Super Mario: Blue Twilight DX

Foreword

Welcome to Super Mario: Blue Twilight DX. I don't think I really had any idea what I was getting myself into when I started this game. It was originally slated for an October 2004 release, but I had overshot my deadline. To get the game out on October 31st, 2004, I would have had to cut massive amounts of content from the game. After that, I was hit with an unfortunate form of writers block - it is difficult to stay focused on a Halloween-centric game after Halloween has come and gone, you know? Add to that the fact I felt as if I failed, and MarioWeen DX sat, gathering dust.

In early January 2005 I re-focused on the game again as hard as I could. A February release turned into March. Into April. May. June. As I finished off the rest of the game content and added a few new ideas, months whisked by in the blink of an eye. It also didn't help that there were mass distractions: Multiplayer Online games like The Specialists, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Zombie Panic, Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst and GunZ would consume me for weeks at a time. Not even playing Super Mario Sunshine could motivate me to work on MarioWeen longer than a few hours per day - if even that. But slowly, surely, the game was getting done, small piece by small piece. Finally, six months after the October deadline, I announced: Game content was finished. Let bug testing and polishing commence.

But even that took two months. The last-minute addition of Luigi as a playable character, combined with the massive task of tying 20 or 30 separate snippets of gameplay and interface together to form a big game was a much larger task than I anticipated it would be. Finally, after a week of beta testing, the game is ready for launch. Even if the game itself was a little shaky, it was finally done. It might not be a perfect game, but I don't know about you - this has been a wild ride for me and a learning experience like no other. To date, Super Mario: Blue Twilight DX is the biggest game I've ever released, and it's an incredible feeling to have it behind me. I often feel as though the game is held together by chewing gum and duct tape, anymore - due in part to the awkward way you have to do things in the program the game was made in: MultiMedia Fusion. The engine wasn't designed very well, and it shows - and I have no way of going back and fixing it properly without remaking the entire game from scratch. But, oh well! Thanks for playing!

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