The Secret of the Switches

Extra Files:

Readme.txt

THE SECRET OF THE SWITCHES
by Aaron Rotenberg (arotenbe)


The Secret of the Switches is my first publicly released Super Mario World hack (although I made one before this that got trashed after I started reading the SMW Central hack removal log). It is almost entirely plotless--even more so than the typical Mario game--and is really more of an exercise in level design. It is mostly vanilla, but I don't hesitate to use custom blocks and sprites when I think it will improve gameplay.

The overall goal of the game is to press all four colored "!" block switches and beat the final boss. In this first demo, only the Yellow Switch world is completed. The main path to the Yellow Switch has four levels and a castle, and there are also three bonus levels.

This hack has a steep difficulty curve--i.e. the difficulty increases greatly in later levels. There are two reasons for this:

* You can save after every level. (Not being able to save at any point is a pet peeve of mine.)
* In the final version, there will be four worlds, so if you get stuck you can just try another level.

Some parts of the hack are especially hard. The castle can only be described as evil. (Isn't that the point?) Meanwhile, "The Mountain Secret", being a parody of bad level design, is extremely irritating unless you bring a cape in and fly over the top. It also features an "endless" bonus game which isn't really endless.



== Known issues ==
* The player can get a ridiculous number of 1-ups by bouncing on the Cheep-Cheeps in the northeast "Elsewhere" level. I might choose to make the jumping ones invincible to stomps, like the swimming ones, but this could break the player's expectations from the original game.
* Since the player can save after every level, Game Overs are largely meaningless. This is a general game balance problem which I will need to address in future releases.


== Credits ==
* FuSoYa for Lunar Magic and Lunar IPS
* Yy for YY-CHR
* MrCheeze for the SMW Fix patch
* edit1754 for the No More Sprite Tile Limits patch
* BMF54123 for the Fade Fix patch
* Jonathan Wilson for Block Tool and the Teleport block
* mikeyk for Sprite Tool and the Level Ender and Bomb Bro sprites


== Reuse ==
You can copy anything from this hack for yourself, as long as you credit me. I can't really imagine anything that you would want to reuse, though.



== Changelog ==

Demo 1.1:
* Modified the Yellow Switch submap to better reflect the contents of the levels.
* Added some coins to a blind jump in Yellow Switch 2.
* Made an irritating Torpedo Ted launcher in Yellow Switch 3 slightly less irritating.
* Changed the palette for the ground in Yellow Switch 4 (and the end of Yellow Switch 3) to have a bit more contrast, per Hach's suggestion.
* Made the castle slightly easier by changing a block that gave a flower to give a feather instead.
* Changed the readme to tell people that the endless bonus room isn't endless!
* Added a couple feathers and a big free-flying area to the "end of demo" level.