Mario's Nightmare Quest

[CM30]

Where's this convention going to be held?  I followed the link but I couldn't find any specifics other than the date.

It's an internet convention.  The site is the convention.

[Thirteen 1355]

How is it going?

[CM30]

You can decide for yourself very soon.  But here's a picture showing part of a level in progress:



Graphics from Tiny Toons Adventures, a very, very nice looking game for the SNES.

[Thirteen 1355]

Tiny Toons Adventures? Don't know that one.

[CM30]

It's very shortly going to be released as a demo, but... a few last minute pictures:

[Chpexo]

.

[Bonesy]

I think it's Ashley from the Wario Ware games.

[CM30]

I think it's Ashley from the Wario Ware games.

Yes, that is correct.

[Thirteen 1355]

Scary.
Reminds me of Yume Nikki.

[CM30]

You be your own judge of that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWB8J6YxVXQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErsBgNP_lbY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaP71uICuYM

^ random WarioWare videos!

And updated:

[Thirteen 1355]

So it seems it is not from Yume Nikki

[CM30]

Demo 1 is now out:

https://gamingreinvented.com/forum/index.php?resources/marios-nightmare-quest-part-1-demo-1.15/

A quick preview, in case you need some reasons to download:

[drunkenjesus]

Really interested to finally try this out so I ran through all the levels that I could & here are some notes;

Glitches:  The toad house boxes sometimes glitch if you walk while hitting them,  In it never rains the floating platform guy(dunno his name) floats directly into a block and that causes a glitch & near the end if you try to go under that 1 block high flipping boxes sections you can get stuck, glitch, & die. In the first castle if you accidentally blow the explosive early you get stuck & it's pretty difficult to not get hit when you blow it at points. Sometimes the note blocks graphics glitch, it's most notable in the first ghost house but I'm pretty sure I saw it in other places as well.  Dying in the ghost house or beating via either exit is freezing the game for me so I can't progress past that.  Some of the bullet bills act strangely like firing backwards or the graphics are in the wrong direction.  Seems some of the midpoint respawn points have graphic glitches to the left when restart at them.  One or two of the ! block columns have glitched firebar graphics in the level they're in.

Suggestions:  Their seems to be a bit of an excess of tight corridors, random bullet bills & firing enemies, and multiple hit enemies to sort of artificially ramp up the difficultly I expect hacks to be more difficult than the original games but I felt their were a bit too many cheap deaths in my runthrough.  Inversely of that the typical hack cliche of precise platforming isn't present at all I'm not a fan of overdoing it but you'd expect some tricky jumping sections every now and then in a platforming game.  I liked all the additional power-ups and didn't really run into any bugs with them but it seemed a bit overkill to have so many but no real level specific uses for them & having the raccoon leaf and cape really doesn't make sense unless theirs really long sections you have to fly across with the cape later in the game.

Overall: Graphics were the high point of this imo everything looked really great & I liked all the imported things from other mario games.  Most of the ASM hacks seemed to be really well done & some of the bosses could use some polishing up but I was really impressed with the pirate crocodile boss.  Wasn't the biggest fan of some of the level designs but for a demo it was pretty substantial and showed a lot of promise.  Didn't really like that I had to register at your site just to try the demo I could see doing a site exclusive release for a finished hack but not for just a demo.

[CM30]

Really interested to finally try this out so I ran through all the levels that I could & here are some notes;

Thanks for your feedback, it's excellent.  I hope when the final version is done, you'd be interested in a review, since you seem to be pretty good at pointing out the good and bad points of a hack.

But more in depth:

Glitches:  The toad house boxes sometimes glitch if you walk while hitting them,  In it never rains the floating platform guy(dunno his name) floats directly into a block and that causes a glitch & near the end if you try to go under that 1 block high flipping boxes sections you can get stuck, glitch, & die. In the first castle if you accidentally blow the explosive early you get stuck & it's pretty difficult to not get hit when you blow it at points.

The Toad house boxes glitch I know of, and I'm trying to fix the custom blocks so they don't do this.

The Amazin Flying Hammer Bro will be moved up in It Never Rains, as well as in a few other levels to prevent this.

The 1 block high flipping boxes I didn't know of, thanks for pointing it out. That will also be changed.

And the explosives?  Yeah, I'll try and make them harder to hurt yourself with, though I'm not sure what to do about them exploding early or being lost forever.  Maybe I'll come up with a generator or something that respawns them.

