runhello.com

So a random little thing that I ran across and had me sort of floating on air… if you’ve played the amazing indie platformer Super Meat Boy, you’ll have seen an interesting feature they have where once you beat a level, they play back all the (many) attempts it will have taken you to complete it, simultaneously and superimposed. An example, via IGN:

If you’ve been reading my posts here, you’ll have probably figured out by now that I really like punishment platformers. So I’d been playing Super Meat Boy more or less nonstop for several weeks when someone forwarded me this Game Informer interview with Team Meat, wherein it turns out that the replay feature was actually inspired by the “Many-Worlds Mario” video I made and posted here way back in 2008:

How did you come up with the multi-death replay system?

Refenes: Basically, there’s a video that’s been floating around on the Internet for awhile. It’s a modded Super NES emulator that’s rigged to play custom-made Super Mario World levels. They rigged the emulator so it would record every attempt and then overlay them and play them at the same time. So this one video, it’s called Quantum Mario, it’s just one Mario jumping from platform to platform and he’ll fall off on the left, fall off on the right, or get hit with a bullet, or jump off of the bullet. It’s just every one of his attempts. It starts through this incredibly difficult level and just goes all the way through until it’s just one guy remaining. I love that video and I was like “We should do that with Meat Boy and I can do it in real time.” I just kind of coded it in over a weekend or something and perfected it as we were going through the development. It was an on-the-whim kind of thing. And it worked out as a great reward for f—ing up.

So that’s a kind of a weird and encouraging feeling. I spend a month and a half making a bizarre youtube video, and three years later, it turns out the world is slightly different as a result… ^_^

A little housekeeping note: I discovered this weekend that for a really long time– probably six months or more– commenting on this blog has been broken. Apparently one day reCAPTCHA broke and started marking every single comment as spam, then deleting them after two weeks. So I’ve lost literally everything anyone’s posted here for I’m not even certain exactly how long. I am really sorry about this. I’d been thinking, wow, it’s a little odd how comments on the blog seem to have dried up…

I think I can promise a little more traffic on this blog this year. I’ve got a few interesting things in the pipeline: a new game that’s maybe half done, a little iPad music toy that’s mostly done, and a new version of Jumpcore that comes with support for iOS and Android (an alpha of that last thing is here). Also, keep an eye out for a post tomorrow, I think I’ll have something interesting for you…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 18th, 2011 at 1:54 am and is filed under Many-Worlds Mario, Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.