Dijon Dunes (60s Rush) | YCC-YLK-9MF

Dijon Dunes (60s Rush) | YCC-YLK-9MF

The first course I made for Super Mario Maker 2, modeled after the Retrush level of the same name, Dijon Dunes is a more technical speedrunning course with plenty of ways to bound gracefully over the desert sands. You only get 60 seconds – go for the best time!

Falling a little behind, so today’s Catching Up post will be posted over the weekend. See you then ✨

Catching Up: Retrush

Before working, before college, before even this blog, my earliest days on the Internet were spent toying with a little fangame called Mari0, a mashup of Super Mario Bros. and Portal. It was my first time with a Mario level editor, and I made tons of mappacks – everything from traditional Mario levels to Portal-style puzzles, and even a mappack where Mario can't jump. My latest project, Retrush, is a speedrunning mappack where you have a limited amount of time to get from checkpoint to checkpoint, and I'm really proud of how it's coming along!

However, I started work on it in 2014... and five years later, the mappack is still not finished. What gives?

First, a little context. Retrush started out as a tileset demo of sorts, to see what kinds of levels I could make with just the tiles from the original SMB, but with tons of different color palettes for each tile (also all from SMB). I had no shortage of ideas – a fiery cavern, a train chase, an abandoned aquarium – and the "hook" of having limited time for each section of the level was a lot of fun! So I decided to make twelve levels, which I thought was plenty of levels to play without being too overboard to work on. College slowed my output on this considerably, but even still, I had ten of the twelve levels finished within a year or so.

As I was starting to wrap things up (I even sent out a beta to several people), I had an idea: what if there were extra challenges for each level after you finish? Say, scouting the level for red coins or having to beat the whole level in one run (no deaths). It was supposed to be a quick way to add extra content for people who wanted more to do.

But like all things I make, it spiraled out of control, and became Red Coin Remixes. Each level still has the same layout, but all the enemies and obstacles are rearranged, and the challenge is increased. Even the color palettes are changed, so now the fiery cavern becomes an icy one, the aquarium becomes a chemical plant, and so on. Rather than a quick way to re-use content, it effectively means there are twice as many levels to make!

And then, in the process of making the remix levels, I got an itch to make some more levels from scratch. It's hard to pass up on the idea of a desert level with a shimmering, hazy sky whose remix is a seabed with shimmering refracted light. I decided to make four more to round out the level count, which is actually eight more levels including the remixes...

And that's the story of how I went from 12 levels to 32 levels.

That said, it has been five years. You'd think I would be close to done with them by now. And I am! At the time of this writing, twenty levels are completed (or mostly completed), six levels are in progress, and the other six haven't been started for various reasons. I've made a bunch of animated tiles and backgrounds, tons of custom enemies including an Unagi with custom graphics (my first pixel art!), and systems for keeping track of Red Coins collected and resetting them on death (which do not exist directly in Mari0).

Obviously, progress has been slow because of mental health issues and working full-time. But even with that, I'm fairly certain I could finish all the levels and polish everything up with two or three months of focused effort. The reason I haven't finished Retrush isn’t really about the number of levels, or the graphics, or the polish, or even being an adult.

The reason... is music!

At first, I had no idea what music I wanted to add to the mappack. I tried using music from Kirby Canvas Curse, but I couldn't find good tracks for some of the levels. Once I added the Red Coin Remixes, all pretense of finding a fitting soundtrack was out the window. I need a song for every level in the game, with tracks that fit both the original level and the remix – and frankly, that's not happening. So I took the only logical course of action and decided to compose my own soundtrack.

I've kept quiet about this for a while, partly because I wanted it to be a surprise, but mostly because I didn't know whether I would actually follow through with it. I've always wanted to make music, but this is my first time doing so, and it's for a [checks notes] 30+ track OST. That's a lot even for a seasoned composer! Eventually I realized that, in my mind, Retrush would be incomplete without an original soundtrack. So, whether or not I actually can do this, I have committed myself to trying.

I was hoping to have something to show before I actually announced this, but frankly, this is the biggest stonewall in Retrush's development by far. Due to working full-time and struggling to learn Famitracker and music theory, I only have a handful of tracks in various states of completion, all from two years ago. I've felt like there's some aspect of composition that I haven't picked up on, and once I "get it" I'll finally hit the ground running... but that's simply not how real life works, and in the meantime the rest of the mappack is languishing.

You might be wondering, "why are you doing this to yourself?" The answer is that, before I started working full-time, it seemed within my reach. Now, I don't have the energy to push myself that hard – to make something so big while learning how to do it along the way. I've done this before with other things, which is why I continue to aim that high so frequently... but I don't know if I can at this point in my life, as much as I want to.

Regardless, Retrush is still one of my most important projects on deck, and I still intend to finish it at some point... with or without music.

ladiesss

I Can’t Believe It’s Not On Nintendo Switch!

Catching up

Hey there! Been a while, huh? I’m happy to finally say that I’m back for real this time! ✨

I’ve been keeping plenty active on Twitter, but this blog was in limbo for quite a while now. There was, after all, a major event here on Tumblr that caused a massive exodus of users. I wasn’t sure what to do after that; I already hadn’t kept up with the blog in ages, and a lot of my people seemed to be going elsewhere.

Initially, the plan was to build a new blog from scratch, with static hosting and a custom theme and other techy nonsense. I even got a basic version up and running! However, working out the design was difficult, and there’s a lot I still haven’t figured out. Plus, since it’s not on Tumblr anymore, I would miss out on all the social features – including other people being able to find my posts.

But what put the final nail in the coffin... was that I landed my first full-time job! I now make software for boats that drive themselves, which is not the most glamorous job, or even remotely what I was expecting, but I like it well enough. Unfortunately, programming for my day job kinda makes it difficult to want to program in my free time, so the idea of making a custom site has pretty much run its course.

Regardless, after giving it some thought... I don’t know why I considered moving away from Tumblr for so long. It still works exactly as well as it always has. I make long threads on Twitter left and right, so I’m clearly not tired of writing. And, despite everything, I still have more people following me here than I have on any other platform. So I’m back, and I’m here to stay until Tumblr itself disappears into the nether!

We’ve got a lot of catching up to do, so expect a few posts in the near future. At first some of them will be old updates and threads from Twitter, but after that, anything new I make will be posted here as well. As I go along, I hope to incrementally update the blog with new features and design tweaks; right now I’m back to basics with the default Tumblr theme, which I’ll be using as a base. Finally, I’ll clean up some old posts and redo the tags – one of the first features I want to add is a “featured tags” block so it’s easy to find all my levels, or drawings, or stories, or whatever else. I’m really excited to be back at this!

Some other notable life updates that happened while I was away:

Came out as nonbinary 💛🤍💜🖤

Started medication for my anxiety disorder

Discovered I may have ADHD

Got my driver’s license and my first car

You know, listing it all out like this makes me realize just how much I’ve accomplished in the last year or two. It’s been really difficult to make things while also working full time, so seeing progress in other areas of my life gives me hope that maybe I’ll figure out this “being an adult” thing after all.

Stay tuned, and thanks as always for reading. 💙