same section without a sweat, just because i moved that one piece. how is that possible?
well, moving that one red coin bit completely changes the way that the player approaches the fading paths! when it's on the lower step, the fastest way to the next red coin bit involves jumping up through the fading path, which is a little finnicky in this game's physics engine. by moving the coin bit, i moved the player's line of focus – now the next coin bit is across from the player, and they can simply jump over to the next platform!
old path on the left, new path on the right.
i am so proud of this little change… these are the little things i've learned to spot in ten years of working with level design! this is the culmination of all my time working on Retrush and beyond! i'm far from perfect but i've come so far, and i love being able to see that reflected in real time ✨
Raspberry Rainbow (D-3) | Retrush
A radiant run through space with even more colorful lights flying by to cheer you on! Wait, those are lasers. Wait, that's a LOT of lasers holy frick
dev commentary time! the ultimate final challenge of Retrush is itself a remix of remixes, where every single mashed-up tile from Marshmallow Mash-Up was updated to use the remixed palettes from their respective levels. it was a massive undertaking! and it could only have started once i had finished every single other remix and locked down their respective designs. no ADHD pinballing here – for once in my life, the grand finale was the very last level created for the mappack!
of course, that didn't stop me from daydreaming about it over several years… but i didn't really have that strong of a vision for the level. the only thing i knew is that i would make the player traverse the whole thing, with no teleportation skips. but i also knew that would make it take longer than 50 in-game seconds to clear each section… maybe these red coins would give you more than the maximum amount of time? and maybe there would be some kind of boss involved…
in the original level, touching the pink flag on the left skips this entire section in a quick transition to the next mash-up. in the remix, the red coins are located within the transitions, and you have to go through each one on foot.
it wasn't until i returned to working on Marshmallow Mash-Up that i finally locked down the major idea of its remix: the corruption wall at the end of the main level should instead chase the player through the whole remix. that meant that it would need to be a straight shot, with as few stops and u-turns as possible – so i designed the base level around this, hoping that the remix would be able to take the idea and run with it (so to speak).
originally, the corruption would chase you from the very beginning. there was a whole opening event to force Mario to run for the first second. it was needlessly complicated.
the original idea was that the corruption wall would chase the player the whole time. grabbing a red coin would push it back a bit, but otherwise it would always be there at the edge of the screen, chasing you down. this turned out to be really hard to implement, due to some strange limitations with Mari0's custom enemy system… long story short, i couldn't wrangle it to slow down properly when it was chasing you in screen-space, and i couldn't find a good balance for how fast it was chasing you in world-space across the entire level. multiply that by the fact that the timer felt superfluous, since something was already chasing you the whole time – and i just couldn't get the level to feel cohesive!
early test of the corruption wall. notice how the corruption suddenly speeds up the moment Mario trips over a block momentarily. this is an odd side effect of one of the game's custom enemy movement options, and it's what we in the biz call Not Cool.
luckily, this is where that Pizza Tower inspiration from before came in extra handy.
footage courtesy of this absolutely incredible run by Derpyfailz.
during the escape sequence in each of Pizza Tower's levels, there's a timer pushing the player to the end as fast as possible. unlike in Retrush, the timer doesn't kill you when it runs out; instead, it spawns a boss that chases you around at top speed. it has a VERY high probability of killing casual players, but clever speedrunners can outrun it to squeeze in an extra bit of time during score attacks.
ready or not, once the timer hits 0, the corruption wall spawns.
Wasabi Wrap-Up apes this system to spawn the corruption wall when the timer reaches 0, and push it back once the player gets another red coin. remember that each of these sections is too long to take all 50 in-game seconds… and that means the corruption wall always spawns towards the end of each section! it makes for a fantastic push-and-pull: first you outrun the timer to spawn the corruption as late as possible, then you outrun the corruption itself – which is always possible, no matter how early it spawns – and finally, you get the relief of watching it push back with each red coin.
this also made it a lot more fun to balance the speed of the corruption wall itself! i decided to spawn it in game-space, moving just a bit slower than Mario's top running speed… then slowly ramp up over the next few seconds until it matches Mario's running speed exactly. in other words, early on you can afford to make mistakes and still outrun the wall, but if you take too long then there's no way to gain ground – every mistake counts.
as the corruption gets faster, each mistake leaves less and less room to recover.
and that just covers the main mechanic of Wasabi Wrap-Up… as a remix of Marshmallow Mash-Up, this level contains all of the corrupted elements and fake-outs that the original level does – and as a remix of remixes, it contains all of the custom enemies and mechanics added to the other remixes! it was INCREDIBLY tough to balance all this against the push-and-pull of being chased, and honestly, it turned out to be much harder than i was hoping.
