Delirium

Delirium is another hack that I really don't expect a lot of people to gravitate towards. It's following in the same footsteps as Chirality, where I was having more fun messing with conventional aspects of SMW while building levels rather than trying to make something straightforward. This was being made while still feeling a little burnt out on Mario in general, as well as having some changes going on in my life.

Much of the level design was made while forcing myself to take lunch breaks while searching for a new job. When I was laid off at the beginning of 2025, I made it my "full time job" to be searching for another job as well as learning new skills that I could add to my resume. Even though my previous job was high stress/high pressure, I now felt like I was working harder than I had in a decade. Many days I would look at the clock for the first time after starting and realize it was already 4:30 or 5:00, and I had not taken a break or eaten anything yet.

To remedy that, I started setting timers to force myself to take a lunch. Since no one else was home at that time, I would take my lunch back into my office and work on a level. Thankfully, I was able to land another job after about 4 months, which then led to needing to learn a lot of new things for that environment. Still, I would force myself to take lunch, grab my laptop, and work on levels out in my car.

All that to say, it felt like a very tumultuous time. Free time was sparse, I felt scatterbrained, and the hack captures some elements of that.

Originally, every level outside of the first one was going to have some type of gimmick related to it. I have a list of ideas I was going to implement. However, I started working on a short straightforward level without a gimmick in it. When playing what I had in sequence, I liked how sometimes my brain would try to carry over the gimmick from the previous level, and playing a normal level felt odd for a second. I decided then to have the "normal" and gimmick levels alternate.

While testing "We Must Go Steeper", I fell in love with the level "PURPLE?" due to it's mechanic of switching left and right based off touching layer 2. I asked T0a0 if it would be possible to make a block or ASM that would cause the regular and spin jump buttons to swap under certain circumstances. He very quickly sent me the files and that level was made almost immediately after.

The other "new" ASM that was made was for Iloperidone. The idea of reversing jumps completely had been in my head for a while. After failing to make it work myself, I reached out to Abdu, who thankfully was able to make it work perfectly with very little effort. Playing through that level is a little mind melting at first. But when it clicks, it's a very satisfying feeling.

As always, Saela was incredibly kind and took care of aesthetics for me and was a great tester. As I have said before, I make things, and he makes them good. He also asked one day if I would like a movie included, which I enthusiastically accepted. That became the level "REPRIEVE." Megascott also very nicely offered to do the aesthetics for CLARITY. Can't thank them enough.

This trailer was the first time I didn't use a song. I decided to make a noise collage for the soundtrack, made entirely in Filmora because I was too lazy to learn how to set up and use a DAW properly. Maybe sometime in the future...