SMBX2 Development Blog

Hey what’s up gamers?!?

Today I wanna explain some of the stuff that’s been going on that isn’t directly related to new features as much as it’s some cleanup and reworking of a very old feature, one that most of you should be familiar with:

Now, hold on for a second. Have you ever noticed the names of these categories? I stumbled across this a week ago and couldn’t believe how I miss(c)ed it for so many years! Redigit truly is a master at hide n’ seek! Jokes aside… the way these itemboxes are organised in SMBX is pretty bad. They’re slow to navigate and even more hellish when you’re working with anything custom. Now, PGE helps with that by allowing you to create your own custom arrangements of tiles, but it retains this messy layout. It’s time to change it!

But that’s not even the interesting part…

TILES

All the tilesets got a complete rearrangement to cut down on useless filler categories and have a more compact arrangement. The best part: They’re all in one place, so switching tilesets to place a single ?-Block is a thing of the past!

If you’re someone who likes to have their tiles on the left side of PGE (where you’d find the level itembox by default), don’t be disappointed! These sections are comfortable to use even vertically:

NPCS

NPCs are arguably the most common thing anyone would want to access when leaving their custom tileset. As such, the NPCs group is the first one you will see for every category. Here, enemies are categorised by there general theme or environment where you’d most commonly see them! Don’t hesitate to use them in other environments, though.

Some of you might know that 1.3 has two beach koopa enemies, one of which being deprecated and tucked away in the hidden “The lakitus are throwing lakitus!” tab. With Beta 4, some new npcs will join the lonely child. A new blurp with its SMW AI, and a checkpoint supporting multiple checkpoints in a level have already joined him, with more enemies to come in the future.

WORLD MAP

Of course, the map isn’t forgotten either. The interesting thing: while constructing these tilesets we came across four duplicate path tiles. We dug ’em out and put ’em next to the others, so now they’re free tiles for sprite replacement!

And that’s about everthing I got regarding the tileset rearrange! Let us know what you think. See something that’s been categorised wrong? Please tell us so we can improve these categories!

HOELOE’S CEREAL

See you next time!

~Enjl

Hello there.

I heard you are screaming for news about new content? The NPC array was extended exactly a week ago (April 1st) and since then we’ve seen new NPCs daily. Here are some of them:

Oh, was that too fast? Don’t worry. I prepared a small level to showcase some of the stuff some of these new NPCs can do:

So yeah. Things are appearing rapidly and are a ton of fun to use. These enemies are all pretty self-explanatory. We’re trying our best to accurately recreate the source game behaviour of all NPCs. Regardless, there are a few things I want to take a closer look at today:

CHARGING CHUCKS

Probably the most diverse enemy species in all of Super Mario World is making its way into the game! Soon enough everyone can create football tournaments in SMBX. At this point not all of them are finished, but even now they are threat you shouldn’t underestimate:

SNAKE BLOCK

When looking at the path of the Snake Block, you might’ve been intimidated by how hard it might be to define. Don’t worry, though, as it’s as easy as putting down a platform track:

These arrows will be invisible in-game and move the snake block when it touches them. Here’s what this section looks like in action:

Yes, you can freely customise the block which an eater block spawns and eats! Want a castle where the lava moves on a set path? Very easy to do! I’m excited to see lots of eater block patterns in future levels. The possibilities are endless!

A BLOCKY DETOUR

The main focus of this post is NPCs for sure, but The0x539 has been working on some new blocks as well! They’re not inserted yet, but a great addition to any level’s geometry! Glass pipes!

ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES

Well… not literally, but still! A big focus of ours is to add interactions to the game and give designers like you a variety of things to do with all the objects added to the engine. We hope this blog post gave you some ideas for stuff to do with these early additions. If you’re interested in more, check out the claims sheet where you can track our progress, check what slots have been claimed, who made what and what npcs, blocks, effects and bgos to look forward to in the future! To end this peek into the future of 2.0 off I want to introduce a new segment to these blog posts:

HOELOE’S CEREAL

See you soon!

-Enjl