Sometimes the note blocks graphics glitch, it's most notable in the first ghost house but I'm pretty sure I saw it in other places as well.  Dying in the ghost house or beating via either exit is freezing the game for me so I can't progress past that.  Some of the bullet bills act strangely like firing backwards or the graphics are in the wrong direction.  Seems some of the midpoint respawn points have graphic glitches to the left when restart at them.  One or two of the ! block columns have glitched firebar graphics in the level they're in.

Huh, that ghost house bug definitely needs to be fixed.  What emulator did it occur in?

If you need to go past that point for now, it doesn't seem to break in ZSNES.  I'll test the level in BSNES a bit later, then SNES 9X.

Suggestions:  Their seems to be a bit of an excess of tight corridors, random bullet bills & firing enemies, and multiple hit enemies to sort of artificially ramp up the difficultly I expect hacks to be more difficult than the original games but I felt their were a bit too many cheap deaths in my runthrough.  Inversely of that the typical hack cliche of precise platforming isn't present at all I'm not a fan of overdoing it but you'd expect some tricky jumping sections every now and then in a platforming game.  I liked all the additional power-ups and didn't really run into any bugs with them but it seemed a bit overkill to have so many but no real level specific uses for them & having the raccoon leaf and cape really doesn't make sense unless theirs really long sections you have to fly across with the cape later in the game.

Thanks for pointing this out.  I have to admit, the amount of random Bills and other enemies is higher in the endgame parts, which the military world accessible by going right is one of.  But I'll try and make sure less of them are there, so there are less cheap deaths.

The amount of platforming sections is lower because as weird as it sounds, the intention here was for an easier game, not the precision platforming of most Mario ROM hacks.  Which is why I should look into reducing the number of enemies in some places.  But there should be more platforming in parts 2 and 3, and less enemy overuse in the final version of part 1.

The power ups may come across as overkill, but it's a more a throwback to the style of SMB 3.  Basically, in the olden days, power ups were... just that.  They didn't have puzzle utility, they were to make you feel like a god as you killed everything in sight.   Nowadays, it seems like design is more about 'balance' and puzzle solving and what not, and I'm not sure I prefer that.  Basically, they're deliberately overpowered.

Overall: Graphics were the high point of this imo everything looked really great & I liked all the imported things from other mario games.  Most of the ASM hacks seemed to be really well done & some of the bosses could use some polishing up but I was really impressed with the pirate crocodile boss.  Wasn't the biggest fan of some of the level designs but for a demo it was pretty substantial and showed a lot of promise.  Didn't really like that I had to register at your site just to try the demo I could see doing a site exclusive release for a finished hack but not for just a demo.

The bosses are still being worked on, especially in terms of sprite graphics.

The level design will hopefully get better, given that I've also got a pretty well known ROM hack reviewer as a beta tester:

https://www.youtube.com/user/SMCslevelengine

As for the demo, it's not site exclusive, it's also on NCFC:

http://nintendocfc.com/booth.html?id=80

That should be a guest usable download link.  Sorry about pushing the sign up to download stuff, it's just a (somewhat lame) attempt to promote a site that's currently in development.  I do the same thing for music downloads and other stuff.

[drunkenjesus]

And the explosives?  Yeah, I'll try and make them harder to hurt yourself with, though I'm not sure what to do about them exploding early or being lost forever.  Maybe I'll come up with a generator or something that respawns them.

Really after the first one it wasn't that big of an issue once you figure out how to get the jump right, if you could maybe increase the time or something that'd probably help, because if you get accidentally get trapped between it and the wall its pretty much impossible to get out of the way in time.  The respawning aspect is more or less just so it falls in line with mario games, in SMB3 they just had a pipe that looped you back in the levels that you needed to use a turtle shell the break through or had to fly somewhere.

Huh, that ghost house bug definitely needs to be fixed.  What emulator did it occur in?

If you need to go past that point for now, it doesn't seem to break in ZSNES.  I'll test the level in BSNES a bit later, then SNES 9X.

SNES9X for the Wii, I'll try the other snes emus on RetroArch Wii or on a PC later

Thanks for pointing this out.  I have to admit, the amount of random Bills and other enemies is higher in the endgame parts, which the military world accessible by going right is one of.  But I'll try and make sure less of them are there, so there are less cheap deaths.

Yeah even SMB3 kinda used that exclusively in the last world to ramp up the difficulty so I don't mind it too much, it just gets a bit aggravating jumping over something then blindly getting hit by a bullet bill or kicked shell in early levels before you get a chance to rack up lives.

The amount of platforming sections is lower because as weird as it sounds, the intention here was for an easier game, not the precision platforming of most Mario ROM hacks.  Which is why I should look into reducing the number of enemies in some places.  But there should be more platforming in parts 2 and 3, and less enemy overuse in the final version of part 1.

