#cleverdan

Bowser’s minions have taken over Meta Knight’s airship, The Halberd! Meta Knight will scale the front of the bow, clear out enemies on the inside, carefully travel underneath the ship, avoid rocket exhaust flames, travel in the vents, avoid cannon fire, and take the bridge! There’s a stand-in for Captain Vul and Sailor Waddle Dee on the bridge at the end of the level. Maybe Bowser’s and Meta Knight's minion’s aren’t too different.

I’ve been working on this level for a few weeks. I spent a lot of time researching the Halberd from Kirby Super Star and Super Smash Bros. and I tried combining elements of Kirby and Super Mario level layout and gameplay. There are a lot of enemies since Kirby games are all about the enemies you encounter, but Mario doesn’t fight enemies directly aside from the stomp. There are hidden 1ups in blocks in the level however all other power ups are exposed on tracks, to simulate obtaining an exposed power up from Kirby.

I ended up fighting the block limit very frequently and tried to work in Bowser. When his fire breath is really unwanted, it really makes parts of a level unusable, and I eventually cut him from the level with a better puzzle battle at the end.

With the frequent Mystery Mushrooms and checkpoints, this level is probably on medium difficulty. It’s one of the longest level’s I’ve made and I wouldn’t have made it if we didn’t have checkpoints.

This level was a lot of fun to make, and I haven’t seen a tank army-style level yet. I got the idea when I thought of using conveyor belts as tank treads.

There are a few challenges I had to work around. The first was that the ground-block in the airship style are actually what makes up the tanks, so after trying other blocks, I decided on using bridge platforms. Airship-style levels also have built in camera float, as they are intended to be high in the sky. I raised the whole level by three-blocks so the player always has a a view of what each tank is armed with. Sadly there isn’t a way to give the tanks their signature slanted appearance, nor create long cannon barrels, so I was a little creative in their design, which I think still works out well. I felt the original SMB3 tank level was fun, but pretty easy. I used more cannons here and used a few more traps that weren’t in the original level, such as jets and a grinder. Being able to change the timing of the jets is great because I didn’t want them firing as soon as they enter the screen -attacking the player before he/she can see them. Bullet bills weren’t actually found in the original army/navy levels, and all of the ones here are loaded with Bob-bombs, which cannot be placed in cannons. The tanks are also spaced a little farther apart so it’s more difficult to skip all the danger between each tank. There is a boss battle at the end that isn’t too difficult, I had to get creative with it because using Bowser Jr. for everything gets tiresome. I also learned Sumo/Hammer Bros. don’t jump when there are other objects on their head.