…possibly too hard. i wanted to push the player's limits! and i may have ended up pushing their patience instead.
for one thing, all of the remixed levels only have one checkpoint… except this one! it has three checkpoints, one for every two major sections. it's more generous than the other remixes, but dying right before a checkpoint still bites – and the corruption wall is timed to show up at the end of each section, right before the checkpoint. oops!
additionally, not all of the level is as straightforward as i'd have liked it to be, considering it's a long chase sequence; there were always shortcuts for speedrunners that make it possible to never let go of right on the d-pad, but not every player can pull those off. the most egregious sections have pre-placed portals to take the edge off, but in one case, that simply wasn't enough.
the train car below went through several iterations in playtesting – originally, jumping on the right side platform would launch the player via faithplates and blue gel across to the next train car. but my playtesters got stuck on the roof one too many times, so i had to use portals instead! the problem is that these portals are placed way too far apart… if the corruption wall is chasing you, the portal might just drop you straight into the corruption, killing your run instantly.
on the left is the beta version, on the right is the final release. on top is what it looks like to succeed… below that is what it looks like to fail.
really, most of the deaths in this level can be narrowed down to a handful of places like this one. either a specific group of enemies are too targeted and the player isn't able to react in time, or the final chase from the corruption wall right in front of the red coin is too tough. difficulty via death by a thousand cuts!
all of my playtesters spent at least half an hour on this level alone, and even after making tons of tweaks to smooth things out before release, @notquiteapex still took half an hour on this level in his launch stream of the mappack. there's no denying it: this level is too hard.
but it brought to the world this incredible moment that i completely forgot about until now. thank you apex
honestly, with more time spent playtesting, i think this would've come out perfect…! but i didn't have that luxury, since this was the very last level added to the mappack by necessity. i spent nine years replaying all of the previous levels on my own time, but i only had about a month with this one before release, and most of that time was spent refining the timing of the corruption wall.
frankly, i don't even think this level is particularly egregious – it isn't a complete attrition drain like a certain other level, it just takes a long time to conquer. if anything, i aimed for a specific mark in pushing the player's limits, and i don't think i quite nailed it… but hey, in all my years of designing levels, i've never tried to design a difficulty curve quite like this! the fact that i came close to my mark counts for something, and i get to take what i've learned and apply it towards future levels like this. long story short, i feel much more confident in designing challenging levels now that i have this experience! ✨
the last thing i want to share is that there's a secret message at the end of the level! by clearing either Marshmallow Mash-Up or Wasabi Wrap-Up without checkpoints, the level will acknowledge your achievement with a special message. but Wasabi Wrap-Up has another special message – by clearing the level so fast that the timer never runs out. i've never done it myself, all i know is it has to be done with portals… it might even need to be tool assisted. anyone up for a challenge?
Wasabi Wrap-Up (D-4) | Retrush
The longest and most challenging speedrun of the whole pack! The coins in this level spawn a wave of corruption to chase you when the timer runs out. Keep moving and let your confidence carry you to the finish line!
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...
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!
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!
dev commentary time! every good SMB1 style level pack has a secret hidden over the top of the screen, so why would Retrush be any different? Kolache Keep was the perfect candidate for a secret challenge, because i had already planned around the possibility of players going over the top LONG before secret challenges were in the cards…
Bowser should probably patch up that roof sometime.
this section in the middle of the keep was directly inspired by a castle from SMB1 – endless platforms with a hole in the ceiling to make platforming easier. in original drafts of the level, you could just jump over the top of the screen and run past the rest of the level… boring!
the time gates each have a region trigger that i can adjust the size of for each checkpoint. normally i want this to be as large as possible, but in this case i moved the region down below the ceiling so you can't get the extra time when running across the top.
the little gap between the region trigger and the ceiling is to account for the marginal possibility of Mario falling into a portal and touching the region through the roof.
