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this is the projects page! here i'll dump stuff about things i'm working on...
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Woolen Shotshells

Progress: still pretty early indev

The origins

ok. so. i have to explain the like, beginnings of all of this first—

i've both used and been a big fan of Mari0 ever since i was really little, mainly because of its level editor. man i spent hours of my life making ...levels! in the original Mari0 1.6 on my laptop /ref.
eventually, at some point i learned about a mod to the game called Alesan's Entities that not only adds many many more enemies to the game, but also generally way more customization for levelpacks (such as replacing almost any given sprite or sound in a map pack.) most importantly, this mod adds support for custom characters with special abilities, and custom entities using json properties. for about 8(??) years people have been tinkering with the stuff this mod adds and have created a lot of really really cool stuff... and in about about 2018 i got my hands on it! :D

anyhow. fast forward to October 2022 and i made a weird shoddy custom character named Twixx, with the express gimmick of the fact that he had a shotgun.




he... looked really weird, didn't really work due to my attempts to make his gun fire individual pellets, and was quickly forgotten about, but he was partially the catalyst to Woolen Shotshells.
3 months after I created Twixx, Pizza Tower came out and in its final two levels ("Don't Make A Sound" and "WAR",) it contains a powerup that gives Peppino a shotgun. the way it works is just by pretty much spawning a giant hitbox in front of him.




It also lets you shoot downwards to slightly boost yourself up (while also, again, creating a giant hitbox below you)
Now, of course, at the time of me playing Pizza Tower for the first time, Twixx had entirely left my mind. Hadn't thought about him for at least 2 of the 3 months' time between these two events. However, the shotgun mechanics of Pizza Tower greatly changed my brain chemistry in how I'd approach firearms in a 2D platformer. Which, coincidentally enough, I had decided to do again almost 2 years later in September of 2024. Say hi to the very first posted image of Albort in the STYS discord:



"a really long while back (like when i was still wroking on sackboy's world) i was maing a custom character with a shotgun and i finally picked it back up ... after entirely changing their design and name and redoing all of their sprites and shit. this is albort. say hi to them"
~ marlee_goat, 1:41 AM EST September 8th, 2024

After creating the very first version of Albort with working knockback around 5 days later on the 13th, I immediately knew I had to create a mappack surrounding these mechanics and the cool jank that Mari0's engine creates surrounding them. Initially, it was just meant to be a small project, maybe a single world in length—which is why I had named the mappack's folder "shootingrange". However, the scope of the project began growing incredibly fast as my ideas for the plot and greater use of Albort as a character began to flourish...


The very first video of Albort gameplay with knockback, posted 9/13/2024 at 7:12 PM
"NEVERMIND IT WORKS and it is Really fucking fun"


Albort as a character

really quickly, i want to focus more on the creation of Albort given she's the center of all this.
she was created a day before the initial discord post on September 7th, in a voice call with some friends of mine. you can tell because this image that contains the very first drawings of albort also contain my friend's gayass fursona and also Mips hi Mips :].
she used to be... a lot more awkward. and a lot nicer, to that extent! her characterization was almost completely different, generally being a bit more... game for everything? if that's the word.

her original sprites were made in only an hour after this image actually, at least according to the files' last modified dates.


i'm still a big fan of the albort in this image. she's so jolly looking. also this is a drawing of the evil flaming skull from late september!! i genuinely didn't remember that i came up with him that early given how rushed the first demo's development was through october


as i continued working on the game through september though, something became quite clear to me: the custom character i had made... couldn't really. drop. the gun. there is no point and no way you can ever un-equip it, because i had made the shotgun firing stuff part of the custom character. so... should i come up with an explanation for that? the answer is Yes I Did !


basically, to make a long story short because i don't want to explain the entire plot: albort accidentally gets herself cursed, binding her gun to herself whilst trying to put a spell on it.
in canon, magic has been globally outlawed for centuries due to fear of misuse, and because you can't exactly go out into public with a shotgun visibly on your person, with no good explanation alongside a few encounters with the police, she becomes a social outcast and runs away with her only real option being to hide and try living in a cave.


this is also how her new characterization came to be. bitter, cynical, and a near-constant seething rage due to a random impulsive thing she did a while ago. as far as i'm aware, this version of her came around in late october to early november of 2024. this characterization (and also, generally the way she looks now) was in part helped by casper's drawings of her


Demo 1's development

Development of the mappack started on September 15th, with 1-1 being completed 2 days later on the 17th. I wonder why I eventually replaced it and split the tutorial off into its own level, it's definitely not like a level I made in 2 days could have been bad at all......




thinking back on it now, yeah, no wonder I scrapped the original version of this level. not to mention it just looks so... desolate. there's nothing goin' on here.


