Koopa Kavern Zone

[FlyingNosaj]

Hello wonderful person who may or may not be looking at this text, you've stumbled into the release thread for my first custom SRB2 zone!

Welcome to Koopa Kavern Zone! Here we have;

3 Stages of questionable length!
Lots of turtle robots!
Seperate paths for Knuckles!
Questionable level design!

Criticism is very much welcomed!

 

[D00D64]

Welcome to releases.

 

[Prime 2.0]

Oh wow, a full 3 act zone, how delightful!

I'm a bit pressed for time right now, so just a few quick thoughts as feedback:

* Remember to make enemies face where the player is supposed to come from
* Be careful with low light levels. Parts of your stage are dark enough that anyone with a bit of glare on their screen won't be able to see it at all.
* Some areas get a bit crampt, which you might want to think about in future levels. Remember, sonic and co can travel very far, very fast, and SRB2 is at its most fun when there's a sense of flow to your movement where you don't have to come to a complete stop.

Pairing a turret with the eggslimer was a cool idea: it's a creative and original approach to preventing the usual cheese strategy, but it also means you have to be mindful of your rebound when attacking eggman, and can even choose to bait the turret into shooting him instead! Very neat.

Making the arena such a large circle that it turns into a bit of a chase also makes the boss feel much different from its THZ counterpart, though I'm uncertain of how well that will play as knuckles, since he can't thok or spinfly to cut the RNG out of the situation. Spinjumping might be enough to deal with that though, and with the turret there you have to be mindful of when you charge one up, which sounds pretty cool in theory.

If you ever decide to add an egg capsule to the act 3 (just copy/paste it and the control sectors from a different map and adjust the heights with ++number, it's what everyone does), just be sure to set up something to kill the turret when the boss goes down.

All that said, Welcome to - oh, D00D beat me to the punch.

Suppose I should have expected that. :v

 

[SSNCaleb]

Well, since no one cares about replying here, I'll post my review here. Starting from Act 1, I could tell that there were turtle robots all around the caverns. Somethings are very questionable, in which Prime 2.0 already mentioned, so I won't say them. Anyways, Act 2 had a weird turn at the split off. Normally, Sonic & Tails go the same path while Knuckles gets his own path. But, by some odd reason, Tails can go on Knuckles' Path and still make it thru alive. Act 3 took ages to get the first hit on Dr. Eggman because of the turret, and the Eggmeister can also defeat themselves due to the bottomless pit between the players and the turret. But overall, it was a nice 3 act zone, and I wish you good luck to all the new levels you make.

 

[sluggard]

Nice looking levels, going to give this a shot.

 

[Chromatian]

Prime already covered most of what needed to be mentioned, so I'll just point out that the Knux-only paths can be taken with any character, and Knuckles can go through the No-Knux paths as well. If it was intentional then cool, but if you want to force knuckles down his route, you'll need to do some clever positioning of your platforms and no-climb walls to get him in there. Players love to break rules, and they will if you let them.

 

[Ice]

Neat levels!

I can tell why it's a Koopa Kavern, though I have to admit, the turtles are one of my least favorite enemies in the game. But that's not your fault.

This is a nice set of levels. I liked the way you used the textures and lighting to create a vibrant aesthetic, though, as mentioned before, some rooms do tend to get too dark. The levels do border on cramped, but not anything nearly as bad as we used to get. Back when the editor was jankier, it was a lot easier to think you're creating a massive chamber and end up with a skinny weenie hallway. This zone is right on the boundary between too-cramped and ok, which I think is fine if you're deliberately trying to slow down the player.

The levels look nice, as I said, but a lot of the sectors were too square. I think perfectly-rectangular platforms are okay, but perfectly-rectangular rooms, especially a lot of them stuck together, gives the player the feeling that he's in a Minecraft base rather than an SRB2 level. If you made the boundaries of the rooms a little less straight and a little more organic and uneven, I think you'd improve the aesthetics by a fair margin.

I really liked how you paid attention to the nooks and crannies of the level. It feels evenly-decorated, and there's a good amount of ring monitors, emblems, and extra lives crammed into the easily-overlooked corners of the level. On my second playthrough, I took the time to slow down and look around, and I felt well-rewarded for my efforts. This is what good explorability is :)

And what's this, a good third act? Again?? The last level I reviewed, Quiet South Island, also made clever use of the Egg Slimer boss. Yours made even MORE clever use of him! The wide arena and turrets really made this boss a lot more exiting than usual, and for that you deserve applause. You guys keep showing me that Egg Slimer is a lot more versatile than he first appears.

Good work, and I hope I see more levels of yours in the future!