Author: Jay Pavlina

Super Mario Bros. Crossover 2.1 Released

Super Mario Bros. Crossover 2.1 is released. It features new skins, an improved upgrade system, and faster music emulation.

It’s been about 10 months since I’ve released an update for Super Mario Bros. Crossover, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead. Now that I have help, it’s possible to keep this game alive while still working on other projects like Super Retro Squad.

This update ended up being bigger than I thought it would. I was planning on just having  a few new skins, but I was never quite happy with the upgrade system from the last update, so I revamped it a bit. Adobe also finally released Flascc, so I implemented that and it improved music emulation speed by about 4.5 times. The game still doesn’t run as smoothly as I would like, but optimizing it further would require a huge amount of time and this project is no longer my top priority. A few of the character skins have also been customized to play differently than the original, like Quick Man and Pit.

I really like all the new skin sets, but there are also a lot of new character skins. Some of my personal favorites are Quick Man for Bass (fastest walk speed in the game), Old Man for Link, the Super Mario World skins for Mario and Luigi (added extra sprites for them), Shadow for Ryu (awesome music), Pit for Samus (modified to play more like Pit), Whip Skeleton for Simon, and Tetrimono for SOPHIA. I personally never thought I’d be playing Super Mario Bros. as a block from Tetris, but I’m happy to be doing it.

Thanks to Blaine (sbq92) and Zach (Ryuza) for their help with the update. Blaine did a huge amount of work on it and it probably never would have come out if it weren’t for him. Having a team makes me happy. As always, I’m sure some new bugs have appeared, so please report them and I’ll be fixing them over the next few days.

Anyway, Happy Holidays! Now go play the update or see a full list of changes.

“Amazing” Basketball Shots

See some of the most amazing basketball shots in the world!

Watch with audio commentary

Here’s a video I made in 1998 with one of my friends when I first started using a video camera. I remember being excited about stuff I could do with editing, so this was one of my early experiments.

Problem 27

Two friends must solve math problems as they try to find their missing calculus teacher. Completed in April 2003.

Watch with audio commentary

Whoa! I started posting old short films again. This time, I’m going to keep posting them until they’re all up. So if you hate them… maybe unsubscribe for a while. In other news, I started posting on Twitter regularly, and I will continue to do at least 1 or 2 tweets a day.

This is a short film I did in high school for my calculus class. It has a lot of calculus jokes, but it’s still funny if you don’t understand them. Anyway, enjoy it. Or don’t. But either way you should watch it… maybe.

Attempted Love

A girl tries to read in the park, but some guy is stalking her. Completed March 2004.

Watch with audio commentary

This is the first short film I made in college. It’s silent and was shot on black and white 16mm film. It’s about a guy trying desperately to win a girl’s love.

Jay: Vampire Slayer

I have decided to release my old movies. The first one is Jay: Vampire Slayer, a movie about Jay fighting vampires. Perfect.

Watch with audio commentary

I finally decided to start releasing my old movies. We’ll kick it off with the classic, “Jay: Vampire Slayer.” I believe this was filmed in March of 1998, so you are seeing 14 years into the past. Crazy times.

Also, I decided to do audio commentary for every movie I release. That way you can learn a little bit more about what was going on when I made them. There won’t be any particular order I release the movies in. I’ll try and mix it up so that you don’t get a bunch of boring ones in a row.

Super Mario Crossover Two Year Anniversary

It’s been 2 years since Super Mario Crossover was released, and many awesome things have happened since then. Also, we added another person to our team.

Today seemed like just another day, but then a bunch of people started saying stuff like “congratulations on two years of success” and “I can’t believe it’s been two years” and then I realized today is the two year anniversary of Super Mario Bros. Crossover‘s release. It seems that quite a bit has happened since that simple day two years ago, and there are many more big things to come.

I figure now is a good time to update people on what’s been going on with Exploding Rabbit. I know I usually do videos to update people, but I’ve been working so much and having so much fun that I haven’t taken the time to do it. I feel like I hit a really nice flow with working on the game. This is probably the smoothest workflow I’ve ever gotten into, and I’ve been making very rapid progress.

But “what am I making progress on” you may ask. I mentioned on the forums recently that I’m porting Super Mario Crossover to the Unity Game Engine. There are many reasons for this, but it’s mainly because it’s more powerful, easier to work with, and most important of all, more fun to work on. This will allow many more possibilities for the game, and I’ve already mentioned on the forums I’ll be adding multiplayer. I have not decided if it will be local or online, but I plan on doing online eventually. Progress on the port is going extremely well. I have all of the sprites, animations, colliders, and most of the palettes imported, so I can start writing game logic soon. It is going much faster than I thought… maybe because I work on it for like 12 hours a day.

I also have another exciting announcement. The Exploding Rabbit team has expanded yet again. We have recruited sbq92 from the forums to help us with the game. I have always been impressed with sbq92’s graphics and suggestions for improving the game, and he just seems like a nice guy, so I brought him on board. Sbq92 will mostly be doing graphics for Super Mario Crossover and adding new skins to the game. Zach’s duties are mostly concentrated on other games we’re working on, so I thought it made sense to get someone specifically to work on SMBC graphics. Sbq92 will also mostly be in charge of looking at the skins made by the community and suggesting which ones we should add to the game.

Hopefully the team will continue to expand (I’m praying for a sound/music person to fall out of the sky… if only I was more organized at the beginning when people volunteered to do music), and hopefully I’ll eventually make enough money to pay people. Wouldn’t that be crazy? It may happen soon since we’re finally working on original content.

So things are going very well right now. I feel like after 2 years I finally made some solid plans and am moving smoothly towards them. I’m very thankful for how helpful the community has been during all this time (most of them 😉 ). There are many things I learned about games and many awesome ideas I’ve heard that have helped to improve the quality of SMBC and any future games we make. I’m sure the community will continue to expand in positive ways and will continue to be a cool place to talk about games and other stuff.

That’s all for now. I’m very excited about the future of Exploding Rabbit, SMBC, and our future games. I am very confident that we will not disappoint. Happy anniversary everyone!