Willware - Tumblr Posts
Super Block Fort | 1V0-9NC-FVF
A maze of blocks and pipes, filled with big enemies and bigger treasures! Focused around a neat trick with Clear Pipes, which can save a lot of time in this level if used well. Makes for a great beginner speedrun!
Raisin Rainforest | PNG-B9X-6KF
A pretty rainforest course with a strong aesthetic, but tons of blocks overhead and some tough enemy placement. Carefully weave around the Pokeys, dodge Piranha fire, and watch the floodwaters – the Goombas can swim!
Treasure Tower Takedown (v2) | TGL-L3V-6FG
A mysterious tower with untold riches has appeared over the Mushroom Kingdom, and Bowser's armada is storming in to search it by force. Race to the top to claim the treasure before Bowser does! Featuring multiple routes, secrets, and even endings, but a very tight challenge – this one’s for super players!
Re-uploaded the level to fix a few things. Patch notes:
In the section with the Bob-ombs, fewer now spawn, and their flight path goes over the player's head.
Moved a Skewer that was too close for comfort.
Increased timer.
Added more coins showing where to go.
Other minor tweaks and improvements to ensure that the level is the proper amount of Tense and Intimidating without being Painful to play through.
Treasure Tower Takedown (v2) | TGL-L3V-6FG
A mysterious tower with untold riches has appeared over the Mushroom Kingdom, and Bowser’s armada is storming in to search it by force. Race to the top to claim the treasure before Bowser does! Featuring multiple routes, secrets, and even endings, but a very tight challenge – this one’s for super players!
How do you speedrun a nonlinear level focused around exploration? Quickly! A lot of optimizations in this marathon of a run can be really tight, so I played it kinda safe.
Lost In Skyway Metro | 6FN-F3B-N7G
A full adventure in one level! Search high and low for a way out of this massive city full of buildings, construction, and subway tunnels to explore. Find enough Key Coins to purchase a subway ticket home!
This took over 30 hours to make, and it’s one of my biggest and best levels yet. I hope you enjoy ✨
I tried my hardest to get 15sec on this one, but it might be too tight! A fight for WR on this one would be a battle of frames and micro-optimizations for the perfect run.
Blaster Faster (20sec) | 08M-C6P-95G
Blast processing! Get ahead of the floating blaster so it speeds you along to the goal. A ridiculous little concept level that makes for a fun speedrun.
Even a slower-paced level can have an interesting speedrun! The hardest part of this one is swiftly getting around the Piranha Creepers' dodgy hitboxes.
Cheep Creep Creek | LRN-G2C-LRG
Try saying that three times fast! This flooded, overgrown thicket is infested with Cheep Cheeps and Piranha Creepers. You’ll have to go aboveground and underwater to cut a path to the goal!
Like the first Blaster Faster, this run is a game of optimizations, but this time there's ON/OFF switches to change the level layout. I wonder if there's a better route?
Blaster Faster 2 (30sec) | 739-GWT-YVG
Speedrun through an abandoned explosives factory! Like before, the floating blaster will propel you to the goal, but it’s more of an obstacle this time. Can you keep your cool in this heated sequel?
All the shortcuts in this run skip huge chunks of the level. Wall-jumping out of the pipes is very satisfying, but getting into them may well be the most difficult part!
Super Block Fort | 1V0-9NC-FVF
A maze of blocks and pipes, filled with big enemies and bigger treasures! Focused around a neat trick with Clear Pipes, which can save a lot of time in this level if used well. Makes for a great beginner speedrun!
This run revolves around the cycle of rising water. The level was designed with this in mind, but staying high and dry requires some well-timed jumps!
Raisin Rainforest | PNG-B9X-6KF
A pretty rainforest course with a strong aesthetic, but tons of blocks overhead and some tough enemy placement. Carefully weave around the Pokeys, dodge Piranha fire, and watch the floodwaters – the Goombas can swim!
