Make a Good Mega Man Level 3 (18): Tier 7, Part One

[@anueutsuho7425]

Am I insane for liking FUNBAGS a lot? I was somehow never really bored throughout the level in the same way as, say, Hunter Tower, or Sector Upsilon 6 from the last contest. I thought whoever made it had a good sense of humor and it was "Unfocused" enough that I was always curious to what was up next. That said, I definitely understand why so many people were tired from it. And I liked Forgotten Fortress from MaGMML2 which I know a lot of people hated for similar reasons. That said I definitely didn't care for Guts Dozer Neo.

[@Bean1227]

Long levels with multiple goals and me don't do the best. Yggdrasil, Forgotten Fortress, Sector Upsilon 6, etc. There are cool things in here though, but for a single-level design contest, these kinds of levels are how to take me out of it completely.

[@grimspecs4752]

I can appreciate that you enjoyed the level, though I couldn't say for certain if enjoying it makes you insane. Although if it helps, I am someone who enjoys Megaman X6 enough to have 100% it on four separate occasions, so I can say as the creator of this level that I am most CERTAINLY insane lol. (To clarify 100% X6 also means saving every reploid and getting 9999 Nightmare Souls on both X and Zero.) It was very important to me that there weren't too many boring sections throughout the level to keep layers engaged, and including built-in Skip Teleporters was a big part in ensuring that you weren't repeating too many sections. It's why a large amount of sections were cut, they simply weren't all that engaging to play through, not to mention increasing the level's play time by an absurd degree. Forgotten Fortress was actually somewhat of an inspiration for the level, in fact BALL being found by taking a secret route during a force laser drop was a direct reference to how you find Gangly Crash Man in that stage. (Although Forgotten Fortress only had 1 Energy Element, considering how long that level is, it's easy to forget that fact) Guts Dozer Neo is not for everybody I admit, as much as I myself enjoy fighting him. Though the version you face is heavily nerfed from his original incarnation.

[@SomeRobIoxDude]

I had a strat for the token in WWFR, where i literally just used rush bike and bounced (way easier)

[@bigrockerending7711]

I'mma be blunt, I HATE the InDestructiball. It's easily a contender for my least favorite boss in this game aside from maybe Stall Woman

[@Bean1227]

Being past those makes me happy, although I do know about another one from the DQ'd stage coming up in Tier 8. Skipped doing it in my first recording of it the other night. That and one very green stage got spoiled for me by my own curiosity weeks ago.

[@tb3411]

I can see why. But my pick for worst custom boss goes to either Heintz, Solaire Man, or Thermal Man

[@bigrockerending7711]

@@tb3411 All of those are pretty rough too, but I still prefer them above Stall Woman and the Ball. Comes down to opinion and preference, really

[@grimspecs4752]

Probably the biggest regret I ended up including in the final submission. The original idea I had for an invulnerable boss battle was an invincible Stone Man that you would have fought atop Sheep Blocks as they kept disappearing. You would hit the bottom which would have had a Force laser kill him instantly. And truthfully it played alright, the problem? It KILLED the framerate, single digit bad; so I ended up scrapping the entire thing. I tried an invincible Hanabiran after that, but it was annoying to fight no surprise there. BALL was a very last minute inclusion. That number string in his message box? It's his date of implementation backwards. Had it not been for a catastrophic system crash days before the deadline, I probably would have removed his rooms entirely OR conveyed very clearly that he was COMPLETELY optional, something the original message box doesn't express. Plenty of people still fought it thinking there was a Token afterwards, and that's the part that made regret it's inclusion. That people would still fight the thing expecting something afterward, despite how annoying it was to fight.

[@tb3411]

@@grimspecs4752 And you get sent to an entirely different path after defeating Invinciball. Honestly, not a good trade for what you skip on the east path

[@tb3411]

