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2019 was a big year for me. I got too busy to even make a blog. I'm sorry to all that I've left wondering what I've been doing. If you were reading my last blog from 2018 you'll notice I was trying to get a 'job' streaming games. I basically work for myself, but the value of my work is essentially earned through others deciding that my entertainment being provided to them has value and they have the resources to contribute to me for my efforts.
In other words, Every Twitch TV streamer is subjected to the idea that they must labor tirelessly until people find them worthy of donations. This hasn't been something that meant a lot to me personally until I became an affiliate last year. Yes, while playing Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, I reached the goals I needed to reach in order to qualify for a job at Twitch. It's worth noting that the majority contributor to my affiliate status was me playing Super Mario Maker 2. Have I made any money yet? In that entire year worth of streaming? No. Twitch does this thing where they wait for you to earn 100 dollars first before they pay you. So, as you can imagine, my viewers have not been able to give me very much. In order to encourage more donations I have done things like draw my own emotes which people can use across all of Twitch in any channel they chat in, not just my own.
I'm running a Super Mario Maker 2 contest...if you make courses for that game, you can get the information you'll need about that here. And I'm planning to make a big deal out of it if I can; I'll donate gift subs if I have to in order to unlock another emote slot for tier 1 subscriptions.
Today something interesting happened that really got me curious; and sometimes when I get curious I stop procrastinating. I was procrastinating making another blog among other things. I got a notification in my channel that I got 100 bits donated to me by a bot. So I found out where the bot came from; and apparently someone, whoever it was has some sort of... Coil Subscription. I am not sure how helpful Coil would be to most users, but in any case there seems to be some sort of website traffic earning system in place in addition to the watching service(presumably someone would want to bypass the commercials that they would otherwise experience when trying to watch content from my past broadcasts or highlight videos). How useful would that system be for me? I have no idea. But it's something I might need to look into. It's questionable whether I could make it work for this blog, or for that matter if I could make it work for multiple things. So far, it looks more intriguing than the service called Patreon has been...in any case, I need to figure out where I can earn some regular money instead of just 100 dollars every 3 years or whatever Twitch is doing to me(it's not their fault, it's my lack of a consistently generous or otherwise populous audience that is to blame).
To be fair, 2020 has been a rough year for consumers in general. They might not get as much work as they used to due to the terror of the disease that has been worried about. And it wasn't until around the end of 2019 that I became affiliate... and it's not like I made a huge announcement(like, on this blog, for example) about it. I've told some people close to me. But they haven't really cared about my effort enough to so much as show up once to say hello while I work(even though me entertaining people and talking to them while I play games is the entire point of my work, and many of these people spend time watching TV in their spare time, which is my work... TV). I'm drawing art just like my mom did and her mom before her. I thought it would... attract more people. I actually got a host from a 2,300 viewer stream recently. I ran one ad when there were not many viewers left and my ad revenue for the month shot up to a comfortable all time high.
A lot of what I've been doing the past year or so has been me goofing off and having fun, and there have been precious few that have definitely got a lot of enjoyment out of watching that. But I think the moments where those appreciate the show are not as numerous as I'd like or perhaps I'd be receiving more. In any case, I feel like perhaps it's time for me to try harder to reach a more broad audience and at the moment I feel like it wouldn't be a bad idea to announce something. But first, I need to introduce the announcement.
Some months ago we makers in Super Mario Maker 2 got access to the Super World update. We can now have players go through maps course by course, through various paths(sometimes just 1 path, and to be real the maps have a maximum course allotment of 5), up to a total of 8 maps. I've uploaded a few variations of a Super Coin World, and then eventually took down the final version of that in favor of a Super Extermination World. If I could leave both up, I would. But I cant. So, the next best thing was to double my investment(online subscription with Nintendo) and use my alternate email accounts to make additional SMM2 accounts that can upload new Super Worlds. So, with that in mind, I would like to point out, that I have been deep in development on a new Super World. The Super Worlds that I've uploaded up until now were not designed specifically with the limitations of Super Worlds in mind. Some courses may well have been thought of as Super World friendly, Endless Challenge friendly, or whatever... but mostly they were just considered to be fun courses to watch and to play, for me to share with other Twitch streamers so I could have fun watching them play and they could have fun and entertain their viewers. It would be an understatement to say that I've had a blast uploading those 83 courses that are available on my first SMM2 account. I'm near the limit of 100 courses, but I'm still planning to make more courses there, but the production is slowing down. And that's doubly reasonable because I'm going to hit the limit, plus I'm making on alternate accounts.
