Development Insight #2: ASM Contest Round 000

I am a showman at heart. I love to create and present things for everyone to marvel at. The attention thrills me. So when the ASM Contest was announced, it felt like the most amazing thing.

In the end, I had to drop out of the contest for personal reasons. But in the beginning, things were different. "This is my time to shine", I thought. You see, for some reason, no one considers me an ASMer, even though that is probably my strongest skill, the skill I've been honing and practicing all these years. Everyone considers me an artist, even though my art skills have stagnated since high school. Or they just consider me one of the many site jokesters/shitposters/whatever. It upsets me. The one thing I've worked hard on, I'm not acknowledged for. I saw the ASM contest as a way to prove to the community that I can do ASM. Of course, it would be nice to win. But recognition of my abilities is what I really wanted.

Development Insight #1: SMB3 Status Bar

For the longest time now, I've been brainstorming what the perfect status bar would be like, ignoring the actual content of the status bar (as it is usually hack-specific) and focusing on the design and implementation. If I had to use a single word to describe the perfect status bar, it would be "unintrusive". Unintrusive not only to the player, but also to the hack designer. The perfect status bar can just be patched once and forgotten, as it is completely isolated from everything else. As a hack author, there is no need to worry about your level ideas being compromised due to the status bar getting in the way.