so now, when running across the top, there's not enough time to get to the exit!… for casual players. i still wanted it to be possible for speedrunners! so i fiddled with the amount of time the last checkpoint before the ceiling gives you, so that it's just a few seconds too short. but with good timing and precise portaling, a clever speedrunner could still make it across the top in time!
this is more precise than it looks!
long story short, this route was built into the level from the beginning, so i wanted to leverage it for a secret challenge. but as you can see from the gif, it was kind of… too hard. canonizing this as a secret challenge meant that i had to once again make it doable for casual players, without making it too easy.
in the long term, this solution ended up more brittle than i hoped; it's too easy to get caught on the platforms, for example.
my first thought was to set up a portal fling, so that momentum could carry the player to the goal. only problem is, there's no wall to fling from over the ceiling! i had to extend the ceiling to make it possible to fling across the top.
old vs. new. in the original SMB1, none of the ceilings reached up to the top of the screen like this, as not to obscure the HUD.
once i did… the ceiling stuck out like a sore thumb. is this too obvious? it's the only raised spot on the ceiling! it doesn't look anything like the castles from SMB1! surely someone will notice, right?
luckily, that's what playtesting is for. i handed it off to my playtesters… only to find that all of them tried to do something completely different!
hope you've enjoyed looking at the same section of the same level several times in a row~
first found by @qwerbey, the idea was to place a portal on top of the ceiling, take the normal way to reach a gate with more time on it, and then portal back to run across the ceiling with the extra time. what an incredibly clever solution!!
…that i hadn't accounted for, so it didn't work during their testing. oops!!!
once my playtesters informed me, though, i immediately rearranged the way that the challenge is handled internally to make the solution work. it's just too clever to pass up! so, now, there are three ways to complete this challenge – using brute force, a portal fling, or the time extension from a later gate. gotta love a good puzzle with multiple solutions~
the other good news is, nobody thought to use the portal fling in testing (at first), so the raised ceiling wasn't obvious after all. honestly, it was probably only obvious to me because i was used to seeing the lower ceiling for the last several years…
the takeaway here is that it's pretty hard to design a puzzle like this for players who have never seen the solution before – but the best way to get around your own designer bias is to watch people solve it and rework the solutions from there. playtesting is one of the most powerful tools a designer has!
Secret Coin 3 (Kolache Keep) | Retrush
According to the third secret mural, there's a way to clear this stage by going over the ceiling. But wait, there's not enough time on the clock to just run across! We'll have to be extra clever…
dev commentary time! have you ever wondered what's beyond the edges of the game world…? leaping over a wall that it seems you could reach, or changing the events of a game's story by skipping an obvious trap, or looking for secret areas that the NPCs talk about. sometimes the game rewards you! and sometimes the game wasn't programmed for that. but i spent a LOT of time testing various theories like those as a kid, and this challenge was my way of capturing a little bit of that magic.
the "glitched" flagpole is, of course, very intended. it uses a metric ton of the game's custom event system under the hood, which means i could add a secret challenge to it without much fuss. but a player would not have the chance to try slipping past it on their first try – it's a purposeful trap, made to look exactly like the power lines that toggle the level's fading pathways. even the flag graphic itself is disabled, and the border that stops Mario's portal gun is removed (a feature exclusive to newer versions of Mari0!).
so i love the idea of a challenge that lets you get past that trap, and circumvent the climax of the adventure! what else lies beyond the flagpole? where does it take you? maybe there's some corrupted level data, or an alternate ending…??
…well, to be honest, i didn't have a lot of time to do anything fancy! by this point in development i was cramming as much as i could before my self-imposed birthday deadline. i had to settle for a simple challenge to tie together the secret coins and call it a day. it may not be cool in execution, but at least it's cool on paper, right?
the challenge itself is an alternate take on the ending of Raspberry Rainbow, the level's remix – once i laid out the jump for the last coin, i figured that a taller version that requires portals would be a neat way to remix the remix, if you will. like a third tier challenge! if anything, Raspberry Rainbow is the player's biggest hint that there's something beyond the glitched flagpole, even before getting to the mural… though i don't think anyone ever realized that was supposed to be a hint.
like all of the secret coins, this challenge requires the portal gun. with a mouse and keyboard, it's the perfect level of pressure for the average player! but sadly, it's a little too tight for players using a controller. the angles are just too precise, the time just too short. luckily, dying behind the flagpole here resets to the checkpoint without triggering the cutscene that goes to the final level, so the player can retry without any problems… as long as they don't touch the flagpole itself.