The power ups may come across as overkill, but it's a more a throwback to the style of SMB 3.  Basically, in the olden days, power ups were... just that.  They didn't have puzzle utility, they were to make you feel like a god as you killed everything in sight.   Nowadays, it seems like design is more about 'balance' and puzzle solving and what not, and I'm not sure I prefer that.  Basically, they're deliberately overpowered.

Totally understandable design choices, I've always really hated the Cape though.

As for the demo, it's not site exclusive, it's also on NCFC:

http://nintendocfc.com/booth.html?id=80

That should be a guest usable download link.  Sorry about pushing the sign up to download stuff, it's just a (somewhat lame) attempt to promote a site that's currently in development.  I do the same thing for music downloads and other stuff

It does help keep people up to date as I see you've updated it 3 times since I played it so I'll give it another go here whenever I get a chance since their looks to be a good amount of levels that I wasn't able to access.  But for something like this it'd probably a good idea to post a public and site exclusive link since a lot of people may be hesitant to sign up to a site to try it.  Looking forward to the completion of this as imo theirs very few full length hacks of SMW that take the game in a different direction properly most are either vanilla redressings or just gimmick based.

[CM30]

Really after the first one it wasn't that big of an issue once you figure out how to get the jump right, if you could maybe increase the time or something that'd probably help, because if you get accidentally get trapped between it and the wall its pretty much impossible to get out of the way in time.  The respawning aspect is more or less just so it falls in line with mario games, in SMB3 they just had a pipe that looped you back in the levels that you needed to use a turtle shell the break through or had to fly somewhere.

If you need to go past that point for now, it doesn't seem to break in ZSNES.  I'll test the level in BSNES a bit later, then SNES 9X.

SNES9X for the Wii, I'll try the other snes emus on RetroArch Wii or on a PC later

Yeah even SMB3 kinda used that exclusively in the last world to ramp up the difficulty so I don't mind it too much, it just gets a bit aggravating jumping over something then blindly getting hit by a bullet bill or kicked shell in early levels before you get a chance to rack up lives.

Totally understandable design choices, I've always really hated the Cape though.
It does help keep people up to date as I see you've updated it 3 times since I played it so I'll give it another go here whenever I get a chance since their looks to be a good amount of levels that I wasn't able to access.  But for something like this it'd probably a good idea to post a public and site exclusive link since a lot of people may be hesitant to sign up to a site to try it.  Looking forward to the completion of this as imo theirs very few full length hacks of SMW that take the game in a different direction properly most are either vanilla redressings or just gimmick based.

The thing with the explosives in castle 1 is fixed.  There's now a reset door in each section, which resets that specific small area in case you lose the detonator.

The ghost house bug will be checked then.  Not sure while it'd crash, unless the music is breaking.

The random bullets is also kind of because the areas with that generator are in an active war zone.  If there's ever a place you expect to randomly get shot, it's probably a war zone.

The cape is probably rare in this version.  But it might be more common in part 2 or 3.

And yes, the public and site exclusive links are both posted for the most part.  I just thought it'd be a neat way to boost sign ups.
September 05, 2015, 09:17:27 AM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
Note that a couple of fixes have been released for this demo, in the form of updates.  If you haven't, try going to the download link again and redownloading:

https://gamingreinvented.com/forum/index.php?resources/marios-nightmare-quest-part-1-demo-1.15/

http://nintendocfc.com/booth.html?id=80

[CM30]

Well, I uploaded some videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dVNVdj6J0Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv0J3nJVl4k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8tK_6Qkdok

I can also say that a more 'final' version of part 1 could be done by the end of the year.  We're just deep in the middle of beta testing at the moment.

[CM30]

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it?  Either way, I plan to continue this game shortly, since I want part 1 in a mostly finished state by the end of the year (as not to delay parts 2 and 3).

[CM30]

This game is now a Fusion Gameworks project!  Yes, it stands alongside Mushroom Kingdom Fusion, Super Mario Fusion Revival and the Mega Man Day in the Limelight series!

http://www.fusiongameworks.net/smf/index.php/board,58.0.html

But there's a small price.  Namely, because it's now at Fusion Gameworks, I will not be updating this topic, or any other topic on any other site this was posted on except my own.  So you can find any updates in one of two places:

1. Fusion Gameworks

2. Gaming Reinvented

No others.  Over and out.

[CM30]

Well, I said I wouldn't update this topic.

But hey, I changed my mind. Fusion Gameworks is a tad quiet at the moment.

Ice level:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erQPsMbNETg

New enemy GFX:













New beta overworld GFX:



Some GFX for a pyramid level that's half complete:





So yeah, not dead.