My new Super World, which I hope to release as soon as possible, and I'm not sure when it'll be fully released, but I have a strategy for uploading the courses and updating if necessary...will be a 3DW-exclusive Super World. That means all the courses will be from the same style of Super Mario Maker 2 course. There are 5 possible styles to build in, and I'm using only the fifth. This is because I've noticed that an enormouse percentage of the first clears I've got in this game are from 3DW style courses, and it's easy to see that the average player just hasn't mastered the fundamentals of the style. This new Super World of mine is aimed at fixing that problem. It's going to help the players to get good, without making anything too difficult for them. I have to admit, I've got inspiration from many sources, but one game in particular has probably done something super important for me to make me realize something that's been missing from my course designs... Minesweeper Genius is a game on Switch that has some pretty strict rules about how the randomizer works. And that helps make the game easier. Well, I'm being strict with myself about certain things, so that the players know what they can expect and the puzzle aspects of the Super World are going to be toned down because of that. Many times my puzzles have frustrated players and yet as they'll be going into this Super World, they'll gradually be exposed to the same rules that I'm restricted by and they'll learn to trust those rules instead of getting suspicious if the rules change from course to course.
That's not to say that the Super World will be easy. I don't think I could find playing it fun if it were too easy. It'll still be exceptional, and yet I'm hoping at least random players can clear every course. One thing that I'm working on is I'm bringing down the average clear check time for my courses with this Super World. Most courses will be cleared before 3 minutes, if not sooner. The only ones allowed to go over 3 minutes are those with multiple Check Points. The overall size of the courses should be more similar to a Nintendo game course while also containing exploration challenges just like the old Nintendo games. The NSMBU Deluxe mechanic of Star Coins is going to be here in the form of Green Mushrooms. And once per map, the player will be reminded that every course in the Super World has exactly 3 Green Mushrooms that they can grab because grabbing all 3 Green Mushrooms will be the clear condition for 1-2, 2-2, 3-2, and all the way up to 8-2. Similarly, the -1 courses will be 'grab 6 Key Shards then open the Goal room door', the -3 will be 'two Zones of autoscrolling while collecting coins(my most popular archetype when performed in the SMW style, I'll be attempting to '1up myself' with this decision)', the -4 will be 'linear challenges', and the -5 will be 'Thwomp courses'. This pattern is going to help players to be prepared for the next course and will give them a steady flow of things to practice...without feeling like they are getting too much changed for them by leaving the 3DW style entirely. I think that's something that more casual players struggle with more than a veteran player would... changing styles when they'd rather not. And that could be part of what separates the best from the above average in a mode like Endless Challenge. Even I find myself switching controllers sometimes based on the style of the course.
I'm done working on the first 16 courses of my superworld, with 24 more planned, one of which is being worked on now. If anyone reading this post plays the game and wants my first maker code, it's NGK-D5J-B1G. You can then access my Super Extermination World if you'd like. All the hardest courses in that Super World are optional. So although I think the majority of players can clear it, many of the relatively easy courses might be too frustrating since there are so many clear conditions and people tend to prefer Check Point courses. That's why with my new Super World, I'm trying to use Check Points more often, as well as make more linear courses because players tend to get lost and then frustrated when I give them too much freedom to explore.The Super Extermination World is themed, and it's mostly based off of RPG games like Lightning Returns, so it's no wonder that many platforming casual players aren't too interested in the Super World. But the ones that give it a chance have definitely enjoyed it so far. I don't plan to take this Super World down, so even if you read this blog late, it might still be up. Granted, I have a lot of Coin Collection courses, but I doubt I'd put back up a new Super Coin World, at least on my first account anyway. Time will tell.
In other Super Mario Maker 2 related news, I have convinced a website helping big SMM2 teams to put a link to my discord on their page. My team, the Coin Gang is not a 'partnered' or hosted team, but perhaps with time and enough support from the community, we one day will be. With enough members, we can qualify for that and perhaps see even greater growth and as a result, affect the SMM2 community as a whole for the better. I also make courses called 'Explorer's Guild' courses and that's basically what you'll see in my Super Extermination World... but when it comes to elite gaming, there are teams that pride themselves on getting good, and that's where the Coin Gang comes in, where players are tested by the makers in fair ways outlined by the leaders of the teams...in this case, by me. I'm the sole approval agent in the Coin Gang and I doubt I'll be delegating that responsibility any time soon. We have around 30 makers or so in the Coin Gang now, although a large portion of them just make appropriate courses and are either barely conscious of the existence of the Gang or are completely oblivious. But that doesn't stop me from listing the courses for people to check out because I truly think these are fun courses. If you're wondering why call it Coin Gang instead of Team Coin...it's because 4Kids censored Team Rocket from Rocket Gang. I'm just going with the original translation. I don't think the word gang really needs censoring. Feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong.
Well I should probably get back to streaming and maybe do some proper video editing again, but I hope everyone that read this enjoyed the read and who knows, maybe they'll have fun watching Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Toadette run around doing Super Mario things designed by members of the community...if they care to find out, they know where to watch it, on my TV channel. I think I'm going to make a document soon providing links to every collection of videos that I have up on Twitch because my Videos page on Twitch doesn't have enough shelf slots for them all. You can check out my discord for an update on that or maybe I'll post about it in a blog here soon.