My most ridiculous level yet comes with an equally ridiculous speedrun! I did mention there were different routes in this level, right? This was my clear check run ✨
Treasure Tower Takedown (v2) | TGL-L3V-6FG
A mysterious tower with untold riches has appeared over the Mushroom Kingdom, and Bowser’s armada is storming in to search it by force. Race to the top to claim the treasure before Bowser does! Featuring multiple routes, secrets, and even endings, but a very tight challenge – this one’s for super players!
Finally bit the bullet and redid my “New WillWare” assets to make the workflow better, set size specifications, do higher fidelity renders (4K), etc. I’d been putting it off because of the math involved with making the proportions just right, but it turned out to be simpler than I expected.
It was very much worth the effort – I redid the old promo image as a test and it's way easier to put together now! Plus it comes in white too 🖤🤍
Moonshot Scaffold | SSG-R79-3HF
A treacherous ascent up a space elevator that's still under construction! As you go up, less of the elevator is constructed – meaning fewer platforms to catch you if you fall. One slip could send you tumbling back through the stratosphere...
This gravity-defying run features tons of enemy bouncing, claw swinging acrobatics – and pulling it off is every bit as tough as it looks!
Unfortunately I flubbed up right at the end, but it’s a relatively minor mistake and getting this run took over 45 minutes, so I stuck with it.
Moonshot Scaffold | SSG-R79-3HF
A treacherous ascent up a space elevator that’s still under construction! As you go up, less of the elevator is constructed – meaning fewer platforms to catch you if you fall. One slip could send you tumbling back through the stratosphere…
I’m finally getting more comfortable with the idea of finishing college at some point.... if I don’t also have to work. I would have to completely switch out one for the other, which is not possible currently, but at least I can dream about it now!
I had about a year left, but it would probably end up being two, simply because the CS curriculum has to update as fast as the industry does; I was mostly doing C++ in college, which is less of a thing now. I’d have to catch up with Python or Javascript or whatever the kids do these days.
Besides, a second year means I could fit some electives in – art, higher math, music, psychology, improv??? Frankly, that's the most exciting part! These are all things that I enjoy enough to want more formal training with, or never had any in the first place.
Despite knowing it would take extra time, I really would like to finish my degree! That’s a huge step up from this time last year. I’m finally starting to get past the amount of stress that just thinking about it would put on me.
The burnout? Not so much, still dealing with that.
But if I had to work on top of college, for two years, then I would either have to do part time and focus only on the classes I need to finish – skipping electives entirely – or I would explode into a bunch of tiny stress sprinkles. More importantly, it would probably be both.
And so, despite my stance changing from last year, the answer is roughly the same: “It’s not in the cards right now.”
Had big ADHD fun times the other day while trying to get dinner...
There's a farmers market style place about five or ten minutes from where I live. Besides the usual produce etc., they also serve hot food like tamales on the cheap. My mom picked up some boudin from there once (yes, I live in Louisiana), so I figured, why not go try it?
I didn't realize before I left, but I was spacey as hell, which makes driving twice as hard... and twice as dangerous. I could feel myself violently snap back to reality every time someone turned out in front of me, which happened way too often for being, again, a five to ten minute drive.
I made it there safely by some miracle, but while I was in line, I couldn't stop thinking about how weird the drive was. This didn't happen the last time I was here getting tamales, right?
Anyway, I got up to the counter and asked the lady working there for some tamales. She went to the back, opened the pot with tamales in it, and asked how many I wanted.
It started to dawn on me that something was wrong. Yet, I managed to ask for 3. She pulled them out of the pot and into a bag.
...I slowly remembered I was here for boudin. How did I get tamales???
I thought about correcting myself, pointing out that I meant to say boudin. But the tamales were already out of the pot, she was already ringing them up, and I didn't want to explain how I could have possibly made such a huge mixup. So I rolled with it.
The drive home was a lot easier, which was probably for the best, since I was now twice as spacey – completely fixated on figuring out literally what just happened???
That night, I had tamales for dinner. They were good. But they were not boudin.
I still haven't gone back yet for boudin.
Redraw of my current Twitter avatar – my Animal Crossing OC, Rivers! I should properly introduce her here sometime.