Wily's Well-Fortified Room- 21 I see what you were going for but it doesn't work. The enemies are all placed in just the worst ways. It feels impossible to get through some of this without taking damage unless you take out special weapons... and by special weapons I mean Tornado Blow specifically. The level's tiling is completely amateurish, the MM9 Wily 4 music should NOT be used for a full length level, and the text boxes are RIDDLED with typos! The sole Token here is one of the absolute worst in the whole contest and the screen transition leading to it has a spike in front of it. The thing I like the most are using the Count Bombs and invincible blocks with gravity for the keycard puzzles, and even THIS has a huge problem because you decided to put in enemies that make it a LOT harder to think about the correct order to blow up the Count Bombs in! Makes me grateful that there's at least two-way screen transitions here to reset the puzzle. The last of these puzzles could have been the big highlight because it's extremely well thought out but going Buster only will mean you are forced to deal with THREE ENEMIES sniping you while you think the puzzle out! I felt the need to break out Tornado Blow and I had to reset it enough to where I used up a W-Tank for Tornado Blow. It honestly ruins what should be a great puzzle! Also I don't exactly like the construction of the boss arena either. Double dutching projectiles from Beaks is a bit too tight of an arena obstacle to work with Hunter B. Honestly, this level is nothing short of annoyingly and amateurishly designed to the point where even the best parts come off as annoying.

[@GrandmasBoyyy]

Where do I play this game on what platform?

[@Bean1227]

It's a fan game for the PC, and I've had the download link to it in every video so far in the description!

[@tb3411]

