Xedron's Custom Levels

After messing around a lot with constructor, I have finally gotten the courage to create a thread like this.

Hazard Tower
Difficulty: Advanced
Length: Long
Put your knowledge of hazards to the test!

World Record: 15.321 (BPXFreezeU)
www.mediafire.com/download/x5pha4u2fxig35f/Hazard+Tower.zip

Fan Attack
Difficulty: Intermediate
Length: Moderate
Caution: You are about to enter the Fan-Zone!

World Record: 2.80 (LeeKnot)
www.mediafire.com/download/8wn2sakg12ua03b/Fan+Attack%281%29.zip

Road of Despair
Difficulty: Advanced
Length: Long



World Record: 29.36 (Xedron)
www.mediafire.com/download/9l33v01io27a40p/Road+of+Despair.zip

Mastery
Difficulty: Expert
Length: Very Long
Are you ready to test whether you're a master at Marble Blast or not? Time to prove yourself.



World Record: 47.435 (hPerks)
www.mediafire.com/file/vbpxc0z6gqpfoo3/Mastery2.zip

Structural Adventure
Difficulty: Advanced
Length: Long
Get ready to spin in circles traveling around the skyscrapers!



World Record: 21.63 (Xedron)
www.mediafire.com/file/4g16wya5xxkkf4g/StructuralAdventure.zip

Please post your opinions of my levels on here, your critiques will only make me better.

Nice job with making your first Constructor level! For being your first product, this level is quite impressive. It's both fun and challenging; it's often hard to get both of these together.

Here are my general thoughts and opinions:

Pros:

• From the beginning to the last gem, it's ridiculously fun and rewarding to go fast.
• Placement of the Time Modifier is perfect!
• I'm not too sure if this was intended, but the Super Jump allows for different pathways which I love!

Neutral:

• As a level builder, I love spamming signs everywhere. I don't think it would hurt to put some more (maybe one on the bumper/oil slick area and another where the tornado is).
• The same goes for help triggers; they could only help the level to be honest (maybe one on the platform after the green bumper that says "Wall jump here!" or something )
• I think you may have used the MBU ice texture for the tightropes which don't work in MBP (correct me if I'm wrong). Although, having actual ice on the tightropes would be frustrating in my opinion.
• Although the level's challenges aren't exactly original, how you arranged them and the level's design made them feel fresh.
• Platinum and Ultimate Times might be too easy.

Cons:

• Just general texture errors (there are more errors than just these two):
  
  
  
• I feel like the last section of the level (with the tornado) needs a help trigger. It feels almost arbitrary whether I'm going to get sucked in or not. Maybe something like "try and get max height!" or "land on the next platform and jump!" However, after multiple attempts, this section became consistent for me; I'm not sure if that's what you were going for.
• The Easter Egg feels unjustly hard to get, and if you fail, you have to get the Super Jump and redo everything.

Personal Best:

Really good for your first level, Nice balance between length and difficulty and it is something i can consider repayable for myself.



Lets get to constructive criticism shall we:
as mentioned previously there are some texturing errors that can be fixed by doing this:

As you can see here is texture thats not aligned correctly, what we do is we select that face in face selection mode first.

then mess arround by clicking those arrows that where pointed out in last image. And that's it!
This also works for if you select multiple faces by holding crtl.

Another good practice is to keep grid spacing in numbers that are achieved from dividing 1 multiple times.
That is numbers 1 ; 0.5 ; 0.25 ; 0.125 ; 0,0625.... i mostly use 0.125. That way you will have no errors in future

ChezzNF wrote:
As a level builder, I love spamming signs everywhere. I don't think it would hurt to put some more (maybe one on the bumper/oil slick area and another where the tornado is).[/li]
The same goes for help triggers; they could only help the level to be honest (maybe one on the platform after the green bumper that says "Wall jump here!" or something )

Actually they do hurt if you overdo them, especially help triggers. If you put help trigger for every challenge then no one is gonna bother reading it and you'll hear constant spam of those which is annoying and immature. Same with signs. The point of sign is to point out direction where to go because it isn't enough obvious where to go next. (Exception to this are those giant levels that say name of each challenge)
Good way to figure out if something needs help trigger or sign is just to go slowly through level and see how obvious things are, if it isn't enough obvious where to go or how to do challenge or you feel like this challenge needs cheesy comment then you may have to add them.
Placement of items works similar to adding salt to a soup, salt is good because it makes soup taste better but if you pour too much salt into it it will taste too salty and bad like kalle.

Thanks for the texturing tips! Yeah, they got a little messed up when building.
I REALLY should've made the tornado higher. I guess that's what you get for testing after you submit the level
Expect more levels to come

This is a nice short level, but as the two above posts say, the textures are misaligned. The ice is also the wrong texture, using normal friction. I believe there is a lighter, working version of the texture you used, as well as a Marble Mini Golf ice texture.

I look forward to seeing more levels from you.

Xedron wrote:
I guess that's what you get for testing after you submit the level

Protip: Just update the download link with a new version of the level if you find an error after posting it. I've done that several times with my levels.

Also, I think you might have used the wrong ice texture -- it's not even slippery! Make sure to use ice1.jpg instead of mmg_ice.jpg.