World 1 was actually made... really fast. The sprites for the trees in 1-2 were finished on the 18th, and I had started on the level itself by at least the 21st. The sprites for Snaggles were created on the 22nd, and they were properly implemented some time in the coming two weeks. I know this, because this video was recorded on October 3rd after I had added a hitbox to their flyoff sprite:



You might have noticed the collectables being coins instead of stars, which is the next thing I want to touch on—as October 3rd was also the day I replaced coins with the star collectables. A few weeks before, I had a conversation with fellow Mari0: AE community member WilliamFrog, (who, by the way, creates genuinely mindboggling things for this game) in which I realized how much I wanted to distance this project from the whole origins of Mario.* More likely than not, replacing the game's main collectables was one of the first things that was done to begin achieving that.

*if you've watched the first devlog, this is also partially the reason why I made the new item blocks!


Also that day I added Lodestars, a mechanic solely based off of Yoshi's Island's red coins. Oops!


The creation of 1-3 was also fairly quick, only taking about 6 days (not counting my more recent, smaller edits to the map to fix some Lodestar spots and the addition of some new blocks...)
I don't think I've ever actually stated it publicly before, but Casper is the one that designed the Ghouglies. She also partially named them (I first suggested "googly" because I wanted to reference Stampy Cat, but then she added an H like "ghoul" lol,)
In general I don't have a lot of footage or screenshots from the creation of 1-3, at least none that are very interesting. This is mainly because I was rushing like hell to get a demo of World 1 out by Halloween—which I succeeded in, but it resulted in the only public build of Woolen Shotshells we have right now, which is terrible. Exploding on the spot.


Now, as for The Evil Flaming Skull? ... The same thing kind of applies to him. I really don't have much interesting regarding him except a very very very early video of his boss intro, mainly because I was getting things done too fast to document them. Asides from that though, I also have a few pieces of concept art! So here's all of that if you want to see it.



this concept art for his arena is really interesting... originally, the fight was meant to take place outside of his castle, in a courtyard perhaps! however though, i found the void-like black background to be more... enigmatic? ominous? so i went with that after a few iterations with scrolling stars and whatnot (as you can see in the video above.)

Post-Demo 1—Summer 2025

Now, all things considered... there hasn't been that much done with the project after Demo 1. This might be me devaluing my own work, but really all that's been done is the tutorial, the 1-1 and 1-2 reworks, implementation of the Special Stages, and small progress on 2-1 (like 45 seconds of gameplay.)


After I created 1 (One) of the Special stages in early November, i got hit with a crazy long bout of demotivation, before finally getting off my butt around late December and January to work on the Special Stages again—firstly, with the intro animation. Here's a video of a really early version of it, featuring a weird color-shifting single-frame Bort, no white flash or glassbreak particles, and no rift open animation when the stage begins.


reference/concept image of albort's sprite for the special stage entrance animation. it's drawn in my doodley sort of style with stickfigure-type limbs, which is odd, since i dont think ive done that for much other art for this game...


Shortly after I finished that, I got to work on the start menu. I wanted to do this before the level reworks, mainly because I did the tutorial first and you access it through the start menu.


concept of the main menu. worth noting that this version has bort off to the side, and the gear icon is used for an options menu. though, i have no idea how i would have even made functioning changable options in an AE mappack...


i also have a digital version of the same mockup, though a this is obviously little cleaner, and now has tiny doodles of bort to serve as the icons. it's nifty, but didnt really fit the vibe i was going for


concept art for the tutorial! notably, this image was posted on my tumblr...
the lampposts (and i assume other geometry in the level) were meant to be more angular and abnormal...
it's still incredible to me just how important i found the dust motes... and frankly, they are!! they make the level far more atmospheric, still proud of how i went about making them (and their inclusion in general)


it's now occurring to me... this has just kind of devolved into me sharing early videos/photos and concept art. this is all very interesting to me though, and i hope to anyone reading as well, so i don't really care. although... i'm kind of running out of things to talk about. er, well, things i want to talk about. i want to keep them surprises until later in development... or until the game comes out, for that matter. if you've watched the devlog, you should be fully caught up now, too. so, for now, this is the end of this part of the site. i'm working towards releasing a new, better demo... hopefully before the end of this year. so please, stay tuned for further updates! nWn



OK sorry important update from August 9th. the day after i had written all this pretty much.
Skysometric has laid upon me a version of Mari0: AE version 13.2, backported to LÖVE version 10. This is incredibly useful as LÖVE 11's less reliable ordering of pairs() could completely randomly skip over reading certain properties in custom entities, causing unforeseeable crashes, entity offsets/speed issues, and more. Having a version of the latest update to the game with all its features without the problems LÖVE 11 brings will make development (and gameplay from the user's end) far more bearable!!! :D i cannot thank her enough for her contributions ...


My website

Progress: Still under construction, but presentable

What're you doing reading this????
You're already here, nerd!!!! ... Though, I guess I can lay some information down.
I first made this website at some point around 2 years ago now, in late June to early July of 2023. However, in regards to this redesign you're looking at, I begun work on July 25th, 2025. As of writing this, it's August 8th. I think it's going quite well :] Given it hasn't been in development for very long, I can't supply many images or videos, because things wouldn't look very different... but, um, if you want, here's this test page I've never shared the link to


Timeline


top

woolen shotshells
Contents Origins
Albort as a character
Demo 1's development
Post-Demo 1—Summer 2025

website

tiny goat lady at bottom of screen