guppy fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Jul 19, 2019

ryde fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Jul 19, 2019

• Thrown shells in this game have variable speed depending on how fast (or if) Mario was moving upon release. This leads to problems when you're relying on a shell following a long track before triggering what it's intended to trigger. For the first buzzy beetle shell throw, this can lead to the icicles being smashed against the red blocks regardless of how quick on the draw you were getting to shell and throwing it. Later in the level the same problem crops up with the koopa shell you toss into the tunnel to trigger an ON/OFF. If you happened to release it at a slower speed, you'll be too late to proceed with the level even if you got there expediently early.

• Vertical sections are really tricky to design around. Everything within the standard horizontal loading range is loaded in instantly when you enter the area, to an infinite vertical range. This means you need to be extremely careful about enemy placement. This causes big problems with the 3 spinies on a slope you're meant to slide into. In conjunction with the variable shell throw speed while you're on a protracted timer waiting for the blocks to drop you, this creates a really unreliable state for the spinies which can sometimes be directly below you as the blocks release, meaning your only option is to time a spin jump as the blocks turn off and work left until you can proceed. I presume this is unintentional and it's unlikely to provide you enough time for the next obstacle before the platform descends to the spikes.

• Relatedly, if you're designing a vertical speedrun, it significantly complicates providing fair windows to assess and execute what's expected of you as a player, especially in a level centered around descent. The nature of the camera means new obstacles are visible to the player much closer to encounter than a horizontal section allows. As it stands, a significant chunk of your stage mandates trial and error. Now learning by death even at a hazard-by-hazard frequency is not an issue in any fundamental sense, and especially not for a short, intense stage targeting this kind of design and audience, but what you should never lose is the potential for a theoretical perfect blind run. In this stage, you have to remember that the player doesn't have the foresight you do because they haven't seen behind the curtains. When they follow a coin trail down to an unknown destination, they aren't thinking they need to be holding jump to bounce on an enemy's head. They could be threading the needle to land on a small bit of terrain. They can't know until they see it, and there is nowhere close to enough time to assess and execute that situation and solution in the nearly instantaneous time between seeing the koopa and landing on it. This feeds through many of the stage's setpieces, and is compounded by...

• Your signposting and room for tangential error need some work. You've got an open-ended sign for the upward throw of the koopa shell but a completely closed one for throwing it to the left. A single tile-width line of coins is going to lead many players to trigger only 1 of 3 icicles in their aiming, needlessly constraining the maneuver they're going to be asked to pull off later in the level. You've got a line of coins leading into a leap of faith that winds up being a saw you need to be holding jump into before immediately hanging right to get enough momentum off the angle to perform the subsequent actions with the requisite speed. The non-linear, delayed nature of many of the level's setups and payoffs, such as the icicle chase, mean more attention needs to be paid to general guidance and suggestion. A player isn't going to necessarily intuit what a chain of events they've set in motion is going to result in and require a response to 15 seconds down the road without a bit more hinting. What I mean by tangential error is generosity toward imprecision that doesn't relate to the point of a successful action. A good example would be when you need to tongue a shell through a wall with Yoshi. There should really be a 3-enemy stack there, because a player that properly read the situation and acted quickly enough perform the solution shouldn't be punished by having Yoshi's tongue miss both shells by threading between them, because that's besides the point. They already passed the test you cared about them passing.