I'm very disappointed in you Bean. And I'll explain why as we go into this review. Fairly Unfocused Newcomer's Bosses and Gimmicks Stage- 58 Before I review this level properly, I want to point out that the music in this level is too quiet. That is pretty bad to have in a gargantuan sized entry like this one. Anyway, yes this level is quite "unfocused" as it cannot stick to a select set of enemies or gimmicks, but what's actually going on is that this chaos is surprisingly organized. The level is divided into quadrants and sticks to certain enemies and gimmicks for each of them, complete with its own aesthetic. I'll try to review this level one quadrant at a time. West Quadrant: This serves as the starting point to the level and the path to the center of the level. There's some pretty great usage of the Count Bombs and Crystal Droppers, but the bulk of this quadrant is a lenghty side path for the Club Token. This side path utilizes Suzies and Guts Lifts in a fairly decent way and has midboss arenas with the Guts Lifts. I'd say this works out fairly well for the double Hunter A and Giant Suzy, despite the former being a boss that can be stunlocked. Temporal Joe on the other hand is just a messy slog of a battle, especially since he is a Flash Man mod. You're mainly just gonna be waiting for him to get back to ground level to even get a good shot at him. I will say that the Yashichi reskinned as a shrimp is adorable. Notifying the player about the shortcut is very welcome as it cuts down on having to replay this quadrant more than once, which they'll still need to do at least once for the Club Token. South Quadrant: This is by far the most disorganized of the quadrants as is switches gimmicks halfway through. It having Force Beams almost makes it feel like it was meant for the East Quadrant. But I do like how the Sheep Blocks and Force Beams are used in tandem here as they make for a nice puzzle and the Sheep Blocks having shapes on them make for a very colorblind friendly alternative. This should honestly be patented! This part is far from perfect though. The Force Beam spawners have no collision, you have to stand dead center when you get to the end of the section or the Force Beams on the next screen will kill you, and then there is IndestructiBall... While this is an optional boss, it should have been removed altogether, this is basically an endurance match with an Iron Ball and a moving force beam that is used to damage Iron Ball. If anything, the wider arena makes this less of a clusterfuck. But you get rewarded with bolts and Tanks and... skipping half of the East Quadrant. Why would you want to do that? Playing through the East Quadrant in full is a much better experience. More on that later. If you choose to continue down the South Quadrant, you fight Barrage Man. Barrage Man is a mostly well thought out and fairly challenging Metal Man mod. Though I find him being immune to uncharged Buster shots makes it slightly obtuse that he can still be damaged via charged shots. The theme switches to a Hot Dog and conveyor belt gauntlet. Props for making Hot Dog trickier in different ways, even including the vanilla Hot Dog who is normally prone to blind spots. I'd say the vanilla and Yellow Hot Dogs are the most well executed, with the latter shooting off sine waves and is pretty fun if you are on the right or rather _left_ side of the arena. Staying closer to it is asking for trouble but this is how you'd fight classic Hot Dog here. The Red Hot Dog is by far the most annoying as it feels like Donkey Kong gone wrong and Greenie is basically an endurance/waiting game as you dodge his shots while the invincible blocks take a good 10 seconds to give you an opening. I hate that this is the last one since just getting hit once can have the knockback and conveyor belt send you into the pit and you have to do this whole gauntlet over again from that. The next segment then has you on Uranus platforms with some fairly solid enemy challenges around them, though at one point one of the platforms just had its collision randomly despawn on me. Not sure why there is an unchanged Quint here. There is a better use for Quint in this stage, but I'll get to that later. While you'd think seeing a micro Quick Man would be funny, the idea of shrinking Robot Masters down comes off as more obnoxious than comedic thanks to them having REDUCED hitboxes making them more difficult to land a hit on, thus artificially elongating a battle... and you're doing it with fucking *_QUICK MAN!_* I understand that him doing almost nonexistant contact damage tries to make up for that but his boomerangs still do some considerable damage! Seriously, not fun to Buster. Just whip out Spark Chaser against this pest! And then Komuso Man just dies instantly to Force Beams. You better get used to seeing that here. Instead this quadrant is capped with fighting Tempura Man, another Flash Man mod though perhaps not as annoying as Temporal Man, if you can figure out that he has a minor blind spot of simply jumping over him when he stops time which makes his tempura miss you completely. North Quadrant: This is definitely the weakest of the quadrants for me. There's some solid usage of Drillun in the beginning and on the Diamond Token path, but how are you supposed to know to ride one of the Drilluns up. This is definitely the most obtuse of the Token placements and there's even a whole midboss arena with death spikes here as well as a Crash Man mod with a trampoline in the middle of the arena that ends up making him *_EVEN EASIER_* than the already super easy Crash Man thanks to a blind spot! Metool Woman is Stone Man if his fight had too much going on at once. It's not very fun and the bulky Baby Met after you defeat here is such a huge "Screw you!" moment. Stuff like this is seriously not funny if it thrives in purposefully annoying the player. Then a Met gauntlet that you'll end up backtracking through on the ceiling via flipped gravity if you want some extra bolts. You'll need to fight a Whopper on springs to get the gravity flipper btw. After this gauntlet is Captain N Guts Man, and this actually _is_ pretty funny since he isn't really any harder than normal Guts Man aside from not having the higher ground advantage. The final Guts Tank battle at the end is a goddamned mess. It has a lot of health bars, and even though he loses more health later to the point where he spits out health, it's still a draining fight with too damn much to focus on. East Quadrant: I saved this one for last because it's the best one, but before I get to that, I have to say something. Bean, I am sorry, but I am gonna have to leave a dislike on this video. I _did not_ appreciate you skipping the first half of this section and then not showing it off. It does a major disservice to this level. You didn't give this path a fair shot and your score ends up being affected by that. (Makes me hate the inclusion of Indestructiball even more) And come on, 4 points in Creativity? Really? This stage may have been unfocused but you cannot say it lacks creativity. It manages to do a lot with just devkit assets. But I do agree that it should have just stuck to one idea and this quadrant would have been my choice. What you *_FRUSTRATINGLY_* skipped out on were extremely well designed Count Bomb puzzles using Force Beams as well as a section of Force Beams being blocked off by Yoku Blocks. The first half of this is capped off with a Volt Man that gets killed instantly by Force Beams. Yeah it happened twice. After that are the Dragon Hyoeys, which yes I admit the Red one is pretty bad as it is projectile spam. Though I do love the rhythmic platforming for the Heart Token and the Snake Blocks are used great here! I really like that sequence where the Snake Block umbrellas you from the Force Beams! It can be a bit frustrating if you die near the end but it's still a very creative use of both gimmicks! And then we get a Force Beam fakeout for the third time in this stage. This time with Dynamo Man. It's gotten old but it still could have worked if Quint was used here, since the other two that died to the Force Beams prior were Komuso Man and Volt Man. This could have been a hilarious nod to the "Devkit Boss Royal Flush" of MaGMML2 but it ends up being a missed opportunity and a running gag that falls flat on its face as a result! Blackout Man is simultaneously better and worse than Dyna Man of which he is a mod of. He makes for a mostly better challenge than Dyna Man with his rebounding projectiles but they don't despawn! You have to shoot them to make them go away! This can pretty much overwhelm the arena. It's a semi-disappointing cap to this quadrant. This stage won't be for everyone given how excessive this is, but it still had more than its fair share of interesting ideas and you cannot and should not really deny that. Seriously, Bean. Showcase the east path in its entirety! I'm extremely disappointed in you.

