The serious one

honestly tho like

"Thank god I figured out looping animations" - actually it was me who worked out those, over a year ago, you can search the SMB discord for it, and they were integrated into Crafted's docs a year ago today (happy birthday!). It's just a float that you put into the animation header which will make the animation restart. It's actually optional, but it's really pretty and how it's done ingame, which is why I was very proud of it and quick to put it into Thread. Thread was a first for many things - type 1, wormholes, moving goals, shit we take for granted today.

That was February last year, and (this bit might be a bit soppy but I kinda wanna talk about it) I was a complete wreck then. I was wracked with all sorts of misery starting from September 2016 which steadily built and built. I ditched my fourth year of university after missing two exams in October, and spent most of December huddling in my room playing Overwatch. I was going nowhere and at the time didn't want to.

Then came January. I saw the trailer for the original 1.0 level pack, and I was amazed. I picked it up pretty much straight away and played it, and as joyous as it was, it was kinda underwhelming. A lot of things were missing and barren. But that was when I found my calling. I ditched Overwatch, ditched games in general for a while, and put focus into level design. The first stage I made (which never actually made it past Workshop) was a primitive version of Taper.

Later, I wanted to make Thread. The original version was this huge monstrosity, where you'd fall off at the end for the goals. It would have had to had Type-2 animation, but whatever. I was trying to set up a way of getting from one to another, but rolling would have taken up most of the stage and make it very cheesable - not good at all. But then I thought about wormholes and how they hadn't been done, so I asked, and nobody knew how. So I had a poke around myself, and moved a wormhole in some stages. The first working wormholes are about a year old now, my first pastebin dating from 14 Feb 2017. So I thought, why stop there? Have a poke around, experiment, find more things.

Soon, in March 2017, thread was made. It had wormholes, looping type-1 animation, and moving goals. Nothing special today, but revolutionary then.

"I started hacking SMB2 just to make this stage" - 2017 me

Later still in March 2017, I got my first "job" (actually a training program with a prospect of a job at the end - there was no job). Part of the reason I got it was my ability to talk about romhacking and the wormhole discovery. I was ecstatic! Honestly, SMB2 hacking had given me reason to be happy, and that lead to that "job".

Months later, in July 2017, I embarked on something braver. My favourite stage at the time, Dissolved Cone, was the first stage ever to have a vanilla background - and it was a *pain*. I had to manually edit over a hundred offsets to make it work right, but when it came out, it was beautiful (once I fixed the cliff). Later on, I created BGTool using some programming skills I had picked up. It was pretty primitive and some rather ugly C++, but it existed and was good.

Then came GMATool, which had a more honourable existence. It was made in September, designed to get rid of the biggest issue that plagued 1.5 - GX exporting. Since they wanted to add goals and backgrounds to all the stages they possibly could, they'd use the GX export to grab models for it. Unfortunately the GX export removed the normal shading, so many stages, in particular Scrap's Ring Attack and my Dissolved Cone (nooo!), were left visually weakened. This fixed these issues by allowing GMA objects to be added with no fuss, making goals, wormholes, and when combined with BGTool backgrounds infinitely easier to add.

In October, I got a real job. An actual real job that I go to 5 times a week for 8 hours a day. Combined with my commute, it ended up taking out a big chunk of my time, so I wasn't (and still am not) as active a hacker or a level designer as I once was. It's a shame, but I'm infinitely better than I was late 2016, so I'm very happy to be of help within SMB2 level design and romhacking.

And yeah, that's a brief autobiography of my romhacking stuff and it doesn't even touch on seesaws, conveyor belts, level ordering, world ordering, the names of worlds, story mode difficulty, fog, music, lighting, special lighting used in Whale, sphere objects, cone objects, cylinder objects, reflective floors, fallout volumes, my full level list, goal transparency, flat lighting for skyboxes, and of course switches. Nor does it mention Prism or Perihelion, my two best-received stages. And nor does it mention the 6 weeks when I ran those level jams. SMB2 hacking is practically my identity, and although I don't do half as much nowadays, I still throw out constant advice on level design and hacking.

So yeah, I hope you can see why I get pretty worked up over this stuff.