I Wanna Be The StepMan

[Daikyi]

Hey, this is my first attempt at making a fangame, inspired by IWKTK3 and the other community that i'm from.

basis - you generic 100 room fare, based off of songs from another game i'm involved with. (IWBTEngine Seph Edition base)
difficulties from 1-100, with 1 being "literally can't fail", and 100 being ??? (i'm not sure how hard this is actually going to be, wanted to get some opinions on the 15~ rooms and the difficulty progression)

Current status - feeling out game maker/designing
- I've coded in a banner system pretty much like IWKTK3's banner system
- threw together custom death sound + restart sound, added in some music

couple things to note
- much of the looks of the game are not going to remain that way - I'm working with a friend who can make the levels not look like the blocky poop that they currently are (he's the one who did the banners for the first 10 levels)
- title screen and select will be revamped to look good (lol)
- there are 3 warps that you can't get to, which are secret levels based on the unlock system in the other game, so disregard those for now (?)
- in the level with a ton of apples all over the place and no blocks (11) is inf. jumps
- there's currently a debug feature, which is simply, click anywhere inthe level to be teleported there

In conclusion, I know I'm completely new to gamemaker/designing levels, but I know how to program, do sound, and do graphics (with some help) half decently well.  Again, with the current difficulty progression, do you think it's going maybe too slow, or too fast for a 100 room game?  Also to keep in mind, this is also very much going to another community that (mostly) has little experience with IWBTG fangames, which is why these first 15 levels are stupidly easy for now, and are just introducing different mechanics and stuff.  (some of the difficulty/design stems from inside joke stuff in the ffr community)

Also, if there's any other comments/advice there is to offer, that would be appreciated as well, thanks so much!

p.s. a full run of all the current levels should take like <10 minutes, and very little deaths

couple screenshots (very low aesthetic, again)

(click to show/hide)

download link
https://www.mediafire.com/download/bb1fvf4e5pqolqc/IWBTSM.rar

thanks again in advance!

[pieceofcheese87]

Without downloading the game i can see that you have title cards for music. Why? We can just look in the readme if we want to know a song. No need to tell us every time we press R.
Also, please make your own tileset. The brown blocks were never in style.

The death sound is extremely annoying and hurts my ears.

The level with infinite jump and the apple maze is awful, i would re-do that.

overall, your level design isn't terrible, but i can't really make a conclusion based off of 15 screens.

[Taprus]

Well..
Its not bad its just not very good, and i dont really like it all that much
The screens feel bland and for the most part really easy, even more than stuff like 100 trials (wish is really easy) and the difficulty curve is really weird  . That is not counting the water apple maze (wish was awful) and the last screen, the  big apple that shoots more apples (unnesecarily long and very easy to die by the end, compared to the previous screens)
Also use a tileset that isnt the IWBTG bricks or the bland grey background, just dont
And as piece said, why bother with tile cards for the music? It really makes no sense
So yeah that is what I have to say

Though, you cant really judge something out of only 15 screens so yeah

[Daikyi]

the titlecards are more for the other community than anything else; since the levels are based on in game songs and such.

i'm definitely using my own tileset, i'm not sticking w/ the base tileset that was given

i'll be fixing the death sound too, and I guess I can just ramp up the difficulty from the beginning without worrying too much?

thanks for the feedback though

edit - most likely i'm going to throw the curve (more or less) out the window, and have actual jumps that you'd normally see in fangames and w/e

[Starz0r]

Also, please make your own tileset. The brown blocks were never in style.

I never understand why people find the classic tileset to be a problem. There is nothing eyeaids about it, and the fact that a bunch of producers still use shows that they are definitely in style still. I never cared if they were there, and if they weren't, I really wouldn't notice. It's not really a huge problem for a guy's first game anyway since it didn't take any from any non-existant aesthetic value.

[ilvpag]

I recommend adding save blockers to avoid breaking save files like this:

(click to show/hide)

For level design: I'm not really too sure how familiar you are with fangames, but a lot of this stuff does not progress how a normal fangame would progress. There a ton of places where you can easily save through the player killers and just completely skip segments and this is usually never done in fangames (another reason why I recommend save blockers). You say you're going for a 100f type of game so why not try to play through churatch or the conquer the blow game series? Just playing through them will give you a much better idea on how the level design is usually done in 100f games.

Now for graphics/sound/etc, I don't mind the title cards, but I really don't know how the floors you made relate to the songs on them lol (I play sm/ffr too). The gameover sound (like pieceofcheese said) is way too loud, but you already know this. The default tileset itself is fine,

(click to show/hide)

^{the entire twitch IWBTG community has some weird hate for it and it's stupid cause it looks better than 99% of the tilesets people make to replace it...}

but it really doesn't fit your game because of the music, of course you've already acknowledged this so I look forward to seeing what you come up with The song you have chosen is very nice too

[Daikyi]

Yeah, I was kinda designing the levels more with the fact that people completely new to iwbtg (like, others in the ffr community), but I think I'm going to nix that.  That being said, some of the save stuff is intentional still, with the above fact in mind, although I'll definitely reconfirm that you can't break the game like that

[bananaguy12]

Without downloading the game i can see that you have title cards for music. Why? We can just look in the readme if we want to know a song. No need to tell us every time we press R.
Also, please make your own tileset. The brown blocks were never in style.

The death sound is extremely annoying and hurts my ears.

The level with infinite jump and the apple maze is awful, i would re-do that.

overall, your level design isn't terrible, but i can't really make a conclusion based off of 15 screens.

The brown blocks were always in style.

[lawatson]

If all else fails, you can use the guest stage blocks...Even though those are overused too, they don't necessarily look that bad. Do be sure to make sure that the player can't break their save, too. It can suck to have that happen. A last thing to highlight is just a gamemaking tip: If you find your game fun, than in most cases others will find it fun too. I hope your second game is better!