it's not as fancy as i wanted it to be. there's no alternate ending hidden behind the flagpole or whatever. but as the last secret coin… it does lead directly to the secret ending in its own way! and that's what counts. maybe in another game, i can explore that out-of-bounds magic more thoroughly~
Secret Coin 4 (Vinegar Void) | Retrush
The final secret mural suggests that we can get past the glitchy flagpole that normally sends us to the final stage! But how do we get there, and what awaits us at the end…? Only one way to find out!
dev commentary time! every once in a while i am struck with a vision of a fully formed scene for a game, or a comic, or a video… and the vision feels so strong, looks so real, that i have to drop everything to bring it into reality. whether i have to learn new skills, or it pushes my abilities to their limits, it doesn't matter; the vision will not leave me until i have made it real. such is the nature of my adhd daydreaming curse.
most famously, if you've read all of the other dev commentaries so far, this is how the Red Coin Remixes were born – a vision of extra challenges for my silly little 12 level pack, turning it into 24 and then 32 levels as the vision iterated and grew. this was the central reason why Retrush took nine years to finish, and a cautionary tale on the dangers of scope creep.
so when i had another big vision, just two months before i intended to finally release Retrush… i was more than a little concerned!
the vision is almost exactly as you see it in the video: my oc Rivers congratulates the player at the end of a long journey, complimenting the player's confidence for having cleared every level, while a special song plays over a sunset beach scene matching the song's ambient waves. as it played and replayed in my head, it was so beautiful, so fitting… that i HAD to add it somehow. even though it was intimidating.
but why was it so intimidating? it was surely not the writing, as i knew exactly what i wanted to tell the player. nor was it the fear of overscoping myself, as i decided to limit myself to four extra secret coins. nor even was it the technical work of tracking and saving completion, a system that doesn't exist natively in Mari0 and had to be manually added via the game's event system…!
no, it was two very specific things that intimidated me most: the music, and the sprites of Rivers – both skills that i had tried and failed to cultivate in the past. but for each of these, i had a new blessing that i did not have before.
the song, Last Wave, plays at the end of OutRun, a Genesis-era arcade game with gorgeous FM synth music throughout. it's not an 8-bit NES song, though, and all of the other music in the level pack is in NES style. and no matter where i looked, no NES covers of it existed.
but i could hear it in my head…!
so my plan was twofold. worst case scenario, i could just drop the original song in – i doubt anyone would've cared too much about the style clash. but Plan A was to ask my musically talented partner @harmonyfriends to cover the song for me... in a style that she had never tried before.
and to both of our surprise, she pulled it off! she was able to split the original FM synth into its constituent parts, transcribe it in Famistudio, and arrange the song using the VRC6 expansion – the same expansion chip used by most of the other NES arrangements in Retrush. the results are absolutely incredible and they elevate the scene far beyond anything i could do on my own!
(i paid her for her work, of course~)
long story short, the first blessing i didn't have before… was my partner. long ago, when i wanted to add my own music to Retrush, i tried to do it all alone – and got just short of nowhere. now i'm not working alone anymore! i have help!
that brings us to my final magic trick: the sprites and animations for Rivers… which, by contrast, is art that i did all on my own.
see, the whole reason Retrush looks the way it does – made entirely of recolored and lightly edited tiles from the original SMB games – is that i've never really been a sprite artist. all of my level packs over the years have used existing assets from other games and artists; the most i've ever done is re-arrange them for use in Mari0's engine, or maybe edit a few pixels here and there to make them flow better or fit a specific scene. outside of that, i tried to avoid making sprites as much as possible; my few attempts at custom sprites always came out rather shoddy, in my eyes.
so when i saw the grand vision in my head… i instantly knew what the most intimidating part was. it was the prospect of making custom sprite work for Rivers.
by the time i launched the beta, i had just put together the outline for the secret ending. all the text and scripting was there, but Rivers… was not. in her place was a line of text saying "pretend that Rivers is standing here."
a little too goofy for the impact i was aiming for... though one of my playtesters said they still cried at the ending.
