bonjour people of the bits, if you participated in any of my (dami hosted them so i guess they arent mine) smw xhbs, i would like some feedback.

its kinda weird to do this because usually you can just look at other battols if you want to know how to create a good bitpack... if there were any other battles in the past 3 years!!

heres a couple questions i would like to know the answer of:

- vanilla or baserom?
- one, two, or four hour battles?
- are the rules clear enough?
- do you prefer baserom with or without a theme?

if you have any more advice regarding bitpacks, i would love to hear it

i prefer vanilla, but thats mostly because i only had 1 experience with baserom which was the recent 4hb. that one was... suboptimal because the bitpack was lacking clear instructions and a good explanation of what you can do with the custom tiles. i only realized that after seeing the other entries and/or asking many questions in chat.

4 hours is cool but a very big thing that i dont usually want to spend my time on. once in a while is fine but im very busy with other things constantly so 1 or 2hbs wld be better. the ohb felt too short for me, but i think thats just because i need to optimize my lunarmagic workflows. but for now, 2hbs wld be ideal for myself.

rules definitely need to be more clear, as i said above, the 4hb especially was lacking many infos especially for beginners.

im neutral on themes, i think a mix is good because variety is good

i'm certainly not the most involved person on botb but i had of lot of fun participating to the recent smw 4hb/ohbs, so the least i can do is giving some feedback in hope of seeing more smw battles lol.

- concerning baseroms i think they'd work way better on 4hb rather ohb for rather obvious reasons: you'll need some time to see what's in the baserom, how the added resources work, etc. for a smw ohb i'd definitely make a vanilla level than a level using resources i probably won't have the time to see how they'd work.

- while i don't mind having a baserom (i think the one in the last 4hb actually helped for making my level given the theme), in any case it should be optional and never imposed/part of the challenge for the reasons listed above.

- about the rules concerning the baserom, i'm experienced with smw so i didn't had problems, the only issue i had is i wasn't aware (or at least i completely forgot) i could use multiple midways which could have greatly helped for my 4hb level lol. perhaps a .txt file describing each block/sprite/patches could be useful (that's usually a thing in the baserom contests held on smw central).

- generally about baseroms, perhaps showing what a baserom would look like in the smw article on lyceum (i.e. what are the dsc, s16, ssc files) and how to use certain qol resources (like retry) would help to save a bit of time in the future.

- generally speaking i definitely like having a imposed theme/restriction, no matter if there's a baserom or not.

- about bitpacks, one i really liked (and i wish i could've partaken lol) was the 'six sprites': i'd love seeing more of these where you have a limited selection of vanilla sprites. i'd also like seeing more unusual/outside the box bitpacks like the traffic light one.

- i'd prefer seeing smw ohb, they have a more thrilling aspect than 4hb, though having a 4hb from time to time certainly wouldn't hurt.

hopefully i didn't miss anything in particular and answered most of your questions. :)