Super Note's bonus level

2025-04-23


In middle school, I started Super Note Aventure, my first long-term game project. It is itself based on the world of the Notes, my first worldbuilding project in a way. Not sure when it started, do you count preschool drawings as worldbuilding? Anyway, the game.

In November 2012, I added a bonus level available on two conditions:

  1. You completed Level 1.
  2. It is Sunday.

In the game, there were many more important features missing, that I would eventually do in the next months:

But for some reason I still decided to focus on adding a dominical bonus room. It was a single screen, teeming with coins, a few inoffensive enemies, and a NPC that uses the newly added dialogue feature to wonder what the fuck he's doing in here.

In other words, a full display of maximalism only a middle-school level designer could come up with. Behold:

A 2D side-scroller screen with many colorful coins and items and special blocks in front of a blue-green night sky.

This is what it looks like in GameMaker 8.1's room editor.

Most suprising of all is that I didn't play New Super Mario Bros 2 for the 3DS at the time. It's the one with millions of coins.

Other peculiarities & random trivia

The exposition text in the tutorial is inconsistent with the exposition in the help screen, which is inconsistent with the exposition in the planned pause menu, which is inconsistent with the story I did in the following months.

Player 1 can be controlled with either ZQSD (WASD equivalent) or the arrow keys, because my first laptop had a broken left key. Player 2 is controlled with IJKL. Players share the mouse: left click to shoot, right click to switch shooting players, and…

A completely undocumented attack can be triggered by middle-clicking. The shooting player throws a heavy diamond that doesn't go very far at all and then he has to wait a LOT of time before shooting agaim. But that diamond freezes the enemy forever, which can then be shattered in one shot with an EXPLOSION SOUND!!!

On the level select screen, there is a speed/difficulty setting. You can go from 25 to 40 FPS (30 is the default). Whether this is to match your skill or your PC's performance is up to you.

Enemies have invincibility frames… almost. Only their feet are vulnerable. That's because the hitbox IS the ground collider, so that they don't fall off the ground after jumping in pain. That means you can combo them if you aim for the feet, which sounds really silly.

Early distribution of Super Note Aventure was to middle-school friends through a newsletter in which I attached the unzipped .exe file to the email! :D We also played it in class thanks to my first USB key. The game folder had a yellow star icon.

Why on Sundays though?

Weekends is when almost everyone has more free time than usual. Sundays also feel special. It's like, the supermarket is closed, oh well I guess we'll have to play a bit of Super Note Aventure instead!

Really though, there was no reason other than to make this level special.

SNA 1.2 is still in my old builds, running on Linux via Wine. It has been roughly 700 Sundays since this bonus level was built. I probably spent less than 10 of them (probably the most boring Sundays) playing the level, and it rarely took me more than 2 minutes to "finish" it.

But every time, I think this is a completely useless activity, and I smile.