Silencio

I started making kaizo levels in Mario Maker 2 and did that for around 2 years until I felt the need to make a full game instead of just levels. My final level was uploaded in January 2021, and I jumped into Super Mario World about a week later. I played through Quickie World 1 and 2 to get a feel for the physics, then opened up lunar magic. The "DanOfMostTrades" tutorial videos were a great help as well as all the people who answered my silly questions in the SMWC forums.

Near the end of my Mario Maker 2 journey, my level names and descriptions were already direct references to Twin Peaks and David Lynch in general, so the Silencio theming was just a simple continuation of that. I initially planned to name the hack after something Twin Peaks related since all the level names were, but ended up liking the name "Silencio" way too much and just went with it. I didn't think anyone would ever take note of this and I was right. I did also end up including 2 level names that were a Mulholland Drive reference (where Silencio comes from) to try and make it all work somewhat.

Because of my Mario Maker experience I already had a pretty good idea of what the levels and hack as a whole would look like. It was just a matter of getting comfortable with SMW and lunar magic. Overall it was a relatively painless process, but I definitely had some crashes and bad checksums and various other little issues pop up here and there. I didn't even realize back then that using something like the RHR baserom was a thing. I guess that would have saved me some time and headaches but in the end I'm glad I got it all done without a baserom.

When I sent the hack out to my one and only playtester (thank you, MassPunishment) the structure used to be very different. There were I think 4 message boxes you could find which each gave you a number. At the end you would have to find a secret room with passcode blocks in which you would enter the numbers you found. This would lead you to the actual final Level "The Black Lodge".

MassPunishment tested the hack and pretty much said everything was fine, except for that final level. Thanks to his feedback I drastically shortened and nerfed both sections.

Problem was, I only ever tested this hack on snes9x and one day I decided to try it out on bsnes. During this bsnes playthrough I realized the passcode blocks were completely broken and I had no clue what went wrong. I decided to just take them out completely. I played around with level order, even added a completely new second section to one level (time to wake up) and made the whole playthrough pretty much a straight line without any secrets or puzzles. I'm sure most people are happy about this but having no secrets in a Twin Peaks themed hack is still such a sadness.

I was naive and clueless and didn't even think about asking MassPunishment to do another playthrough after I made these changes. He did however test version 1.1, in which I felt the need to add another second section to a level on top of fixing all the little things that usually come up during 1.0 playthroughs.

I know a lot of people had issues with "The Black Lodge" but if you are a Twin Peaks fan, you understand why this hack needed to end in exactly this way. Watching people play that level is still hilarious and enjoyable for me, so I regret nothing. I honestly never thought anyone would give a damn about this hack but when a lot of people actually played it, liked it and occasionally speedran it, I was overjoyed.

There are things I wish I had done differently though. Some very unneeded patches were included because I was clueless and just didn't know any better. Fast swimming is also something I got out of my system thankfully.

Before I started making this hack I said to myself "All I want is to just make one hack that I'm happy with. Then I can move on." However, watching people have so much fun with it on Twitch really fired me up to jump right into the next one.