Change log :
- Reduced the size of every map aviable in multiplayer by 25% following a complain about them being too small.
- Changed the battle course music.
- increased the size of "Sealed Star Slide".
- Added the component to trigger the sky and music changes in sealed stars.
- Garden and Block had their aestetics altered, but dont suffer any layout changes, the modifications being purely visual.
- Broken Spectrum didn't change a bit.
Solid foundations here and a serious visual nostalgia fest for anyone whose played the original tracks. I'm only going on based on my first impressions here, but the repeating trick jumps on the Boswer maps are a little brutal. Springs might be a better fit for what the design originally was?
Also all those maps with varying depths of water, the ones where you just barely have to touch the dark deeper water to get teleported seemed a bit overly sensitive with detection? A limitation of what ring racers can do perhaps idk.
I need to run the maps some more, for some reason despite the tracks being mostly quite wide I did terrible playing a lot of them XD
Also all those maps with varying depths of water, the ones where you just barely have to touch the dark deeper water to get teleported seemed a bit overly sensitive with detection? A limitation of what ring racers can do perhaps idk.
As i already replied to Freaky Mutant Man, It's actualy an oversight causd by the change of scalling
expect this issue to be solved relatively quickly.
If you want to know the details, it has to do with how i've set the depth of the death pit, and the fact that the change in scale made the game now consider them like steps rather than drops, going against what i intended it to behave like.
my only criticism as of rn is to PLEASE add ark arrows to the first sealed star omg, I couldn't tell where I was supposed to go half the time, you may need to do it to others aswell but I'm mainly worried about the one mentioned
my only criticism as of rn is to PLEASE add ark arrows to the first sealed star omg, I couldn't tell where I was supposed to go half the time, you may need to do it to others aswell but I'm mainly worried about the one mentioned
well, Garden is meant to be a hedge maze, so it would kind of spoil the gimmick
the split paths still reconect at one point sooner or later anyway so i can always add arrows at these points.
well, Garden is meant to be a hedge maze, so it would kind of spoil the gimmick
the split paths still reconect at one point sooner or later anyway so i can always add arrows at these points.
Now that I've had time to digest the tracks a bit more (having gotten S ranks on all cups in Master, taking several attempts on all but Mushroom, and played a Gear 3 online session with some of the tracks in the rotation), some more thoughts:
Bowser Castle 3's trick panel segments feel like they could use some re-jiggering - while the online session I played had people suggesting they be replaced with moon panels, I did find in my last Master attempt that you could generally make it through the trick panel gaps consistently by tricking as early as possible until you pass the last gap. Even so, this feels unintuitive enough that, if you keep the trick panels, you may want to consider going off-script a bit and extending or otherwise re-configuring the gaps enough until it's possible to trick through the gaps at a decent speed without getting dumpstered between them.
Battle Courses 5-8 feel kinda... I don't know how else to put this, placeholder-y? They're all much smaller than Courses 1-4 and feel like they were primarily designed for Prison Break rather than being appropriately sized for Battle mode, at least on my first read of them and without having yet had the opportunity to test them in Battle. I can't even imagine how 8 is supposed to play out in Battle mode proper with it just being a small rectangle - in general there's not much going on with their layouts that would entice me to try playing them with other people, 7 seems like it could be interesting for 2-3 players but I can't find the same interest in any of the others. They just feel like much less thought was put into them compared to the adaptations of Courses 1-4, which I think are pretty nice and varied, I definitely want to try those out in multiplayer at some point.
(From a purely technical level, Battle Course 8 is also the only map in the pack that throws out error messages at the start - one of the prison eggs that's supposed to rotate in a circle in the middle of the map doesn't, throwing out an error that "no target waypoint was found for moving capsule" and creating a break in the intended pattern. There's also a warning about multiple finish line waypoints existing on the map, though this doesn't seem to impact anything.)
Block has a weird start - the catcher starts off far enough behind you that it ends up zooming off way ahead, effectively rendering the first item box or two pointless unless you get a sneaker from the first or something. Because it does this immediate quick zoom, you lose out on crucial time to inflict damage on the catcher, which is especially important with how short Block feels compared to basically any Sealed Star in the base game. On my Master attempts, it was very common to lose the first attempt primarily due to how little window of opportunity there is to inflict damage before the final stretch - you'd basically need to nail a triple Orbinaut at some point to really have a chance of pulling off the first attempt, and while it's not a problem for a Sealed Star to be hard, it feels weird when it feels like you're supposed to have just a bit more time to actually interact with the catcher than you really do. Also, the SPB spawn is so comically out of the way and so close to the end of the course that I don't know how you're supposed to go for it without effectively forfeiting your chance at the emerald - my attempts to use it pretty much all ended in failure, and I was left wondering if there was some way to grab it without backtracking as much as it seems like you're supposed to (and if there is, I didn't find it).
Prism is generally fine, it's the last one and it feels suitably challenging - however, I do feel like the final stretch feels just a bit shorter than it really ought to be. It's not so much a matter of it actually being short so much as it is a matter of how easily the end of the course sneaks up on you - the end line is not immediately apparent and only becomes obvious once you're already super close to it, on top of appearing much darker than any of the end lines in the base game Sealed Stars. Even when I was keeping in mind that the end comes very suddenly, it's still a bit of a shock when it does, and my first time around I was completely caught off-guard by it. If there's one edit I think Prism would most benefit from, it's making the end line much more apparent from a distance - you have plenty of time and warning to see the end coming in all of the base game Sealed Stars and the other three in this pack, and I think it'd be best if Prism followed suit for readability's sake.
