Hey gamers and gamettes! It is me.
Progress on SMBX2 has been a bit stalling recently due to many team members having important projects to take care of in their personal lives, so more regularly scheduled blog posts are unlikely for now. I’d prefer putting new stuff into a huge post like THIS ONE!!!!!!
MEGA THWOMPS
All of the thwomps got a facelift and they brought some of their buddies from the family meetup! In Beta 4 it will be possible to use NPC codes to give every id of new thwomps a personalised AI. Customise direction? Speed? Acceleration? Want them huge or mad? Combining these attributes can lead to some smashing results!
BOOHEMOTH
Another big boy joins the party! Boohemoth was introduced in NSMB2 as a stage hazard and now makes his way into SMBX as… a stage hazard! Here he heroically fights a green midget who is responsible for sucking all of his relatives into a vacuum cleaner. The Mega Mushroom can’t save you this time, Green Mario!
KING BILL
Another large member of their family. King Bill serves as a massive obstacle and can be placed to face in every direction.
SKEWERS
These bad boys from various Mario games add an extra way to create treacherous hallways and compete with the mega thwomps in their desire to destroy all the blocks in their path.
SWITCH PALACES
Stretching the theme of the post a bit to describe the scale of an episode, on which these items will have a big impact! The switch palace switches come in four flavours but can be freely customised on a per-level basis to essentially have unlimited switch palaces in an episode! The IDs for the blocks toggled by them, their effect, sprite, and what data they save is freely configurable from a NPC code alone! The one drawback is that you’re restricted to 4 different colours per level, but that should hardly be a problem.
FLAG CHECKPOINT
The SMM Flag checkpoint isn’t physically huge, but it is incredibly useful in huge levels! Its special feat: It can be reactivated when the player returns to it! Metroidvania levels will now be able to place checkpoints at key locations and don’t have to resort to weird workarounds to make their length not frustrating to the average player!
So that’s it for today! I wanna say it’s not entirely groundbreaking but that’d be a lie considering how half of the featured items do exactly that. Either way those are some big tools for you to play around with in the future! Which one are you most excited about?
HOELOE’S CEREAL
Until next time.
~Enjl