Your level is cool. There are some texture misalignments, but this is the risk to take when you're learning or revisiting the ropes about the Constructor, so that's nothing. Next time, pay a little more attention to your texture alignments!

NEW LEVEL!

Fan Attack
Difficulty: Intermediate
Length: Moderate
Caution: You are about to enter the Fan-Zone!



www.mediafire.com/download/8wn2sakg12ua03b/Fan+Attack%281%29.zip

Short in all. No visual issues with the level. It felt too short and slightly too crammed but otherwise game play felt smooth and continuous.

Thanks! Yeah, my level is quite short mainly due to a lack of new ways to feature the fan (I ran into the same issue as threefolder with his scrapped level )

Also, I want to point out that I will be accepting World Records for my levels now. If you feel like posting your records on my levels in this thread you can do so, I will make sure to update them frequently

Doesn't seem too crammed to me, but for some reason, the magenta texture appears as white for me in-game (occurs when a texture is missing, or simply if the texture IS white).

Oh yes...that was a mistake, updated the download link to include the .dif with the magneto texture.

So, Xedron, I just played your latest level "Fan Attack," and it was decent. I'll tell you what was good and what wasn't so great. Let's start with the good!

Good
- Nicely Placed TMs.
- Replayable.
- Well made, no texturing errors I saw.

Personal
- I wish you used some caution stripes in there, as fans are sometimes hazardous.
- I'd enjoy more detailed stuff in there, like wood structuring. It's not BAD that you don't have that, I'd just like that more.

Not So Great
- Too short.
- The challenges could have been better, but they were still decent.
- Time modifiers lasted a bit too long, so you could freeze the time to the end. In the future, make the TMs a bit shorter.

Overall, it was a decent level, and actually very good for your second level only! It was much better than my second level TBH, I'm glad to see an uprising level creator on the forums. Oh and by the way, I got 3.370!

NEW LEVEL!

Road of Despair
Difficulty: Advanced
Length: Long
After countless hours of work, my longest level is now ready to be played



www.mediafire.com/download/9l33v01io27a40p/Road+of+Despair.zip

really sweet level, definitely a huge step forward from your previous 2 levels. Apart from odd first wall hit (there was no need for 1 trim ledge there) it played smoothly and had that old MBP wibe to it. Waiting for more!

Usually you get the PowerUps right when you need them, and I'm glad you did that bit at the beginning for the Super Speed instead. I wouldn't say it's long and rigid, and is an advanced level, maybe more like intermediate, but I like it. Good job.


RD, what's a wibe?

Mispelled "vibe" probably...
Thanks for all the nice reviews!

This level will sure give some inspiration for my levels.

Also, in the future, try using different skies and lightnings, so that your levels don't have always the same design, that could get boring...
Just a little advice.

Ralph wrote:
Also, in the future, try using different skies and lightnings, so that your levels don't have always the same design, that could get boring...
Just a little advice.

BUT don't overdo it. Nobody likes having eyesore when playing someones level. I would stick to beginner lighting for midday level and advanced for afternoon levels (and expert for really hard levels. Regarding skyboxes, custom skyboxes are fine as long as you don't do primary skybox color same as primary color of level (if you somehow manage to balance brigtness then it isn't that bad). You have to have some contrast between skybox and level itself, otherwise it turns into eyesore.
If you ever want to make level more original focus more on gameplay, maybe do different theme, new concepts etc.

I'ts not skybox that makes level boring and repetitive, more often it's gameplay and design of it.

Thanks for the skybox/lighting tips! I will probably use the beginner-expert lighting for my upcoming levels

As for my upcoming level, I have been working hard the last few days trying to get it finished. Here is just a little preview:

Looks pretty good!
I can see you've spent quite some time on it, and I'm looking forward for the outcome of it.

Hey guys! It's been quite a while since I last posted on this thread, as you can probably tell I took a long break from creating, but now I'm happy to tell you all I'm finally coming back to it again!

So plans for my next level..it's going to be a very long level (3:30.00 - 4:00.00 in length) and be a decent difficulty. I'm going for unique but not annoying gameplay, and the level will be divided into 5 parts, each with a different theme.

Here is the what the first part looks like (this is my first attempt at scenery so it may look completely out of place...):


As you can see, this is quite a big project that I hope to get done pretty soon in the future. I hope this is enough to get you excited!

Looking forward to it!

Quick update:
I'm about half-way done with the level currently. The first two parts are complete and the third one is in the making. Here's a quick photo (I removed the scenery because it felt rather pointless):

Finally, after nearly 6 months of hard work, effort, and procrastination, my most proud and most complex level is finally ready to be released to the open public! I present to you...Mastery

Download link is on the first page

Work in progress...this picture is all you're going to get until its release..

This level would fit nicely into a sunset...

New level!

Structural Adventure



Download link on the first post.

So I got some feedback that one of the textures I had used in the level (repul_stripe_caution to be exact) mistakenly had been put into the level and acted as a bouncy floor. Updated the level along with a couple other minor things (making the 1st gem more clear, misalignment's, bad gameplay/bugs etc).

Hope you enjoy the new version! Download is on the first post.