[@Bean1227]

A stage that goes on and on is tossing everything and the kitchen sink at you exhausts you after a while. In that regard, this stage was similar to how a couple of judges and to a much less angrily stated extent that PinkKittyRose's own playthrough of this one went for me. Haven't hated any stage so far, even this one (although one forced visual gimmick coming up was not much fun either), but it's tough to keep your focus when it keeps shifting its own so much. Don't even think the minimap purchase would help here because in the end, I'll always mentally check out of a level that switches things up like this after 10-15 minutes and just forget what I've done. If there are other entries like this in the future, now you know. Also, checking it out, it's not unlike what I did for the one token. If it was one level with one path and those were some of the rooms involved, I'd have enjoyed it more. That's the risk you run when you make a maze-like level with branching paths. You could miss out, and it looks like I did. Creativity sometimes means working with restraint.

[@tb3411]

@@Bean1227 I still think you should revisit the stage on a video to look at the east path in its entirety. You missed out on some good challenges.

[@Bean1227]

I can work that path in on the post-Tier 7 roundup video. Decided to check out things around the hotel and casino then.

[@grimspecs4752]

So I should start by prefacing how creating this behemoth came to happen. I hadn't initially planned on submitting anything to MaGMML3, as I had just finished 100% MaGMML2 and was looking for another fangame to sink my teeth into. When I went to the MaGMML3 page, I saw that they were still accepting submissions so I jumped at the chance at being a part of a collaboration of one of my favorite franchises. To understand better, the devkit was released in Late September 2018; I found out about MaGMML3 in Later October 2018. I was a month behind already, had no experience using GameMaker at ALL; so I was learning how everything worked during the creation process and I had ZERO programming knowledge whatsoever. It certainly explains the jank nature of alot of the custom assets. I was also very eager to create custom bosses because it's something I've always wanted to do, hence why there's so many. It's also why the level's as unfocused as it is, since I was trying to understand how everything worked, I had to pretty much abandon any kind of consistent theming throughout the entire stage, hence why it feels like 3 levels stapled together. But with the preamble out of the way, I'll go through each of the points in order. First the music: This came to down lack of time mostly. I had a bunch of SPC files lying around, and since GameMaker made them loop automatically; I pretty much through in whatever seemed fitting and left at that. Each area was supposed to have it's own music track, but transitioning to a different track ended up being very buggy, so it was scrapped. Volume wise it was fine for me during testing, but considering the amount of complaints from people about music tracks throughout the contest either being too loud OR too quiet, maybe there needed to be better communication as far as what volume the tracks should be at depending on volume IDK. West Quadrant: Pretty much remained how it is for most of development. The area just past the Hunter As went through at least 6 different revisions, I'm still not really happy how it turned how for the final, but time constraints and whatnot. Temporal Man was the first major custom boss I worked on, I'm still happy how he turned out, though the complaints about him being too fast or going off screen too often are valid. South Quadrant: You're not wrong about this being the most disorganized of the four quadrants; there's good reason for why it ended up that way but I'll elaborate on that in a bit. The Sheep Block/Force Laser rooms were some of the first created for the level. The colorblind friendly sheep blocks were done courtesy of Flashman being colorblind, so it seemed like a good idea to help with accessibility. The devteam seemed to agree, since turning on colorblind mode changes all the other Sheep Blocks to higher quality versions, with their shapes matching my cruder implemented ones. The Force spawners not having collision was an intentional choice, since the Lasers had a tendency of bugging out if any collision objects were placed over the spawners. BALL should've been removed no arguments here The end of the Force drop would've led to that invincible Stone Man battle I brought up in an earlier comment. Given the lag issue I was dealing with that boss, he was scrapped and replaced with Barrage Man. And the whole immunity to uncharged shots I explained in an earlier comment as well so I won't repeat myself. The disorganization of the South Quadrant has alot to do with that Stone Man encounter getting scrapped, but also needing to rearrange a ton of sections that were originally used elsewhere (I'll get into this at the end). The Hot Dog Gauntlet, Uranus Block sections, Tempura Area, and Micro Quick area were essentially thrown together haphazardly just to make the path to the Element a more linear run-through (It's why that area's Token isn't hid behind a challenge or secret hiding spot like the others.) Red and Green Dogs were pretty much thrown in to fill out space. Also the reflect blocks in Green's room seemed to change based on your patch version, since I've seen only the bottom one move out making the fight take less time since they drop off one by one instead of in unison. Not sure why it happens. The randomly despawning collision on the Uranus platforms is just a devkit issue, It's happened to me when I played through Fruit Forest. Quint technically is changed since he takes increased damage from everything. He was supposed to be part of a double boss fight with the Green Gutsman you see at the beginning to the level (Again I'll explain this later) Micro Quick's existence was an accident; I ended up shrinking a Quick Man I was using for testing by mistake so I just used it as a joke encounter. Also forget Spark Chaser, he dies in one hit to Tornado Blow. And I've explained Tempura before as well so nothing to reiterate here. North Quadrant: Definitely the most obtuse token in the level to find, I don't blame anybody for using a skip just for this token. I just figured it would be really creative to hide a screen transition behind a Drillun seeing as how they're platforms, but maybe hiding a Token behind it was too far. Bomber Joe (The Crash Man Mod) was similarly just a test asset that I threw into his own arena. Metool Woman and Guts Dozer Neo are still my favorite bosses I designed for the level, they got the most amount of development time out of all the other bosses. Once you get the rhythm for both they're pretty fun fights, but they probably could've gotten nerfed a little further. Also original Guts Dozer Neo had 6 Health Bars and split into three multicolored Gutsman after you killed it, so he was nerfed heavily before submission. He also flashed red every time he took damage (Thank you devteam for removing that) East Quadrant: Definitely the best of the four in terms of interesting setups. It was created very late into development, so if I had known that those setups worked as well as did earlier, the level would have turned out very different. The Blue and Red Dragon Hyoeys also got nerfed heavily, The blue one shot out a triple barrage of Solar Blazes and the Red One shot Changkey Dragon Fires. The blocks snakes were also originally utilized in their boss rooms, but wre scrapped due to buggy behavior. That penultimate snake block Force laser room also caused alot of eyestrain before, since it used the flashing lasers instead of the solid ones (Again thank you devteam.) Dynamo Man WAS supposed to be an actual custom boss, but programming him ended upbeing too frustrating, so I figured I would reuse the sprites I had for a Fakeout. Blackout Man was also nerfed since both he and his projectiles used to fade in and out of visibility. Also if you use his weakness Thunder Beam if lights up the room. It is funny you mention the MaGMML2 Overused Devkit Boss Royal Flush, since Volt Man was only added because I noticed I was already using Quint and Komuso, so I figured why not. Also if you count the Dragon Hyoeys as Mechadragon and the NPC Chill Man, technically the five overused MagMML2 bosses all make an appearance here. Appropriate considering the original name of the level was going to be "Am I Late to Submit to MaGMML2?" As for that Green Gutsman that was going to be an additional custom boss? I was testing one of his new attacks and it caused a catastrophic system crash. I lost days that could've been spent ironing everything out to that crash, hence why he is in eternal gay baby jail at the level start. And I've seen the comments and critiques mentioning how this level needed restraint, it needed to hold back, it needed to flesh out the good ideas it had and scrap everything that didn't work... but here's the thing THIS IS THE RESTRAINED VERSION. If this felt like 3 to 4 levels haphazardly stapled together, the original version was comparable to being TWENTY! IT HAD CLOSE TO 750+ SCREENS BEFORE IT WAS CUT DOWN. THAT'S NEARLY FIVE TIMES AS LARGE AS HUNTER TOWER! A TON of stuff had to be left on the cutting room floor for numerous reasons, hence why some of the sections felt like stuff was thrown in to be fit together... BECAUSE IT WAS. I won't get into everything that got cut here since this comment is pretty long as, but just know. If this level felt like it was slog to get through. IT COULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH WORSE! Anyway hope you enjoyed some insight to this level's development lol :p

[@tb3411]

@@grimspecs4752 "gay baby jail" Shoutouts to Simpleflips. This was a very intriguing developer commentary and it gave me a lot of insight. I'm glad that within the organized chaos, you actually did demonstrate restraint from your original... plan. That would have definitely not gonna over well. I still think the whole level could have worked with the force beam sections alone, but glad to know your train of thought then went into designing this level. While Bean may not agree, this is FAR better than Hunter Tower by all means. He's being unnecessarily harsh. Even Shinryu didn't score your level that low.