when my playtesters got back to me with feedback about the rest of the mappack, i got to work on tweaking the levels, adding new quality-of-life features, fixing bugs… everything other than making sprites for Rivers. i procrastinated until the last minute, as my fear very nearly got the better of me…
finally, on the last Friday before Retrush was set to release, i cleared my day and dedicated it solely to sprite work. i expected to hammer my head against the wall all day and night, only to chicken out at the last possible second, with a single, motionless, half-baked sprite of Rivers standing at the end.
instead, in three hours, i had all of this.
that's her!
see, even though it's "just" recolored SMB sprites, Retrush is the most that i've ever experimented with custom tiles and spritework. all of the animated tiles are still just heavily edited versions of existing SMB assets – but i got to experiment with different effects and styles. looking back, i can see a throughline of growth from the waterfalls in Pineapple Pipeline, to the train tracks in Toffee Tracks, up to the wave effect in Fillet Fjords… each of these is just an effect applied to an existing tile, but making these by hand helped me understand the composition of the tiles and why the effects worked to create the illusion of movement.
then, without me realizing it, my abilities grew. the Retrush logo was my first custom logo, and possibly the first custom sprite art that i ever finished and released. the custom eel sprites in Tilapia Trench were my first ever character animation. the bone fish in Vegetable Vat, while loosely based on the sprites from mario maker, are custom sprites – the first time i ever made rotated adaptations of existing sprites. my technical prowess grew without me ever noticing…
and, apparently, it was enough for me to bang out a character sheet in an afternoon.
now, that was far from the end. in fact, all the sprites above ended up going unused – because they all face right, and i need them to face left in the final. but it wasn't hard to flip the sprites, move the flower, add some more expressions…
you've seen this before, haven't you?
in doing so, i even got to attempt a full turnaround, which i used for looking towards and away from the horizon. but even this kind of technical work was more fun than frustrating, and it didn't take long for me to complete the rotation!
good day to fly a kite, by the looks of it...
also, because the wind effect only plays when facing the horizon, these front shots of the wind effect also go unused. but they were a GREAT base and a huge help for the rest of the sprite sheet…
still not 100% happy with the scrunched grin on this...? expressions in general were probably the hardest part.
one little detail i'm extra proud of is her little nervous foot shuffle. i've never animated anything like it before, and it looks great in motion!
"in celebration of the upcoming launch of Retrush, i made some Rivers sprites to use as my pfp! these turned out a lot better than my last attempt and i'm pretty proud of how far i've come as an artist 💙" — April 23rd, 2023 via Twitter.
finally, here's the promo tweet i made for using the Rivers art as my avatar… i almost didn't want to do this, i wanted Rivers to be a surprise! but i was so proud of the sprites that i wanted to share some of them early, and i'm glad i did – this my favorite avatar i've ever had, and the full animations ended up surprising most players anyway.
where did i suddenly get this skill? i asked myself at the time… but it wasn't sudden at all. the rest of Retrush taught me all the skills i needed. all i lacked was the courage to use them.
so if the first blessing that i didn't have before was my partner, then the second blessing i didn't have before… was confidence. the very same confidence that i wanted to impart to the player, right here at the finish line.
turns out, i needed that confidence just as much.
and i meant every word of it.
our work together – her music, and my sprites – are the last things we added to Retrush, the night before release. fitting that it would end this way, after nine years of ADHD workflows, procrastinating on challenging endeavors, pinballing between levels. the last completed piece was the finish line itself, and i'm so happy that i could properly greet players at the end, just as i had so strongly envisioned.
38 posts later, this is also the last developer commentary post… as much of an adhd mess it was to write and schedule these too. but the mess doesn't matter – because when my memories have faded in a year or two, these blog posts will be the journal pages that i cling to, the last vestiges of the development stories i can no longer remember. i hope you've enjoyed them too, that you found some insight and lessons to take with you on your own journey!
one day, when i get to make another game, we'll do this again! i'm sure i will have a lot to share, and i hope you'll be there for it too. for now, though, i am going to take a break from big projects and work on smaller things. nine years is a long time, and i think i need the space to rest and get my IRL in order before i tackle something big again.
but i'll still be writing, streaming, designing, creating… and maybe even spriting. i hope you enjoy my smaller things too, and i hope we keep sharing new things with each other for a long time.