Minor note on the Sealed Stars that might be down purely to personal taste - I feel like Prism and maybe even Block warrant using UFO Smasher over UFO Catcher. I was kinda surprised when all of them used Catcher, even when the difficulty seems like it's being brought up to about Super Emerald-tier.
Final note for now: as Superstarxalien points out above, it would definitely feel more appropriate to credit Soyo Oka instead of Nintendo for the music. That always bothers me whenever I notice it.
Again, I do quite enjoy the pack and I think a lot of the courses are pretty good adaptations of the original game while making appropriate and interesting changes for better gameplay in Ring Racers - I do want to see more, and I am curious to see what else you might do with it.
Now that I've had time to digest the tracks a bit more (having gotten S ranks on all cups in Master, taking several attempts on all but Mushroom, and played a Gear 3 online session with some of the tracks in the rotation), some more thoughts:
Bowser Castle 3's trick panel segments feel like they could use some re-jiggering - while the online session I played had people suggesting they be replaced with moon panels, I did find in my last Master attempt that you could generally make it through the trick panel gaps consistently by tricking as early as possible until you pass the last gap. Even so, this feels unintuitive enough that, if you keep the trick panels, you may want to consider going off-script a bit and extending or otherwise re-configuring the gaps enough until it's possible to trick through the gaps at a decent speed without getting dumpstered between them.
Battle Courses 5-8 feel kinda... I don't know how else to put this, placeholder-y? They're all much smaller than Courses 1-4 and feel like they were primarily designed for Prison Break rather than being appropriately sized for Battle mode, at least on my first read of them and without having yet had the opportunity to test them in Battle. I can't even imagine how 8 is supposed to play out in Battle mode proper with it just being a small rectangle - in general there's not much going on with their layouts that would entice me to try playing them with other people, 7 seems like it could be interesting for 2-3 players but I can't find the same interest in any of the others. They just feel like much less thought was put into them compared to the adaptations of Courses 1-4, which I think are pretty nice and varied, I definitely want to try those out in multiplayer at some point.
(From a purely technical level, Battle Course 8 is also the only map in the pack that throws out error messages at the start - one of the prison eggs that's supposed to rotate in a circle in the middle of the map doesn't, throwing out an error that "no target waypoint was found for moving capsule" and creating a break in the intended pattern. There's also a warning about multiple finish line waypoints existing on the map, though this doesn't seem to impact anything.)
Battle Courses 5-8 are (poor) attemps at capturing the feels of the old ones with added verticality
i'm honestly only happy with 5 and 6, and might revisit them in the future
Block has a weird start - the catcher starts off far enough behind you that it ends up zooming off way ahead, effectively rendering the first item box or two pointless unless you get a sneaker from the first or something. Because it does this immediate quick zoom, you lose out on crucial time to inflict damage on the catcher, which is especially important with how short Block feels compared to basically any Sealed Star in the base game. On my Master attempts, it was very common to lose the first attempt primarily due to how little window of opportunity there is to inflict damage before the final stretch - you'd basically need to nail a triple Orbinaut at some point to really have a chance of pulling off the first attempt, and while it's not a problem for a Sealed Star to be hard, it feels weird when it feels like you're supposed to have just a bit more time to actually interact with the catcher than you really do. Also, the SPB spawn is so comically out of the way and so close to the end of the course that I don't know how you're supposed to go for it without effectively forfeiting your chance at the emerald - my attempts to use it pretty much all ended in failure, and I was left wondering if there was some way to grab it without backtracking as much as it seems like you're supposed to (and if there is, I didn't find it).
Prism is generally fine, it's the last one and it feels suitably challenging - however, I do feel like the final stretch feels just a bit shorter than it really ought to be. It's not so much a matter of it actually being short so much as it is a matter of how easily the end of the course sneaks up on you - the end line is not immediately apparent and only becomes obvious once you're already super close to it, on top of appearing much darker than any of the end lines in the base game Sealed Stars. Even when I was keeping in mind that the end comes very suddenly, it's still a bit of a shock when it does, and my first time around I was completely caught off-guard by it. If there's one edit I think Prism would most benefit from, it's making the end line much more apparent from a distance - you have plenty of time and warning to see the end coming in all of the base game Sealed Stars and the other three in this pack, and I think it'd be best if Prism followed suit for readability's sake.
Minor note on the Sealed Stars that might be down purely to personal taste - I feel like Prism and maybe even Block warrant using UFO Smasher over UFO Catcher. I was kinda surprised when all of them used Catcher, even when the difficulty seems like it's being brought up to about Super Emerald-tier.
Final note for now: as Superstarxalien points out above, it would definitely feel more appropriate to credit Soyo Oka instead of Nintendo for the music. That always bothers me whenever I notice it.
Again, I do quite enjoy the pack and I think a lot of the courses are pretty good adaptations of the original game while making appropriate and interesting changes for better gameplay in Ring Racers - I do want to see more, and I am curious to see what else you might do with it.
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