Production update 2023-03-04

Hello!

Let's get the bad news right out of the way first. I am not gonna meet the planned release date. I fell behind quite a bit and it didn't get any better until earlier this week. I caught up massively but I'm still too far behind to make it in time for Mar10 day.

For now, I don't know exactly when the release is going to be because I'm coordinating it with IsoFrieze's next video release, given that the topics are very similar. I'm expecting sometime between March 15th and 18th.

But it's not all bad. I actually made a lot of progress since the last update, so let's talk about that. First, the progression status!

There are still more tweaks I need to make to the script that will most likely push it over 5k words, but the general idea is that I'm over 3/4 of the way done!

Now, a look at the schedule. I didn't update it to reflect what actually went down. I might redo it when I have a release date, but I might also just keep it this way and just clear each section when I get to it.

So, yeah. As you can see, I fell 3 days behind. I was actually over a full week behind: I edited everything from Maximizing grounded time to Zipping between Tuesday and now and caught up a lot. So you can see why it's not reasonable to expect a release by March 10th. Especially given that I'm not entirely sure my girlfriend will be done with the sponsored segment this weekend, and given that I haven't really started the music seriously other than figuring out a few songs I want to record this time.

Production stream

I intend to do the second and final production stream for this video on Monday afternoon. I will let you know if the date changes. Last time I posted it here, I don't know why, but the link was broken. I'll try to fix that this time, but in the worst case, I'll just post the link to the stream in Discord like I did last time (after like two hours of streaming to no one...). If that happens, all Patreon tiers will have access!

Patreon satisfaction/suggestions

Once this project is complete, I want to take some time to poll everyone here about their general satisfaction with my Patreon and suggestions for additional content or other improvements. I want to organize this into 3-4 simple questions that will be really easy to answer in a few seconds, so I'll do it properly when I'm between projects. I'm just letting you know now so you can think of ideas in advance.

Progress

There is a lot of fun stuff to show, though! Here's a peek at a few visuals and demonstrations I made.

14 minutes edited since the last update! I'm up to 22 minutes now. You may have noticed just how much emptier this timeline looks compared to my other projects. Well, the reason is simple: you see all the green and pink blocks of video? Those are After Effects compositions with many layers, RAM data, code... The reality is I'm still making edits as complex as before.

Showing the impact of rotating platforms with a race! I made a lot of strategy comparisons that feature Mario and Luigi simultaneously on screen. It's one of my favourite things to make in NES and SNES games, especially now that I've gotten decent at making them. Here are a few of those.

Midair shell jump vs jumping in the water.

Speed comparison (This one makes more sense in motion.)

Over Podoboo vs. under Podoboo.

Neutral jumping at 49 speed vs running.

It wouldn't be a retro Mario without talking about subpixels!

A comparison between two strategies with a P meter display!

The small preview wasn't playing nice so here's a cropped version: the stairs clip!

Speed, P meter, and takeoff timer all at once!

Finally, explaining zipping was an undertaking. I recreated the zip Tsuake got in his run and painstakingly labeled each block on each frame with the order they were bumped in. I thought the result would make it crystal clear what happens, but even frame by frame, it happens too fast to be easily understandable. Bit of a bummer but I guess it simplifies the explanation. I had to scrap a bit of the script there that was "explaining" something that wasn't really happening that way.

That's it! I'll post one more update sometime next week, and then it will be the release. Stay tuned on Discord for the exact date!