until then, thank you for reading. 💙💜🩷
Secret Ending | Retrush
After clearing EVERYTHING in Retrush, we arrive at the end of the road… where I pour my heart out to the player. Whether you've unlocked this yourself or simply watched along, thank you for joining me on this journey 💖
(Note that the "perfect stars" you get for clearing the stages without dying are NOT REQUIRED to see this ending – you simply need to clear all 16 remixes and get all 4 secret coins, no matter how many deaths it takes.)
here's the finished Pushmo we made of Rivers on stream! if for some reason you still have Pushmo World on your Wii U, you can scan the QR code to play the level yourself ✨
(this puzzle DOES NOT work on the 3DS version of the game due to Reasons™!)
new stream archive! in which i play an obscure Wii marble roller with a full 3D level editor, and rediscover all of the levels that me and my brother made to get on each others' nerves.
new stream archive – in which i take a sprite i made of Rivers and turn it into a real, playable puzzle! 💙
In which I polish up my unfinished "magnum opus" from the early days of Mari0 and show it in its best light – with 40+ music tracks, unfinished level concepts, and a complete version of the final boss. This is the DEFINITIVE look at one of my earliest major projects!
Zeta - As Complete As It Gets
Zeta was my "magnum opus" back in 2014… the pinnacle of everything I had learned with level design in Mari0 1.6. Everything about it is as grandiose as possible – colorful levels made with an omnipalette tileset, unique challenges that blend Mario and Portal elements in fun ways, a plot holding secrets close to its chest. I released about half of it in various demos up until mid-2013, getting lots of praise and attention from the community! I was quite proud of myself and my work…
But I had ambitions to use features that hadn't even been added to the game yet, like a full custom music album, water tiles, custom enemies, cutscenes. I decided to shelve the project for a little while, at least until later versions of the game gave me more tools to work with. Those new versions came and went… yet I never returned to Zeta, instead embracing other big new projects like Retrush and Floating Isles. Zeta faded into history, left unfinished, a casualty of ADHD novelty-chasing.
Many of the ideas that were planned for Zeta would later find their way into my other projects, but the idea of returning to Zeta itself has always been daunting. Despite the fact that I was so proud of it in 2014… it's a little uneven looking back on it now. In addition to finishing the existing levels, there's a ton I'd want to rework from scratch! That would practically be a new project in its own right.
The perfect excuse to return to Zeta came when I started streaming all of my Mari0 mappacks in a retrospective series. Most of them I was content with showing as they were released… but with Zeta, I specifically wanted to show it in its best light, as close to its original vision as possible. So, using modern tools in AE, I added all of the music I wanted to add from the beginning, added warps between areas of unused content, and even finished the final boss! The stream itself went great, and I had a lot to say about development of the mappack – you can watch it in full here:
The short version is that Zeta is honestly better than I remembered! Even though there's still a few rough edges, and the blend of Mario and Portal elements gets kinda wacky at times, it has a cadence to it that's genuinely unique and fun in its own right. It's a lot more mature than I expected, and getting to revisit it was a joy.
And since I already have all the materials ready… I'm releasing this version of Zeta to the public! This version has a little more work done on it since I played it on stream, including the addition of water tiles in some areas and fixed time limits in most levels. There are still a few unfinished levels, but otherwise… this is how I wanted Zeta to be, ten years ago. This is as complete as that original vision gets.
I have to make the distinction that this is the "original vision" because there's SO MUCH I would change these days. Before I did the stream, I had to mull over just how extensively I wanted to change things up – but I decided that preserving the original vision was most important… and if I want to change things more extensively, that will be a separate release. I guess let's say that a Zeta DX isn't off the table~
For now, though, here's that original vision preserved as faithfully as possible. It doesn't run in the original Mari0 1.6 anymore due to the music and the final boss, so you'll have to use Mari0 AE. A decade later, please enjoy Zeta as it was meant to be played!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/85z8jqotzun1e8z/Zeta%20-%20As%20Complete%20As%20It%20Gets.zip?dl=1
"What possessed me to make this level? Satan himself?"
New highlights video! I think the developers of this obscure little gem for the Wii would be thrilled to know that my brother and I would regularly torture each other with the game's level editor. The Geneva convention, however, would probably be less pleased.
New York Landscape Natural Stone Pavers Picture of a fall-themed large traditional backyard with a stone retaining wall.