Given the name, I felt this latest level of mine warranted a special introduction.
/!\ CAUTION /!\
Giant assault vehicle
[ Black Behemoth "BONEGRINDER" ]
is advance on location
Mission ID: 24E6-0000-0068-DC5C
Stay Vigilant Always
(http://i.imgur.com/V6PT4Oo.png)
This stage is short and a little brutal with a pretty intense boss fight (would be more intense if not for one thing).
So anyway, things about my latest two courses.
Topsy-Turvy Mountain
The switching between two "versions" did come from A Matter of Life and Death. I obviously didn't want to copy that, so I figured a stage where you'd "flip gravity" was a good way to do it. Building this stage took extra care since I had to make sure that every tile, every enemy and every coin was replicated but upside down in the other section. Even the three 1-ups are replicated - even if they're only obtainable from one side. I might have run into a bit of what Yoshi mentioned, "find barrier, switch", but I also tried to make it a bit puzzly. Even if I used basically the same concept twice. It was interesting to make and I'm kinda proud of it.
Black Behemoth "BONEGRINDER"
This was a combination of a few ideas. The name was an idea I had of something where enemies would fall into holes with grinder blades, and there'd be a subsection that would be underneath the stage where there'd fall down bone koopas and stuff from the blade points. It was inspired by something Soap said, and I never really figured out how to make the concept work, but when I needed a name for this stage, it came in handy. I also wanted to make a SMB1 airship themed level, because I really liked the black steel design and the BGM. But I had already made Fortress in the Sky, so I decided to make it a ground-based vehicle instead, with grinder sawblades for wheels, and a slow autoscroll to make it seem like it's approaching. Thematically, but not gameplay-wise, it became a bit of a followup to Fortress, in that you start on the outside of it and enter it, and fight a boss with bombs at the end. But it's much shorter and there's only one interior section, which is the main part of the stage. It's pretty compact - excluding the boss room and exterior section, it's 8x2 screens to go through. It's definitely not an easy stage and Yoshi is probably going to yell at me about it. Due to the length, I also decided to put exactly 100 coins in it, and that's in addition to the three 1-ups. Spent a lot of time on the visuals, too.
Fighting bosses with infinitely spawning bombs is a thing you're likely to see more of from me. I find it a good way to provide a means of both attacking the boss and to force the boss to be fought, by putting a barrier to blow up afterwards. Easy to do when the boss is dead, and if you manage to pull it off while the boss is till alive, hell, you deserve to skip it.
Also! I learned how to get good screenshots, courtesy of SomethingAwful: "Find a screen you like on either Gamepad or TV, then hit home, go to Internet Browser, go to imgur.com, select Upload Images, then Browse Computer."