The Missing Sketchbook
I finally found one of my missing sketchbooks last night! Naturally, my first instinct was to take pictures and post it online, lol. It's around ten years old, so I've forgotten about nearly everything that's in here – this is a big deal for me!
This is the first page??? I don't remember the context of this sketch, whether it was by reference or whatever – but I definitely don't remember ever drawing anything this complex. The fact that I even attempted it kinda blows my mind 🐲
Holy frick it's a redraw of a super old Kirby puzzle I made... Every row, column, and diagonal has something in common – can you figure them all out? (Probably not, some of the answers are really obscure details that I could never quite capture.)
Once again, I have no memory of ever drawing something this complex, but my inner 14-year-old's heart is fluttering with excitement. The Mario vs. Donkey Kong series was my first time really sinking my teeth into level design! But that's a story for another day...
Mini golf courses! These are fairly simple, but I was always fascinated by the design and gimmicks of a particular one I went to as a kid. There's a bunch more of these in the other sketchbook I'm missing, including one with a waterfall!
WAIT WHAT??? ANOTHER BIG PAGE????? And it has a bunch of redraws from the original AAAAAAAA
Okay, okay, before I get carried away, the Big Page was something I did in my first sketchbook where I would fill in a bunch of boxes with little Kirby scenes!
Here's what the original (four or so years prior) looked like – much bigger page, but much, MUCH smaller boxes, lol. I remember it being so hard to draw that small, looks like I corrected that mistake in the newer one. Maybe I should do this again sometime...
Wait? Wisps?? Sonic Colors???
counts out the years on my hands
Yeah I guess that adds up, doesn't it...
I did a lot of perspective drawings in this particular sketchbook – it was kind of a natural extension of the mazes I drew in my graph paper notebooks (which I always did way more of than sketches).
This one was a test for the next two...
SPACE! This scene was inspired by the later levels of Thruspace, which I can't seem to find screenshots of. I really loved how the walls open up as you go, and you start seeing more outside the tunnel.
I hope I can stream Thruspace one day, it's still near and dear to my heart.
This sketch helped me map out the image on the right – one of my first pieces of digital art! I'm still really proud of the concept behind it. No two pixels touch orthogonally... although one's missing from the digital version, whoops!
This was for Mario's 25th, ten years ago.
Here's some Mario items and enemies, to practice shading with just a pencil. Honestly, it wasn't "practice" at all – I just thought they looked cool like this, and I wanted to try it out in different ways. Whether it looked right didn't matter as much.
I really miss that mindset…
Some more assorted sketches:
A few Chao in various shapes and sizes. They sure are a diverse little species, aren't they?
A Zelda dungeon room – I don't remember how it works. I just remember wishing I could make whole dungeons! (Still do, honestly.)
Finally, here's the wackiest one of all: A concept for a rotating game system! Each of the four colored sections has a control stick, two buttons, and a "paddle" at the bottom (the colored-in part). There's also an accelerometer, so you could rotate it and play from any section!
One game might ask you to put one hand on either side, like a regular controller. Another might ask you to hold it from the bottom, like a Game Boy… but four people could hold it and play like that all at once! It's a little like the Switch's multiplayer, but pre-dated by nearly ten years!
I didn't really come up with any games for it, though – and in hindsight, I think it may be a little *too* out there for anything much more than the obvious:
A Platformer But With Gravity
Steering Wheel
WarioWare: Twisted
But I'm just amazed I came up with this at all.
———
Anyway, that's mostly it! This is a tiny sketchbook with 24 pages, and I've shown all the big stuff.
Drawing was usually a way for me to express ideas rather than practice quality, but I'm surprised by how much I tried to push my limits here – only to completely forget it all.
This was the last sketchbook I kept up with regularly, before being overtaken by "I can't draw, all my drawings suck" for several years... right as I had just started looking at quality on my own terms. Luckily, I'm starting to catch up again lately ✨
I'm still missing one other sketchbook in between this one and my first, but it might be lost to time – I knew this one was buried in a box somewhere, but the other had been missing for much longer. If I find it, we'll do this again!
In the meantime, back to drawing.